Some Remarks on the Status Of The Rajopadhyaya Brahman In Bhaktapur

For Newar Hindu Bhaktapur, the Rajopadhyaya Brahman is the Brahman. Other priests, including other kinds of Brahmans, serve to enable his functions in one way or another, and to protect his status. Most of these other priests and priest-like figures protect the Brahman's status by performing necessary services for the management of pollution and thus the restoration or protection of "ritual purity" (chap. 11). One priest, the Tantric Acaju, also protects the Brahman's status, but in this case not directly from pollution itself, but rather from the publicly visible performance of the morally equivocal act of blood sacrifice, an act that is permissible in esoteric Tantric contexts but not in public contexts where the Brahman must be the exemplary priest of the ordinary, purity-based dharmic civic system.

The civic elaboration of auxiliary and para-priests, both overt and covert ones, is derived in part from the Brahman's vulnerability to impurity. This vulnerability is reflected in an ambiguity and ambivalence regarding the Brahman's status both in his own view and the views of others, particularly upper-status people.

Lynn Bennett makes an observation about Indo-Nepalese Brahmans, which describes what is also a widespread South Asian pattern. When Indo-Nepalese Brahmans become economically and politically powerful, they "tend to give up their priestly work. They expressed the view that accepting dana and daksina^[*] [as purohita s] was somehow demeaning, like accepting charity" (1983, 251n.). It has been argued (and debated) that the acceptance of dana , a gift, is more demeaning or problematic than the acceptance of the ritually prescribed routine "offering" of daksina^[*] (see discussion and references in Fuller [1984, chap. 3]). Whatever the problems of the purohita , the salaried temple priest had, in other parts of South Asia, even lower status among Brahmans themselves. As Stevenson wrote of Kathiawar^[*] , although a temple priest in a big temple might become a wealthy man, "because he takes pay, he is not held in high esteem by other Brahmans" (1920, 377).

The reason why the dana or daksina^[*] may somehow compromise the Brahman is variously explained. Receiving payment for a service implies servitude. And what the Brahman may be paid for may be thought of as including the removal from the client of some substance-like sin and impurity, as well as simply guiding the client in that removal. This implication is clear in similar gifts elsewhere within the Brahman's realm. Why the Brahman is, or should be, somehow impervious to this is the subject of much Hindu apologetics.

All this has been taken to be problematic for statements that associate the Brahmans, "supreme rank" with their priestly function^[42] "For Brahmans themselves, as well as in the Brahmanical tradition as elaborated in the classical texts, the general notion is that priestly Brahman subcastes rank below non-priestly Brahman subcastes, and that Brahman individuals or families engaged in the priesthood are considered demeaned or degraded by their caste-fellows who are not" (Fuller 1984, 49). The argument (summarized in Fuller [1984, 62ff.]) is that Brahmans represent an ideal of purity that is, in fact, compromised by their priesthood, that the Brahman as priest is in a paradoxical position.

In Bhaktapur the Brahman cannot escape his priestly functions. The Rajopadhyaya Brahman, proud of his aristocratic historical alliance with royal power, boasts of his commitment and restriction to priestly

work in contrast to non-Newar Brahmans. In a traditional community such as Bhaktapur the Brahman must fulfill his priestly responsibilities, although when conditions change, motivated by the contradictions in his role he may try to escape them. But within that traditional context, in Bhaktapur's version of a climax Hindu community, the ambiguities and paradoxes in the Brahman's role help generate an elaborate system of social roles and of complex actions, ideas, evaluations, and symbols that are the very stuff of traditional Hinduism.