Covert Para-Priests: The Pollution-Accumulating Thars—Po(n) and Jugi

The sector of Bhaktapur's symbolic civic order in which the Brahman has a supreme and ideal position is ordered through the idiom of purity and pollution. The auxiliary priests and para-priests in this system protect the Brahmans' position by performing the polluting and other unseemly actions that the civic ritual system requires. The ritual and enabling functions of these "religious workers" are clear, and centrally define their differentiated traditional thar duties. In contrast to this group are those lowest thar s in the city, whose polluting power is centrally and obsessively emphasized (see fig. 21). These groups, locally conceived in some contexts as the antithesis of the Brahman, can hardly be conceived of in Bhaktapur as "kinds of Brahmans" and in contrast to the other figures we have been discussing, including the Buddhist Vajracarya, are not included on Brahmans' lists of "religious workers." Their functions as "religious workers" are ideologically hidden. In an analytic view, however, they are clearly para-priests, essential enablers of ritual action.

It is now widely recognized, following Hocart ([1950] 1960), that an important function of the lower castes is to absorb pollution from the higher ones, and thus to maintain their relative purity and the hierarchical system dependent on it. Hocart notes the remark of a Tamil in-

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Figure 21.
Untouchable Po(n) children.

formant about the barbers' traditional function in cremations that the barber is "like a priest on the cremation ground." Giving other examples of such funeral functionaries, Hocart concludes, "The barber and the washerman, like the drummers, are not so much technicians as priests of a low grade, performing rites which the high-caste priest will not touch" (ibid., 11). Gould has called the whole class of low-status Sudra jati s "contra-priests." These were the groups "at the bottom of Hindu society who practiced such defiling occupations as washing clothes, barbering, sweeping, removing dead animals, midwifery, and cremating the dead. As it were, they absorbed the defilement in dealing with blood, death, and dirt so that the rest of Hindu society could be free of it and partake of the rituals that prepared the ground for rebirth into ever purer occupational categories" (Gould 1971, 11; see also Gould 1958). Gould notes Dumont and Pocock's remark that what is specifically Indian in the attempt to control defilement is "the employment of specialists who take upon themselves a part of the impurity, and to whom it remains permanently attached" (Dumont and Pocock 1959, 18; quoted in Gould 1971, 12).^[28] Such "contra-priests," "by virtue of their specialized ritual functions, live permanently in that state of impurity which they help others to abandon as rapidly as possible" (Dumont and Pocock 1959, 18).

Many of the auxiliary priests and para-priests perform polluting tasks, and this is related to their relatively depressed statuses. The polluting entailments of their tasks are secondary to the importance of those tasks, however, and seldom are salient; they are, in fact, usually muted in public discussions. If their statuses are relatively depressed, they are still found in all the clean ranks of the status system. The "impurity" of these people is simply the relative impurity that distinguishes each stratum of the macrostatus system from those above it. But there are some low thars whose "permanent state of impurity" is their major defining characteristic, their most salient meaning to others, and whose priestly functions are secondary or covert.

For all people in Bhaktapur the dramatically polluting thar s are represented by two, the Po(n) and the Jugi. There are other low thar s that are near them in status. The Nae, the butchers, are just above the Jugi in status, and in principle almost as polluting, and the remnants of some very low thar s—the Do(n), and Kulu—intermediate in status between the Jugi and the Po(n)—are also found in the city. However, these other thar s are almost never discussed in talk about the impure. That talk, often full of feeling, focuses on the Jugis and most emphatically on the

Po(n)s. People are deeply concerned (in ways that will be presented elsewhere) with the conditions of life and the nature of these two groups in an orienting and defining contrast with their own way of life and their own nature.

The Naes (like the borderline clean thar ) are unclean because of what they do, the necessary service they perform, namely, killing water buffaloes as the main source of meat not derived from family sacrifices. However, the central service that the Po(n)s (and, secondarily, the Jugis) perform is to accumulate pollution in particularly dramatic and—for the Po(n)—multiple ways, in short, to be unclean . The various polluting services that are assigned to them are in part justifications and attempts at objectification of their theoretical uncleanliness.

The Po(n)s in Bhaktapur have many of the functions that were classically associated with untouchables throughout much of South Asian history. They are fishermen; as the Naes kill water buffaloes, they kill fish, the fish being (traditionally) bartered and now often sold to other thar s for food The Po(n)s, in Malla times, were executioners, and thus also takers of human as well as animal life.^[29] Most saliently now the Po(n) are "sweepers." They clean the streets, which entails the cleaning of much human and animal feces, and they remove excrement from house latrines and from the special fields used in the city for defecation by people without access to latrines. Traditional Indian untouchables, the Candala^[*] , in addition to being executioners, had "as their main task . . . the carrying and cremation of corpses" (Basham 1967, 146). Bhaktapur's Po(n)s have a narrower funerary function. They must remove the mats and cloths with which bodies are covered during funeral processions from the cremation grounds, after which it is generally believed they use them as ordinary cloths and mats in their houses. As elsewhere in South Asia (e.g., Stevenson, 1920, 352) the Po(n)s are prominent after eclipses, when they go throughout the city receiving alms from anxious householders, thus drawing on themselves the bad influences associated with eclipses. Similarly, as we have noted in conjunction with the Bhatta^[*] Brahman, an offering may be made to a Po(n)—equivalently to the offer to the Bhatta^[*] Brahman—in order to remove astrologically produced misfortune.

The Po(n) have the vital function of making the city's organizing pollution system real , in the sense that they bring it into contact at its lowest point with a sensorially accessible world of real pollutants, and with the most dramatic of these, feces. In their degraded conditions of life they also make real the penalties of bad karma , and they thus vali-

date the whole system of community dharma and help motivate people's adherence to it. Uniquely among the accumulators of pollution the Po(n)s must, as untouchables had to in South Asia since very early times (e.g., Basham 1967, 146), live outside the city, the city boundaries being in part defined by their external residence. In Malla and Rana Nepal they were not supposed to enter the cities after sundown, and there were strict limits on the kinds of houses they could build and clothes they could wear.

The Po(n)s were clearly marked and distinguished as those beyond the community who helped to define that community. However, in contrast to other images of the outside and beyond—other kingdoms, non-Newars, wild beasts—the Po(n)s are integrated into and controlled by the city, they are part of the city system, essential for its symbolic ordering. They belong to the defining, bordering outside. When people variously placed in Bhaktapur's social system talk about the Po(n)s, it is evident that the Po(n)s represent in a fantasy augmented even beyond the unpleasant reality of their condition what would happen if one ceased to follow the sometimes onerous duties and restrictions of the ordinary daily religious and moral code. Life would be disgusting, impoverished, without decency. People sometimes say, "Without the protection of the dharma we would all be like Po(n)s." The Po(n)s, in their maximal accumulation of poverty and social disability, represent the realization of the important sanction of the bad rebirth resulting from violations of dharma , as well as the "state of nature" resulting from the rejection of social order. While people tolerate and understand and feel helpless to prevent other groups rejecting their traditional stigmatizing thar duties, there is widespread and passionate agreement that the Po(n)s must continue their work, and stay in their proper place. They are (as reflective citizens of the city articulate) as essential to the organized city order as are the Brahmans. Their function in this order is, then, not only in their particular necessary cleaning (and, traditionally, murderous) activities but also in the general meaning, value, and emotion, which accrues to them, which is strongly supported by the realities of their life, and which helps maintain and make sense of the city system. The Po(n)s not only are the "contra-priests" par excellence to the Brahman but also are joined with him in a special segment of Bhaktapur's symbolic order, the realm of the priests and the ordinary civic dharma .

"Po(n)," the ordinary term used to refer to this group, has a pejorative quality. The members of the group use the relatively neutral term

"Pore" (in Kathmandu Newari, "Poriya"; in Nepali, "Pode^[*] ") to refer to themselves. This term is also often used by others alternatively to Po(n). There is, as there is for almost all low thar s, an "honorable" and polite term that can be used in reference or in addressing them, namely, Dya:la. This refers to their activities at the Astamatrka^[*]pitha s outside the city. "Dya: " means "deity," and "la " is of uncertain reference for our informants.^[30] Members of the Po(n) thar are assigned by their thar council in rotation to attend the pitha s, where they gather remnants of food offerings made to the deity and bring them to their households for food. The Po(n)s here, as the Jugis do for some food offerings within the city (see below), join the other protective absorbers of food offerings to deities that must be discarded—crows, dogs, the goddess of the crossroads or chwasa , and the river. They also have a responsibility for caring for some of the mandalic^[*]pitha s and cleaning them.^[31] This has sometimes been interpreted as a duty in which the Po(n) is a guard or a "keeper" (e.g., Manandhar 1976, 222), or even a "priest" (D. R. Regmi 1965-1966, part II, p. 576), but now, at the least, it resembles the Po(n)'s other functions, the cleaning up and absorption of polluted materials.

The Po(n) is a para-priest in that he performs functions that permit the priest's activities, functions that are defined in the religious theory of the city. However, there is a final implication to his role, suggested, for example, by his alliance with the crows, dogs, the goddess of the crossroads, the river, and the Jugi in the absorption and rendering harmless of food offerings. In these functions the dogs and crows are often thought of as quasi-deified agents of Yama, the ruler of the underworld, and the river as the goddess Ganga^[*] . As some Po(n)s as well as others are aware the Po(n) is very much like that class of deities who operate outside of the realm of dharma and pollution, who operate through power. While degraded in the moral world, there is present in the ideas and emotions about the Po(n) the uneasy sense that he has the power to transcend it.^[32]

Inscriptions from the Malla period already indicate the presence of the "Jugis" in the kathmandu Valley society. The Jugis (Kathmandu Newari, Jogi), also known as "Darsandhari^[*] ," their thar name, and as "Kapali" and "Kusle,"^[33] are believed (by themselves and others) to be descendants of followers of the Natha yogi Gorakhnath who may have been members of the Kanphata^[*]yogic order (cf. Briggs 1938; Das Gupta 1969, part III).^[34] Bhaktapur's Jugis now consider Gorakhnath to be

their main deity, and their traditions and legends of their ancestry reflect something of these origins. Uniquely among Bhaktapur's Hindus they are not cremated but, in the ideal practice for Hindu renouncers, both men and women are buried in a sitting meditating position. Whatever dim remnants of their traditional practices still remain, they are an important part of Bhaktapur's craft and symbolic organization, and in the latter rank with the Po(n) as obsessively considered examples of pollution. One of their special thar professions within Newar society is that of tailors, work generally assigned to groups of very low status in traditional South Asia. They are also the traditional players of a musical instrument of special ritual and festival importance, the mwali , a double-reed instrument closely resembling the medieval shawm.^[35]

The Jugi's main traditional function for the city is in connection with the ceremonies that take place at the time of a death and also (depending on the customs and status of the particular thar ) on the fifth or the seventh day after it.^[36] Immediately after death while the body is being prepared in the family house for cremation, clothing is removed from the corpse and is brought, often by a daughter-in-law or a member of the funeral guthi , to the neighborhood crossroads, the chwasa . If a person is wearing only a small amount of clothing at the time of death, sometimes another article of his or her clothing is touched to the corpse and then discarded on the chwasa . A man of the Jugi thar^[37] must go to the chwasa and gather the clothes, presumably for his own family's use. On the fifth or seventh day after death a daughter of the bereaved household who has married out of the household returns. She boils rice on the cheli of the house. The rice is divided into three portions and worshiped by the household's chief mourner. One portion is placed under the eaves of the house and is later taken and thrown into the river, a second portion is offered to crows (messengers of the god of death) at the riverside, and a third portion is given to a Jugi, the same one who took the dead person's clothes earlier (see app. 6).

The Jugi's function here is clearly to receive and absorb death pollution and to dispose of problematic materials. As we have emphasized, in contrast to the "enablers of ritual purity" above him, he is, along with the Po(n), a focus for ideas and emotions about polluting thar s, whose person and conditions of life are disgusting. Upper-status discourse about pollution discriminates (or did discriminate in the years preceding this study) fine distinctions in the conditions in which Po(n) and Jugi could cause pollution, and the differences in purification procedures required.

The purifying workers above the Jugi and the Po(n) become polluted in the course of other activities. The barber, for example, in his cutting of hair and paring of finger and toe nails, helps separate those parts of the body, leaving the trimmed individual more "pure." The barber's low status is related to this work, but when he has finished, he discards the residues of hair and nails. The Jugis and Po(n), in distinction, must eat the polluted food that they collect and wear the death clothes. The pollution literally enters their being, accruing directly to their persons in a much more direct way than those above them.^[38] They are terminals for pollution.

The contrast between the Jugis and the Po(n)s, the classical untouchable, is, in part, quantitative—the Po(n) not only absorbs a part of the death pollution in taking the funeral clothes but also executes a wide range of polluting and sinful actions of use to the community. However, there are significant differences other than quantity. The Po(n) must live outside of the city (see map 4), which is an important part of his meaning. The Jugi not only lives within the city, but in contrast to many other groups who live in one or more enclaves in the city, the Jugis are widely scattered and distributed throughout the city (see map 10). Their contact with the clothes of a corpse is throughout the city at the chwasa s found in all the city's neighborhoods. In their outside/inside contrast the Po(n) and the Jugi reflect a difference we have seen in the placement and uses of the dangerous deities and, most particularly, the stone deities (chaps. 7 and 8). Some of those deities are located close to the outer borders of the city and represent the environing contrasts of the immediate exterior to the internal city as a whole. The pitha s of the Astamatrkas^[*] —where the Po(n) are, in fact, Dya:la—are the main physical representation of these outer deities. The other placement of dangerous deities is within the city as markers and protectors of many of the significant nested spatial units within which moral communities of various kinds—neighborhood, phuki , and household—carry on their dharmic moral relations. One of these is the neighborhood chwasa , the site of a goddess who moves pollution out of the area into some other realm, the place where the Jugi collects the death clothes.

The Jugi and the Po(n) also represent the ambiguous similarities and contrasts of the historical renouncer, as the Kanphata^[*] Yogis once were, and the outcaste. Both were beyond the civic dharma , beyond the differentiating system of pollution and hierarchy. It is not clear to ordinary folks at least (and that includes Bhaktapur's Brahmans in their attitude to visiting Sadhus from India, for example) whether the renouncer,

although he "transcended" pollution, might not be polluting to others. At the very least, people say in discussion of this issue, they are—as a result of their way of life—disgusting.

Po(n) and Jugi draw some of their meaning from groups that were "outside" the dharmic system but in different ways: the Po(n) from the untouchable groups beyond the moral pale of the traditional caste system, who became drawn into intimate and essential relations of service and meaning to it; the Jugis from the renouncers, who, rooted in the system, went beyond it, becoming ambiguous to those who remained "behind." The echos of these two contrasts to the city's ordinary citizens may be found in their contemporary similarities and contrasts.

The Jugis' main sources of income are as tailors and as musicians, playing instruments and music that are their thar specialties. Some families specialize in one or the other activity. Within the civic religious sphere the Jugis have thar rights and duties that are in contrast to their role as collectors and exemplars of pollution. The Jugis are thought to have their own Tantric tradition, knowledge, and initiation,^[39] and each year during a certain period (chap. 13) one Jugi dons a bone apron associated with Tantric "magicians" (both among the Newars and in Tibet) and walks around Bhaktapur accepting offerings and prayers as an incarnation of Siva as Mahadeva. Like the stone deities who accumulate and destroy pollution (among whom is the chwasa itself), the Jugi has the power to transcend the effect of pollution, and thus the system of ordinary dharma . At its lowest point, untouchable and renouncer become joined with king and Ksatriyas^[*] in opposition to those trapped in the interdependencies of the city.