Approaches to Meaning

In the next three chapters (chaps. 13 to 15) we will describe the annual calendrical events. We will look for aspects of form and thematic content, and for similarities and contrasts that contribute to the meaning-fulness of clusters of and subcycles of calendrical events, as well as of the entire annual collection. We will introduce here some of the issues and approaches that will concern us in our detailed presentation of the festival year.

Cycles

There are many ways of sorting Bhaktapur's calendrical events. Our first rough sorting has been into events of the solar year and of the lunar year, and then a further division of the lunar year into one set that constitutes a clearly interrelated and extremely important group, the "Devi cycle," and another, residual, lunar group. The solar calendar has only one important festival sequence, Biska:. The lunar cycle as a whole (as opposed to the clearly integrated Devi cycle) seems on the surface at least to be a mixture of miscellaneous events. We will, however, be concerned with its deeper patterns insofar as they may—or may not—exist.

Marc Gaborieau (1982) has proposed a "structure" for the Indo-Nepalese calendar that, although problematic for the Newars at least,

provides a useful point of departure for a discussion of the meaning of the overall lunar cycle. He notes that some writings on Hindu time (he cites Mus [1932-1934] and Zimmer [1951]) represent it as having the following properties: (1) each of the different divisions of time (days, years, cosmic periods, etc.) is arranged in a cycle; (2) these cycles are formally similar; (3) each cycle has a beginning and an end; (4) each cycle has a movement from order toward disorder and culminates in a state of chaos that precedes the regeneration, which will mark the beginning of a new cycle; and (5) the stages of chaos and regeneration are not considered parts of the temporal cycle, but temporary escapes from time. They represent the "axis which communicates with eternity."

Gaborieau argues that this schema is reflected in the Indo-Nepalese festival cycle. For the Indo-Nepalis, he writes, the four-month period beginning with the summer solstice—the period of the monsoon and the major work prior to the rice harvest—are considered inauspicious months, but it is also the period for the majority of the year's festivals. The period begins with the festival of Hari Sayani, the time when Visnu^[*] goes to sleep for a period of four months "leaving the earth to the demons." In Gaborieau's speculation, those months are out-of-ordinary secular time. The first two months correspond to the period of disorder, the second to the period of "regeneration." The festivals during this period "manifest radical disorders and reversals followed by profound restorations of order" (1982, 16). In contrast, he argues, the eight-month period beginning with the first winter month (Marga in November/December) is an auspicious period where life follows its normal course, and household ceremonies for good luck, and prosperity, and the like, take place as do lineage ceremonies. He further argues that those inauspicious events, the disorders and reversals, that do take place during this period primarily concern the lower castes. The "cyclical mystery" of the year as expressed in its festivals is the privileged experience of the upper, twice born castes.

How far this schema is adequate for the sorting of the Indo-Nepalese festival calendar is for others to judge; the involution of festival practices, the relative secularization of most of the Indo-Nepalese groups, will make an anthropological critique difficult. In its details, this schema does not work for Bhaktapur's calendar, but for certain aspects of that calendar and with different timings, it will provide (in chap. 16) a useful point of departure for an analysis of the possible implications of the arrangement of all the components of the annual cycle within that cycle.

Whatever the internal structure of the overall annual calendar of events may be, there is the partially related question of how the meanings of the events might be affected by external cyclical events of a different order. Is there any relation of the meanings of festival events to the phases of the moon and to the sun's course and seasons beyond their clock-like uses in coordinating the cycle? The kinds of data we deal with show only scanty echoes of these cosmic events. But when we consider still another external cycle (in turn, dependent on the seasons), the rice agricultural cycle, particularly in its relation to the Devi cycle, the connections are of central importance.

Selection from the Hindu Set of Festivals

Although most of the elements of Newar symbolic life are taken from the inventions and developments of South Asian history—supplemented by some significant bur quantitatively minor Newar and Himalayan forms—there is, as we have seen in relation to the urban pantheon, a necessary selection among these elements. There are quantitative considerations—only a certain number of elements can be understood and put to use in the civic system. There are also considerations of propriety; some forms do not fit in, or are redundant, have their places filled, as it were, by other symbolic elements. As is the case with all inventories of South Asian possibilities, the list of calendrically anchored events noted in the classical literature and religious texts is very large. Kane has what is presumably an almost exhaustive list of calendrical vratas and utsava containing well over one thousand events throughout India's vast history and extent (1968-1977, vol. V, pp. 253-462). These vary in their general importance and occurrence through out historic time, space, or class of devotees.^[9]

Bhaktapur's calendar selects and rejects from this group, and invents—or often pieces together from existing fragments—its own festivals. The most salient contrast of the Bhaktapur calendar for Bhaktapur's citizens is with other Newar calendars and with Indo-Nepalese calendars. Not only does the presence or absence of calendrical events in Bhaktapur reflect an active selective in relation to other calendars, but so, and often more significantly, does their local importance. Thus a festival of general South Asian importance may be present in Bhaktapur, but only in some residual and unimportant manifestation. We will consider the questions of selection and emphasis in the following chapters.

Aspects of the Analysis of Calendrical Events

When we narrow our horizon to look at Bhaktapur's various calendrical events in themselves and in their similarities and contrasts to each other, we must seek appropriate and relevant aspects for analysis and contrast. We must attend to the social and spatial units involved. What are the static and dynamic uses of those units? Which deities are made use of? Is the deity or deities moved; do people move? Where? To what purpose? Who are the human actors and audiences? What are the different sorts of actions? What are the themes and narratives portrayed and recounted? Are there narrative "plots," with conflicts, tensions, climaxes, resolutions? What kinds of symbolic forms and rhetoric are used to contribute to meaning? What kinds of themes are there in various events? What problems seem to be dealt with? How do participants seem not only to act in but also to respond to particular calendrical events? How are various city units tied together—through "parallel" devices (with various units doing the same sorts of things at the same time) or through "serial" or "interactive" devices, with some sort of meaningful movements and encounters systematically interrelating different kinds of actors and social units in the course of the event?

Such questions are in the background of our considerations of calendrical events, but we have not dealt with these issues explicitly in relation to all the calendrical events noted in the following chapters, for many minor festivals many of them are irrelevant. These various elements of festival meaning become fully relevant only in the more developed festivals, those that are more important to Bhaktapur by various criteria, which we will present in the following chapters.

A catalogue of their potential resources for generating and expressing order and meaning, in fact, is liable to make the annual events seem more exhaustively integrative and constitutive of the city's symbolic system than they really are. That task falls on selected ones. The question of which potential resources are, in fact, used or neglected by particular individual events and throughout the course of the annual cycle is an empirical one.

We will see that the events vary in importance from "trivial" to what we call "focal" events, events of central importance to the city,^[10] and we will make an estimate of the relative importance of the various calendrical events as being of minor, moderate, or major importance. In the next three chapters we will lose ourselves among the trees of the annual cycle. In chapter 16 we will return to the view of the forest, and

the consideration of its differential contributions to urban order. What do these annual events do for Bhaktapur and its people? How do they do whatever it is that they do?