The Thar

Newars in Bhaktapur have, in addition to their given names (usually two), a surname that is their thar name.^[1] That name allows Bhaktapurians to place each individual exactly in the macrostatus system. In order to try to obscure their "caste" membership some Newars in the relatively anonymous, socially heterogeneous, and mobile society of Kathmandu and other Nepalese cities often change their surnames to such ambiguous and mildly honorable sounding names as Srestha^[*] ,^[2] Singh, and the like in order to try to obscure low traditional status. But the use of such names in Bhaktapur would be obvious and futile attempts to escape traditional categorizations.

The Bhaktapur Town Panchayat's registry of the city's population has about 350 thar -designating last names for the city's Newar population. This list is not exactly equivalent to the actual number of thar s because in some cases thar members have the option of using one of a limited number of equivalent alternate thar names. Furthermore, in a very few cases the same name appears at two status levels and represents two different thar s. This is either because some function designated by the thar name (e.g., Tantric priest or physician) is performed by practitioners at different status levels, or because a family segment that was outcast for some transgression (usually an improper marriage) might have kept its original thar name when it was reduced to a lower status level. Thus the list of thar names actually represents about 340 different thar groups (see app. 2).

"Thar " is a term widely used in Nepal, deriving from a Prakrit term for "collection," and is usually translated in Nepali-English dictionaries as "clan" or "tribe." The significance of "thar " among the Newars differs from that of other groups of Indian origin in Nepal, the "Indo-Nepalese," as we will refer to them m contrast to the Newars through-

out this book. Thus Khem Bahadur Bista writes of the Indo-Nepalese Chetri that the thar name is no more than a family name, "equivalent to an Anglo-Saxon family name such as Brown" (1972, 31). Lynn Bennett (1977, 41), also writing of the Chetri, supports this usage:

Although villagers sometimes refer to thar as if it were a clan or even lineage unit, strictly speaking, thar is really nothing more than a last name shared by many different descent groups. Individuals with the same thar may or may not be patrilineally related. Yet, because of the vague sense of the thar as an extended patrilineage, there is a preference to marry outside one's thar .

She also notes and accepts an observation of Fürer-Haimendorf's (1966, 30) that Chetri thar s are not ranked, that "no thar is inherently superior or inferior to any other Chetri clan."^[3] The Newar usage of "thar " is different from this.

It is possible to find some groupings of thar s in Bhaktapur that in their internal organization resemble the Chetri thar s. In comparsion with Newar thar s, however, Chetri thar s are a special case, representing one kind of internal organization found among some Newar thar s, and lacking the external hierarchical ordering that defines much of the meaning of thar s (or, sometimes, of sets of equivalently ranked thar s) in Bhaktapur. Newar thar s in Bhaktapur are heterogeneous units and have (or are thought by members to have) quite different kinds of corporate origins—common descent, or some shared trade in the past, or some common historical origin prior to settlement in Nepal or Bhaktapur, or some mixture of these.^[4] Some are endogamous, some few are exogamous, while in others it is optional whether one marries within or outside the thar . In all cases marriages out of a thar must be made with only a limited number of other thar s at the same macro-status level.

The thar s are arranged in twenty distinct levels in Bhaktapur's urban macrostatus system. Those levels , while absolutely distinct in the minds of virtually all Bhaktapurians (although they may occasionally disagree on the membership of one or another thar in a particular level), do not have any local name (which is why we use a neologism "macrostatus level"). In some cases, however, a particular level or groups of contiguous levels may have a name (e.g., Brahman, Chathar, or Jyapu), and if not, there are various local ways of indicating which level is being referred to if that is necessary.

When people in Bhaktapur talk about someone's significant position and function in the macrostatus system, they will sometimes use a thar

name, sometimes a status-level term, and sometimes a "class designation" (see below). This depends in part on the context of the discussion, and is a matter of which social function or aspect is being emphasized and discriminated. In these discussions what the individual in question is said to "belong to" is not a thar or a status level but to a jat (a Nepalese variant of the South Asian term jati ), which simply means a kind or category. Italian, bird, and crow are all a creature's jat in one or another context and abstraction.

Our question in this chapter is what kinds of jat s, that is, what kinds of kinds are Bhaktapur's thar s? What are they made to do? The same question must be asked about the macrostatus levels. There are some twenty of these levels, ranked from Brahman to untouchable, and the 340 or so thar s are sorted among them. Sometimes a macrostatus level contains only one that (Brahmans, butchers, etc.), sometimes a group of thar s. These levels determine or are expressed by patterns of marriage, eating, and association and, for many groups, places of residence. In the traditional system they were—and for some groups still are—determinant of differential access to wealth and, in some cases, details of clothing, decoration, and house types. They are ranked from up (cwe ) to down (kwe ), and are associated, in classic South Asian ways, with theories and symbols of purity and pollution, which we will examine in chapter 11.