A Summary Note

We have described a city that at the time of our study still retained many of the features which had long charcterized it. It had an enormously dense but stable population. It was a city that, in comparison with communities elsewhere m the world—and in much of Nepal—was relatively little related to larger economic and political networks. Its economy, which had a large nonmonetary component, was still heavily based on internal (including its bordering farms) production and exchange. For the city as a whole it was more of an administered than a political unit, the sources of power and decision were elsewhere, in the non-Newar national government at Kathmandu. That external administration was minimally disruptive, and it was certainly not innovative. It provided what support it could to the ongoing life of the city. Bhaktapur was then in both fact and ideology "self-sufficient" and turned in on itself. But this was nothing new. In its Malla days its political adventures were the affairs of kings and their armies and were to a very large degree—once a dynasty had established itself—external to the life of the city. The city was used to being a world in itself. Royal power, and in recent centuries Gorkhali power, had taken advantage of this as a basis for stability. The proper policy, the successful policy, was to support and encourage the city's, in our case Bhaktapur's, isolated, and self-sufficient order. Bhaktapur's dense and isolated population was almost entirely Newar and almost entirely Hindu Newar. These Newars share a tradition, an identity and a culture—in both the popular and anthropological senses of the word. Bhaktapur is in contrast to Kathmandu, to European medieval and modern cities, a unicultural city.

In the presence of such conditions, what kind of internal order did the city construct? We may, or more accurately must, begin with its system of defining, organizing, and assigning social and economic and "ritual" roles. It is a system tailor-made, as it were, for the conditions of Bhaktapur's life.