PART ONE
ORIENTATIONS AND CONTEXTS

Chapter Two
Orientations

In the following chapters we will discuss those aspects of the past and present of the Newars and of Bhaktapur that will serve as context and background to our principal concerns. We must first introduce the Newars briefly and then, at rather greater length, present a collage of theoretical "conceits" that will suggest the field of discourse in which this book and its selections, arguments, and assertions is located.

Bhaktapur and the Newars

Traditional Nepal, an ancient Asian society with a literate high culture, was confined largely to the Kathmandu Valley. The people of this valley came in time to call their territory Nepal, themselves Newars, and their language Newari. Archaeology has not yet fully clarified their prehistory, but it seems that at an early period (perhaps the eighth or seventh century B.C. ) a predominantly Mongoloid, Tibeto-Burman speaking people settled in the valley where they may have encountered an aboriginal population speaking an Austro-Asiatic language. From perhaps the first or second century A.D. a political organization emerged that was to characterize the Kathmandu Valley until the late eighteenth century. A ruling class, a king and his court of North Indian origin, speaking and writing Sanskrit for sacramental and literary purposes and a Sanskritic North Indian language (a Prakrit) for everyday purposes, was progressively woven into an underlying society and culture with Hima-

layan and Central Asian features. Gradually a language (Newari) and culture (Newar) arose that synthesized these elements. Although the Sanskrit culture of the priests and court persisted, it became more narrowly traditional and ceremonial. Progressively more of the larger religious, political, and literary life was expressed in Newari and Newar forms.

There were dynastic disputes and confusion, but the Newars flourished. The valley soil is exceedingly rich, the bed of an ancient lake. A complex system of irrigation works for the collection and distribution of rainwater from the slopes of the surrounding hills was inaugurated sometime prior to the establishment of the first North Indian dynasty, and the rich soil and irrigation permitted highly productive farming. The Valley in time found itself on the major trade routes between India and Lhasa, in Tibet, and trade, tolls, and services became the basis, along with the rich agriculture, for considerable wealth. This made possible (and was, in turn, developed through) a great sociocultural efflorescence.

Stimulated by Indian ideas and images throughout a very long period of time, the Newars began, perhaps from the fourth century onward, the progressive elaboration and centralization of their society and culture in urban centers. Of these, three—Bhaktapur, Patan, and Kathmandu—became variously principal or secondary royal centers. They became concentrated, bounded (walled during certain times), highly organized units, surrounded by a hinterland of farmland and villages. Finally the three cities became politically divided. The hinterlands became territories, and three small states developed, each with its own central royal city, its king, its particular customs, its dialect.

During these centuries the Newars created architecture; sculpture in wood, stone, and metal; music; drama; a multitude of beautiful crafts; and domestic goods—and above all they created a complex public religious and social drama, for which the cities became the great stages. In these Kathmandu Valley cities there was an elaboration of a particular kind of society, culture, and person. This had much to do with Hinduism (in its widest sense as a set of peculiarly South Asian understandings, images, and actions) and much to do with the structural necessities and implications of a certain kind of organized life, which I shall call here the "archaic city."

In the late eighteenth century the Newar kingdoms, divided and inward-looking, fell to the attacks of the armies of the chief of the small Indianized mountain state of Gorkha in the western Himalayas. The Gorkhali alliances and conquests defined the greatly enlarged territory

and state of modern Nepal. The Newars were no longer the people of Nepal. They were only one of some seventy linguistic and "ethnic groups," and a conquered one at that. The Gorkha alliance put its capital at Kathmandu, and the long autonomous political history of the Newars was over.

Yet, Bhaktapur, only eight often muddy miles away from Kathmandu (a long enough distance for those who walked or were carried in palanquins) was left more or less alone. It lost its Newar king (although he continued and continues to be powerfully present symbolically) but it remained relatively isolated by Gorkhali political policy for dealing with what was in effect a conquered state. That policy, variously motivated, was to isolate Nepal from the "outside," and to isolate Newars from power within the new state. The Gorkhalis encouraged Newar traditional life, as had the previous North Indian founders of Newar dynasties. However, these latter-day rulers did not become integrated as their predecessors had into a Newar state. The conquerors' language, Gorkhali, became "Nepali," the official language of the newly expanded country, and the Newars found themselves no longer a small nation, but in the eyes of other Nepalis (although not in their own) just one "ethnic group" among others.

Bhaktapur ran on in very much the old way, like a clockwork mechanism assembled long ago that no one had bothered to disassemble. The first serious shocks of modernity began only in the early 1950s, when, following a political revolution, Nepal opened itself to the West. Development—education; agriculture; health programs; increasing travel in and out of the country; burgeoning communications of all kinds, books, movies, radio; and internal transportation—began to alter this conservative, isolated Himalayan country.

Altered in what way? Bhaktapur had always been m history, but it had tried for hundreds of years to turn the flow of history into what might seem a timeless eternal civic order. In 1973, when this study began, the city, or most of it, was still trying. The signs of a deep transformation to another way of being in time and in history were evident and were illuminating for both what had been and what might be about to happen. This book is concerned with the struggle to order Bhaktapur, its particular way of carving out a space and time and common reality in the face of history. It describes at length things that are important in that they are aspects of that order. As the order changes, as it "modernizes," such things will be of interest for other reasons—as problems for modernization and as potsherds left over from old broken pots, clues for antiquarian enterprises.

Ways of Looking at the Organization of Bhaktapur

Ballet

We will make use of some interrelated ways of looking at and talking about Bhaktapur. The book will illustrate the value these "fanciful and ingenious conceptions" or "conceits," as they once could have aptly been called, may or may not have. Our collage of conceits is more fanciful, literary, and metaphorical than precise, but "marked symbolism," "ancient" and "archaic" types of cities, "axial transformations," "epistemological crises," and the like are ways of adumbrating what seem to us the important tendencies and relations that may well be lost in the mass of details that are to follow.

We may start with an assertion that in comparison with certain kinds of simple traditional communities such as Tahitian villages^[1] on the one hand, and with complex modern urban communities on the other, Bhaktapur is to a very large degree characterized by the presence of a great deal of a certain kind of symbolism. We may defer for a while the questions as to what kind of symbolism and what that symbolism might do, what purposes it may serve. For now we may characterize it as "extraordinary," and of compelling local intellectual and emotional interest. That symbolism is, in large part, derived from the vast resources of South Asian "religious"^[2] ideas and images, locally transformed, ordered, and put to use for Bhaktapur's civic purposes.

In the following chapters after first considering the contexts of Bhaktapur's "symbolic world," we will distinguish and discuss various aspects and elements of that world. For those who live in or are familiar with other kinds of cities, whose experience of urban symbols is of a different kind, it may be useful to think, at the start, of the civic life of Bhaktapur as something like a choreographed ballet. The city space is the carefully marked stage. Beyond the city is another sort of space, another kind of world, the wings of the civic stage. Both the civic stage and its wings are symbolically represented, the dance moves off center stage at times, but the symbols, conceptions, and emotions proper to the city stage and to its wings are quite different, although interdependent. The civic stage is separated from the "outside" by clear boundaries and is elaborately differentiated and marked out through the symbolic divisions imposed on the physical space of the city, which we will present in chapter 7. These spaces contribute their own meanings to the

performances that take place on them and, in turn, take further meaning from these performances.

Distributed through this differentiated space are images of deities, shrines, and temples, many of which are semantically appropriate to the spaces they characterize. Like all our analytically separated out aspects and elements, specific deities give meaning to and take meaning from the other aspects—space, actors, time, form of enactments, and so on. We can think of the gods and shrines as the distributed, differentiated, and, above all, meaningful decor of the ballet, setting the mood and context against which the human actors dance. "Decor" is too weak for the deities' roles, however; they strain our metaphor, and their contribution is more like that of the Commandatore in Mozart's Don Giovanni , part decor, part singer. We introduce them in chapter 8.

Largely through descent, roles in this ballet are assigned to the city's inhabitants. There are more than 300 clan-like units (thars ) that in large part determine what ritual and occupational roles their members will play in the city. These are ranked in some twenty or so "macrostatus levels," in a hierarchy of statuses from king and Brahman to untouchable. Civic roles, the civic social structure, is the subject of chapters 5 and 6.

Actors, decor, and space are set into motion by the city's conventional arrangements of time, the music of the ballet, signaling various beginnings and endings, rhythms and tempos, entrances and exits, movements, and phases of performances. There are some eighty annual events^[3] determined by the lunar and solar calendars. There are other times and tempos in the city. The time of the life cycle—birth, maturation, menstruation, and so on—brings on stage a dozen events during life, and a large number on dying and after death (app. 6). Another kind of time, making use of the planets and, for some purposes, the moment of birth, is associated with its own deities, the astral deities (chap. 8) and is used in attempts to bring the city dance into relation with what seems from the perspective of the order of the dance to be choice, accident, chance, and luck.

If one knows what a person's surname is (the designator of his or her thar ), his or her age and sex, what day of the lunar (for some purposes the solar) year it is, and where the person lives in Bhaktapur, one can make a plausible guess at where he or she is, what he or she is doing, and even something of what he or she is experiencing. One has come to understand "the work." This is, in part, simply to claim that there is considerable social and cultural order in Bhaktapur. This in itself is

banal, but when that order is placed in comparative perspective, when the details of the ballet are worked out, when the relations between actor and role, between person and symbol are considered—then the question shifts from order to a special order, and, in part, a particular kind of order. Our approaches to "kind," our typological conceits include "the archaic city" and "climax Hinduism."

Typological Conceits: The Archaic City

Bhaktapur, as we will see in chapter 4, is an exceedingly densely populated community containing a very large number of people (in the comparative scale of premodern communities), whose life in relation to that community is highly and complexly integrated. Their community life is such—to paraphrase a synthesizing definition of the "city" in archaelogical perspective (Redman 1978, 216)—that their identity derives from their aggregation, an aggregation that is formally and impersonally organized, that the economy of the community comprises many nonagricultural activities and provides "a diversity of central services both for its inhabitants and for the smaller communities in the surrounding area."^[4] This makes Bhaktapur a "city" by such criteria, but what kind of city?

In a fundamental paper on "the part played by cities in the development, decline, or transformation of culture," Robert Redfield and Milton Singer (1954) attempted a classification of types of city in historical perspective. For our purposes their types can be divided into two different sets. The first is a group of types in which cultural heterogeneity and secularity are of central importance. These are cities, in their words, where (Redfield and Singer 1954, 57):

one or both of the following things are true: (1) the prevailing relationships of people and the prevailing common understandings have to do with the technical not the moral order, with administrative regulation, business and technical convenience; (2) these cities are populated by people of diverse cultural origins removed from the indigenous seats of their cultures. They are cities in which new states of mind, following from these characteristics, are developed and become prominent. The new states of mind are indifferent to or inconsistent with, or supersede or overcome, states of mind associated with local cultures and ancient civilization. The intellectuals of these . . . cities, if any, are intelligentsia rather than literati.^[5]

In contrast, there are kinds of cities that they term "administrative-cultural" "which carry forward, develop, elaborate a long-established

local culture or civilization. These are cities that convert the folk culture into its civilized dimension" (ibid., 57). These are the cities of the literati. They also call this kind of city "the city of orthogenetic transformation," and "the city of the moral order," in contrast to the "city of heterogenetic transformation and technical order." They claim that the first cities in early civilizations were cities of orthogenetic transformation where local culture was carried forward rather than broken down to be replaced by new means of relation and integration, familiar to us in Western urban history.

In an analysis of such early cities, Paul Wheatley (1971, 225f.) argued for the centrality of "symbolism" in their structure and function:

Whenever, in any of the seven regions of primary urban generation, we trace back the characteristic urban form m its beginnings we arrive not at a settlement that is dominated by commercial relations, a primordial market, or at one that is focused on a citadel, an archetypical fortress, but rather at a ceremonial complex. . . . The predominantly religious focus to the schedule of social activities associated with them leaves no room to doubt that we are dealing primarily with centers of ritual and ceremonial. Naturally this does not imply that the ceremonial centers did not exercise secular functions as well, but rather that these were subsumed into an all-pervading religious context. . . . Operationally [these centers] were instruments for the creation of political, social, economic, and sacred space, at the same time as they were symbols of cosmic, social, and moral order. Under the religious authority of organized priesthoods and divine monarchs, they elaborated the redistributive aspects of the economy to a position of institutionalized regional dominance, functioned as nodes m a web of administered . . . trade, served as foci of craft specialization, and promoted the development of the exact and predictive sciences.

Bhaktapur is not an ancient city in terms of historical continuity, but its organization reflects many of the same principles that have been ascribed to otherwise differing ancient cities as members of a certain type of urban community. As a member in some respects of such a class it may well suggest, mutatis mutandis , something of what they might have been, and may be thought of as an archaic city.

Historical Conceits: The Ancient Indo-European City and the Axial Age

In his classic, once influential, and recently much criticized^[6] 1864 study La Cité Antique , Fustel de Coulanges was (of interest for our present

purposes) concerned with a transformation from one state of affairs to another, the transition to the classic cities of Greece and Rome. This work, and its echo in the idea of a transformative "axial age," give us another set of metaphors to suggest Bhaktapur's peculiarities. Fustel tried to look back through the texts of "the Greeks of the age of Pericles and the Romans of Cicero's time" for clues to an earlier urban organization of society and religion that was already ancient to Classic Greece and Rome, clues preserved in vestiges of language and ritual and legend. He added, because of his "addiction to the newfangled Aryan doctrine" (as Finley [1977] puts it) comments on what he took to be early Indian social forms based on his reading of available translations of some Sanskrit texts. He felt that the first Mediterranean European cities arose on the basis of a shared peculiarly Indo-European family organization. "If we compare," he wrote, "the political institutions of Aryas of the East with those of the Aryas of the West, we find hardly any analogy between them. If, on the contrary, we compare the domestic institutions of these various nations, we perceive that the family was constituted upon the same principles in Greece and in India" (Fustel de Coulanges 1956, 113).

According to Fustel's idealized schema the preclassical ancient city was built out of successively inclusive cellular (bounded and internally autonomous) units (ibid., 127f.).

When the different groups became thus associated, none of them lost its individuality, or its indpendence. Although several families were knitted in a phratry, each one of them remained constituted just as it had been when separate. Nothing was changed in it, neither worship nor priesthood, nor property nor internal justice. The city was a confederation. . . . It had nothing to do m the interior of a family; it was not the judge of what passed there; it left to the father the right and duty of judging his wife, his son and his client.

There was a nesting of these cellular units—"family, phratry, tribe, city"—each level marked by its relevant gods and rituals, and in contrast to, say, a Frenchman, "who at the moment of his birth belongs at once to a family, a commune, a department and a country," (ibid., 128) the citizen of the ancient city moved via a series of rites de passage over many years into membership in successively more inclusive units.

Each increasingly inclusive level of structure (as expressed in Fustel's historical and temporal language) had its proper gods and cult. "In the beginning the family lived isolated, and man knew only the domestic gods. . . . Above the family was formed the phratry with its god. . . .

Then came the tribe, and the god of the tribe. . . . Finally came the city, and men conceived a god whose providence embraced this entire city . . . a hierarchy of creeds and a hierarchy of association. The religious idea was, among the ancients, the inspiring breath and organizer of society" (ibid., 132).

Each unit had its interior and its exterior, and the interior was protected by secrecy. Above all, this was true of the household. "The sacred fire . . . had nothing in common with the fire of a neighoring family, which was another providence. Every fire protected its own and repulsed the stranger. . . . The worship was not public. All the ceremonies, on the contrary, were kept strictly secret. Performed in the midst of the family alone, they were concealed from every stranger. . . . All these gods, the sacred fire, the Lares, and the Manes, were called the consecrated gods, or gods of the interior. To all the acts of this religion secrecy was necessary" (ibid., 37).

The ultimate unit to which people were related at this "stage" was the ancient city itself. There was "a profound gulf which always separated two cities. However near they might be to each other, they always formed two completely separate societies. Between them there was much more than the distance which separates two cities today, much more than the frontier which separates two states; their gods were not the same, or their ceremonies, or their prayers. The worship of one city was forbidden to men of a neighboring city. The belief was, that the gods of one city rejected the homage and prayers of any one who was not their own citizen" (ibid., 201).

What anchored and tied together this structure of cells was its rootedness in a fixed and local space. "When they establish the hearth, it is with the thought and hope that it will always remain in the same spot. The god is installed there not for a day, not for the life of one man merely, but for as long a time as this family shall endure, and there remains any one to support the fire by sacrifices" (ibid., 61). The city came to define in itself its own proper social unit and was sacred for that group within the city boundaries. Just outside the city boundary lived a special class of people, a special class of outsiders, who were placed in an essential contrast with the insiders. Those people who were "excluded from family and from the [family] worship fell into the class of men without a sacred fire—that is to say, became plebeians" (ibid., 231).

Fustel's portrait contained a deeply felt myth, that of an earthly paradise of orderly, family-based unities prior to a transformation into a

larger, impersonal, and conflict-ridden state organization. This was one of a set of such myths putting a lost or distant world into contrast with the modern. It was compelling to his contemporaries and annoying to those of ours who are engaged in countermyths. The problem for a summary rejection of Fustel's vision is that the particular formal features of his "Ancient City," that we have chosen to review here are characteristic of Bhaktapur.

Let us now consider another conceit that, in fact, supplementary to Fustel's has more respectability, or at least currency. For Fustel the features he imagined to characterize the primitive stages of the Indo-European "ancient city," disappeared in the Mediterranean West in those transformations of the ancient city that had made the Athens and Rome of Fustel's classic sources into new kinds of places. That sense of an historical transformation of High Cultures, somehow fundamental for what we are now, has been characterized in various ways. It has been seen as a watershed separating us from an alien, archaic civilized world, stranger to us in many ways than the world of primitive peoples. For Robert Redfield the transformation represented the breakdown of the moral order that had arisen through the "orthogenetic transformation" of a still prior cultural order, the "primitive world" (Redfield 1953). A new kind of basis for urban order was required, and the city and its inhabitants begin to be transformed into their modern forms.

It has been argued (for example, Benjamin Schwartz [1975, 1], in a volume reporting a symposium on "wisdom, revelation, and doubt: perspectives on the First Millennium B.C. ") that the European urban and cultural transformations were part of a worldwide wave of "breakthroughs" within the orbit of the "higher civilizations," during the first 700 or 800 years before the Christian Era in an "axial age" (the term and idea were suggested by Karl Jaspers) consisting in the "transcendence" of the limiting definitions and controls of these ancient forms. In Greece this was manifest in "the evolution from Homer and Hesiod to pre-Socratic and classical philosophy" (and, Fustel would have argued, in the changes in urban organization he discerned). For India, the "transcendence" might be seen in "the transition from the Vedas to the Upanishads, Buddhism, Jainism and other heterodox sects" (Schwartz 1975, 1).

When this argument is pushed beyond its heuristic uses toward more specific historical analysis and toward such questions—of interest to us here—as "did India undergo an axial transition" it becomes diffusely

problematic. In the same symposium Eric Weil notes that those who did not participate in this transformation have simply been rejected as ancestors of the modern world. In a consideration of the political and sociological conditions necessary for the nascent "transcendent" ideas to succeed , he notes in passing that the lack of a politically unifying force might explain "why historical and anthropological differences were never overcome in India. There is a tendency to forget these differences in order to bring India into our own scheme of historic progress toward universality; we wish to look only at those phenomena which fit" (Weil 1975, 27). The heterodoxies that followed the preaxial Vedas—particularly the one that proved elsewhere most powerful, Buddhism, with its powerfully transcending attack on the symbolically constituted social order that were concomitant with its ontological challenges—did not prevail^[7] in India. What did prevail was ultimately the static social order of Hinduism, which, whatever its peripheral inclusion in their proper place of the socially transcendent gestures of renunciation and mysticism, was hardly any kind of "breakthrough" into whatever the idea of an axial "transformation" was meant to honor.

All of which is to suggest that traditional India and Bhaktapur, in so far as it may be characteristic of traditional India, are very old-fashioned places, indeed.

Typological Conceits: Kinds Of Minds—A Continent in the Great Divide

The quest for the defining "other" led in the nineteenth century to conceptions of powerful oppositions in contrast to European urban society. These oppositions, which left little place for "preaxial" civilizations, were dichotomies of two variously characterized extreme terms: simple, complex; primitive, modern; prerational, scientific; and Eden, Exile. The oppositions implied not only types of community organization but also aspects of the experience and thought of members of such communities, the "states of mind" of Redfield and Singer. "Gesellschaft ," for example, required of its members (in presumed contrast with "Gemeinschaft ")—as a consequence of its emphasis on contract and rationality in regard to an individual's "interests"—that "beliefs must submit to such critical, objective, and universalistic standards as [those] employed in logic, mathematics and science in general" (Loomis 1964, 286).

These dichotomies, like our various historical conceits, although they never fully characterized actual communities, have continued to haunt scholarly imagination as "ideal types" as possible tools in the quest for a clarification of aspects of social order. Paul Wheatley, in his discussion of the beginning of urban forms, uses the classical terms of contrasts. "We are seeking to identify those core elements in society which were concerned in the transformation variously categorized as from Status to Contract, from Societas to Civitas , from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft , from mechanical to organic solidarity, or from Concordia to Justitia " (1971, 167). In a footnote bearing directly on our view of Bhaktapur he added an amplification, the suggestion that the early city was of neither one nor the other type. "It should be noted that this transformation was only initiated by the rise of the ceremonial center and that . . . the society of the temple-city was neither fully contractus, civitatis, Gesellschaft nor organic" (ibid., 349 [emphasis added]).

The social philosopher Ernest Gellner is one of those who makes use of the dichotomy in a very strong form. Modern industrial civilization is unique and stands historically across a great frontier or divide from what went before. It is in "a totally new situation." The clarifying task is to characterize "primitive thought" in its oppositional contrast to the most powerful form of modern cognition, science. This contrast will help clarify how we are unique.

If this contrast is used as a method, then (Gellner 1974, 149f. [emphasis added]):

One is naturally left with a large residual region between them, covering the extensive areas of thought and civilization which are neither tribal-primitive nor scientific-industrial. Hence there is a certain tendency for evolutionary schemata of the development of human society or thinking to end up with a three-stage pattern. This tendency is a consequence of the fact that the very distinctively scientific and the very distinctively primitive are relatively narrow areas, and three is a very big region in between.

Nevertheless, it is my impression that the problem of the delimitation of science, and the problem of the characterization of primitive mentality, are one and the same problem. To say this is not to deny that the area between them is enormous, and comprises the larger part of human life and experience. But this middle area perhaps does not exemplify any distinctive and important principle . With regard to the basic strategic alternatives available to human thought, there is only one question and one big divide. . . . The central question of anthropology (the characterization of the savage mind) and the central question of modern philosophy (the characterization or delimitation of science) are in this sense but the obverse of each other.

It is the burden of this book that within this heterogeneous range of thinkers and thought between "primitive" and "scientific," and in the wide range of communities between the "simple" face-to-face community and whatever it is we have (or had) become, there is a kind of continent in the Great Divide, which has its own distinctive typological features, exemplifies its own distinctive and important principles in relation to both sociocultural organization and to thought, distinctive features that are blurred and lost in these classical oppositions. Bhaktapur and places that might have been analogous to it in the ancient world are illuminating for this middle terrain. Neither primitive nor modern, Bhaktapur has its own exemplary features of organization and of mind.

Organizational Conceits: The Civic Function of Symbolism in Bhaktapur and, Presumably, in Other Such Archaic Cities

Shortly after arriving in Bhaktapur, I (the senior author) was standing with a Newar inhabitant of that city in a public square when a nearby man began to shout angrily at a boy. "Who are those people," I asked, "and why is the man shouting?" My friend was unable to answer either question. In Piri, the Tahitian village, the understanding of, response to, and staging of such episodes was the predominant way in which village order was known, taught, learned, rehearsed, experimentally violated, and repeatedly brought under control. Conversely, worry that one's behavior would inevitably be seen and known to others—who would always know exactly who you were and what you were doing—underlay the moral anxieties central to villagers' discourse about and attempts at self-control. In its intimacy, in the constant interplay of being watched by the whole village and watching it, through its close agreement on moral definitions and proper responses, and above all in its construction of people's sense of a "normal" reality, the village of Piri operated as what Erving Goffman (1956) once called a "total institution" with consequent implications for the "mind and experience" of its inhabitants (Levy 1973). In Bhaktapur the kind of communally shared learning from patterned, contextualized, "ordinary" events which was pervasive in Piri was limited to only certain sectors of people's experience of the community—to the bounded and isolated household unit and, sometimes, to the larger kin group or the household's immediate neighborhood. Thus, how did the inhabitants of Bhaktapur understand, learn from, and adjust themselves to the larger city, most of which was out of sight and hearing, and whose complexity, whose quantities and

varieties of people and events seemed beyond any direct and intimate grasp? How did citizens understand and how were they affected by a city that, like Redfield's "cities of orthogenetic transformation," seemed to embody a cultural tradition in urban rather than village form? In large part, we propose, by making use of a resource for communication, instruction, understanding, and control that is not much used in Polynesian communities where culturally shaped common sense used to interpret culturally shaped face-to-face interactions and observations provides the core of community integration. Bhaktapur, in contrast, makes elaborate use of particular sorts of symbols—"marked symbols"—to solve the problems of communication induced by magnification of scale. How it does it, the extent and limits of the resource, is one of the concerns of this book.

Organizational Conceits: Embedded And Marked Symbolism

The idea of "symbolism" in anthropological studies has become so extended that it is little more than an invitation to view anything in the life of a community in a certain way. A symbol in this view is "any structure of signification in which a direct, primary meaning designates, in addition, another meaning which is indirect, secondary and figurative, and which can be apprehended only through the first" (Ricoeur 1980, 245), in short, in one or another context, potentially everything.

It is useful for comparative purposes—and particularly for emphasizing an important difference between places such as Piri and places such as Bhaktapur—to distinguish two different kinds or aspects of symbol or symbolism, "embedded" and "marked." The term "embedded" implies "indirect, secondary, and figurative meanings" that are condensed and dissolved in any culturally perceived object or event so that they seem to belong to the object or event as aspects or dimensions of its "natural" meaning. Examples of such culturally shaped embedded and naturalized symbolic forms are the Hindu and Bhaktapurian complex of purity, impurity, contamination, purification, and the like, which are the subject of chapter 11. "Embedded symbolism" is associated with the cultural structuring of "common sense," the structuring of the assumptions, categorizations, and phrasings through which processes of cognition themselves are structured and through which meaning is created and selected out of the flow of stimuli generated and experienced within a community. Such culturally constructed perceptions and understanding have the experiential characteristics of "ordinary

reality." They are no more (or less) questionable than any other sensations or perceptions, and the knowledge associated with them is felt to be directly derived from sensations and perceptions. Beliefs derived from or composing such knowledge are generally directly held with no epistemological problems. Faith is not at issue.

The "symbolism" of concern to recent "symbolic anthropology" has been, to considerable degree, such "embedded" symbolism.^[8] However, the kind of symbolism that is strikingly elaborated in Bhaktapur is of the sort to which statements about "symbols" in ordinary discourse refer—something whose meaning must evidently be sought elsewhere than in what the object or event seems to mean "in itself." "Marked" symbols, in contrast to "embedded" symbols, are objects or events that use some device to call attention to themselves and to set themselves off as being extraordinary, as not belonging to—or as being something more than—the ordinary banal world. This is the symbolism of various attention-attracting, emotionally compelling kinds of human communication, whether it be art, drama, religion, magic, myth, legend, recounted dream, and so forth, which are marked in some way to call attention to themeselves as being special, as being other than ordinary reality. Most of this volume, beginning with chapter 7, is concerned with such marked symbolism and its special spaces, practitioners, messages, resources, and functions in the life of the city.

Typological Conceits: Hinduism As An Archaic Kind of Symbol System And Bhaktapur As A Hindu Climax Community

Bhaktapur, the argument goes, can be considered to have interesting typological analogies with archaic cities insofar as it represents a community elaborately organized on a spatial base through a system of marked symbolism. The particular symbolic system made use of is a variant of Hinduism. When contrasted with Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism (other than its Vajrayana and Tantric varieties),^[9] Hinduism is a peculiar contemporary religion. Ahistorical (without a heroic, that is, transcending, founder, and without a future to be obtained through some progressive struggle of faith, wisdom, or rectitude); rooted in local space, a local population, and a local inheritance; distributive of its godhead into a pantheon of meaningful and immanent gods—essential resources for the organization of space, time, and community; insisting on the inclusion of social order and social behavior within the sacred realm; insisting on the presence of the sacred in

the here and now, and not restricted and banished to eschatological beginnings and endings and distant heavens—Hinduism is in many of its features, which contrast with the "world historical religions," a system for and of what we have called "archaic urban order."

Louis Dumont remarks, in a section of his study of Hindu caste treating "the territorial framework: the little kingdom," that "contemporary anthropological literature frequently stresses the fact that actual caste systems are—or rather, were—contained within a territorial setting of rather small scale. Here social anthropologists found what they were at the same time mistakenly seeking at the level of the village a social whole of limited extent, established within a definite territory, and self-sufficient" (Dumont 1980, 154). Dumont noted the periodic absorption of these "little kingdoms" into larger political states and argued that "the compartmentalization of the little kingdom must have been at its height at periods of instability and political disintegration" (ibid., 156). That instability and disintegration characterized the larger territory, but it was a stimulus to and opportunity for the ordering of the Hindu city-states—a royal city and its hinterland—within that territory.

Whatever the shifting historical relation between caste and territorial units might have been, the conditions that allowed for the formation and development of little kingdoms allowed for the fulfillment of Hinduism's potentials for ordering a community. Such little kingdoms seem to have represented, to borrow a term from ecology, "climax communities" of Hinduism, where it reached the full development of its potentials for systematic complexity, and with it a temporary stability, an illusion of being a middle world, a mesocosm , mediating between its citizens and the cosmos, a mesocosm out of time.

Psychological Conceits: What Is A Newar That He or She May Know Bhaktapur

Yeats put it exactly right in "Among School Children": O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?^[10]

Piri's dance and Bhaktapur's dance are greatly different. What about the dancers? The private lives of some of Bhaktapur's people, people whom we believe to be representative in some ways, will be the subject of another volume. There we will consider aspects of the city's traditional life, such as family religion and rites of passage, which are rel-

atively neglected here, as well as what some different sorts of people experience and how they interpret and are affected by the aspects of the civic life presented here. In this volume, as we remarked in the last chapter, we will deal with such personal dimensions at only a very few points where it seems necessary for suggesting the psychological impacts and functions of some of the city's most important symbolic patterns—this is the case, for example, with the discussion of purity and of aspects of the significance to the civic audience of the Nine Durgas troupe of god-possessed performers.

The differences in scale, complexity, and kinds of resources used for community organization have, we believe, direct implications for differences not only, obviously, in people's private experience but also (pace Gellner) for the "mentality" of people in the two communities. These private contrasts are both dependent on differences in community organization and help maintain and motivate them. For our final orienting conceit we will sketch some of these implications, asserting in a condensed, simplified, and idealized form what will be illustrated, argued, and qualified at length elsewhere. We must now look at our contrasting communities' organization once more, but this time not in itself but as it affects and is experienced by the communities' members.

As we have asserted above, much of the psychologically significant order of a traditional Tahitian village lies in its complex construction of what was locally taken to be literal reality, resulting in what William Blake, speaking of another world, called "mind-forged manacles." The heterogeneity of the village is contained within a narrow and relatively consistent set of assumptions, values, and definitions; this, as well as the structure and limits of vocabulary in certain domains, makes critical and philosophical thought and discourse difficult. This shaped experience, reinforced by hierarchies of coherent redundant controls (Levy 1977), results in convictions of the solidity and rightness of local common sense. Incompatible understandings, motives, and feelings are relegated to an unconscious realm, which is in large part derived from dense social agreement on the unthinkable. With the conscious aspects of their understanding constructed in a comparatively simple and direct manner out of the forms of the "total institution" in which they live, Tahitians act in its terms because it is the natural thing to do. An outsider sees the powerful influence of the village-based construction of local reality, but villagers acting from their certainties about the nature of their world, from their solidly constructed selves, feel themselves to

be very autonomous individuals for whom external controls or even advice on correct behavior from others in the village would be both unnecessary and oppressive.

What people know in what they take to be a trustworthy manner seems to them to be based largely on their sensory experience of their concrete world. They believe, for the most part, in what they think they see; in Tahiti, as is general in Polynesia, the word for knowing and seeing is significantly the same. The conditions of their life generate a corresponding epistemology. In contrast, if something with a claim to truth is presented to them through verbal reports or other obviously "symbolic" forms that seem disconnected or disconnectable from direct experience, they are suspicious, it is "only something that they have heard about." Even those claims of religion that are neither directly experienced nor intuitively "natural" are subjects for skepticism. Faith, a category that is essential for the Newars, is problematic for them. They are only dimly aware of differences in different people's subjective realities and have minimal interest in psychological or sociological speculation, the revolutionary viewpoints that enable a transcending insight into aspects of one's own possibly arbitrary reality and that make the very idea of "mind-forged manacles" possible. Living in their taken-for-granted common-sense reality, they are familiar to us as the kinds of people whom reflective intellectuals and sophisticated city dwellers see pejoratively as rural, provincial, naive, and unsophisticated people, rigid and unimaginative in their convictions and certainties and their dismissive encounters with other worlds.

Tahitian villagers live in a resolutely ordinary, daylight, sunny world. It is surrounded by a shadowy, poorly discriminated, and thus uncanny world, which they refer to metaphorically as the "night." They depart from the literalness of their daylight world into imaginative marked symbolic enactments, ceremonies, and rituals only on restricted occasions. Now and (as suggested in reports of the time of first Western contacts) in the past, symbolic enactments are and were used, as they are everywhere, mainly for signaling radical and usually irreversible changes of status, as digital markers of socially significant change of state—for the individual during rites of passage, and for the community for a transition from peace to war or the submission to a new chief. In these cases, where one socially defined object or person or situation is suddenly transformed into another, Tom suddenly becoming Harry, the pattern of the ordinary is not sufficient and something more than common sense is required.

The experience—and the personal consequences of that experience—of citizens of Bhaktapur is different. Like Tahitian villages, Bhaktapur is a bounded, largely self-sufficient, and highly integrated sociocultural system. But in Bhaktapur's complex organization every mature individual is involved in a great number of different culturally defined and validated realities and experiences calling upon and evoking quite different aspects of or even kinds of "self" as he or she moves from one to another.^[11] Experience in Bhaktapur is greatly more complex; multiple points of view are not only possible but forced on people. Living systematically in shifting and contrasting worlds, many citizens of Bhaktapur are forced into an epistemological crisis, forced to the understanding that external reality, as well as self, is constructed, and in some sense illusory, or in the Hindu philosophical expression, maya .^[12] They are now, like Princess Myagky in our introductory epigraph, in position for a kind of skeptical and critical analysis that transcends the ideology of their culture, and they become the anthropologist's potential collaborators in the analysis of their own culture and situation, rather than, as in the case of rural village Tahitians, the passive subjects of analysis.

Able in certain special contexts and conditions to say and know such things as "gods are representations of human feelings and activities," or "we must have untouchables because without them we would lose the caste system and there would be chaos," or "it is not the behavior of others so much as people's images of themselves that makes them accept their positions [in the caste system]," or "there must be shame and embarrassment everywhere in the world, but of course, what people are ashamed and embarrassed about must vary," people, quite ordinary people, in Bhaktapur's society are "sophisticated," in its dictionary sense of "altered by education, worldly experience, etc. . . . from the natural character or simplicity." If sophistication, taken as the index and result of a profound difference from the conditions that nurtured Tahitian life and mind, characterizes the majority (as we have reason to believe)^[13] of the people of Bhaktapur, there is a still further move, a characteristic response to the epistemological shift that makes knowledge problematic that, in turn, distinguishes the citizens of Bhaktapur from representative (or ideal) moderns. For Bhaktapur is precisely as Redfield and Singer characterized the genre, a city of literati (that is, enthusiasts and technicians of marked symbolism) and not of intelligentsia. The insights that the preceding quotations illustrate are generated by minds working over contradictions and contrasts in the cul-

turally proffered certitudes of various sectors and phases of a complex culture, contradictions and contrasts that are potentially subversive to the society and in many ways problematic to the integration of the self. Rather than making the analytic pursuit of these intellectual problems an end in itself, a move that would encourage the formation of a social class of critical intellectuals, of socially destabilizing philosophers and scientists, people seek their most satisfying answers to intellectual paradoxes, mysteries, and threats to solid constructions of "self" and "other" and "reality" in the complexly ordering devices of marked symbolism, and develop, in fact, a craving for such devices, a symbol hunger . The crisis of complexity is met through a kind of enchantment that people accept in spite of or in tension with their common sense through a leap of faith into a commitment to the extraordinary and fascinating forms of the community's coherent and fascinating array of marked symbols. In chapter 9 and elsewhere we will present interview materials illustrating this movement in some individuals' recollections of childhood, adolescence, and maturity, a movement from simple certainties, to intellectual doubts about the family's and city's religious doctrines, to a conversion into "understanding," acceptance, and social solidarity—a conversion arguably associated with some of the personal implications of Bhaktapur's ubiquitous blood sacrifice.

For people living in Bhaktapur, the city and its symbolic organization act as an essential middle world, a mesocosm , situated between the individual microcosm and the wider universe as they understand it. This large aggregate of people, this rich archaic city, uses marked symbolism to create an order that requires resources—material, social, and cultural—beyond the possibilities and beyond the needs of a small traditional community. The elaborate construction of an urban mesocosm is a resource not only for ordering the city but also for the personal uses of the kinds of people whom Bhaktapur produces. Or at any rate has produced. Some of our acceptable cultural ancestors tried to make doubt a method, and finally succeeded in freeing us, as they believed, from marked symbolism, succeeded in making the symbolic "only" symbolic. The people of Bhaktapur are beginning to desert their continent in the great divide for familiar shores.

Chapter Three
Nepal, the Kathmandu Valley, and Some History

Introduction

Bhaktapur's mesocosm was built out of the materials available to it. In this chapter we will review something of the long history that helped form the present city, and out of whose debris it tried to build a seemingly timeless structure. That history, in turn, was much affected by the setting of the Kathmandu Valley—temperate, relatively disease-free compared to the southern jungles between Nepal and India, isolated and closed in by southern hills and those jungles to the south and by the Himalayas to the north, and with an enormously fertile soil, the essential support for the civilization that came to flourish there.

Nepal

Modern Nepal is a country of extreme geographic and ethnic diversity. At the time of our study (according to the 1971 census) 11.5 million people lived in a rectangular land some 500 miles long on its northeast-southwest axis and averaging some 100 miles in breadth. Totally landlocked, it is wedged in between India and Chinese Tibet "like a gourd between two rocks" as Prthvinarayana Saha, the Gorkhali founder of modern Nepal, put it in a phrase that all Nepalese leaders have always in mind. Nepal rises progressively in height from south to north from the low-lying jungles and plains of the Terai borderlands with India to the giant Himalayan ranges of the northern borders. In its jungles and

valleys and on the mountain slopes live a genetically, ethnically, and linguistically diverse set of peoples. There are by some accounts some seventy mutually unintelligible languages spoken, suggesting the corresponding cultural diversity of the country.^[1]

Among these diverse peoples the Newars are peculiar. For they are themselves the remnants of a sort of nation, an older Nepal whose boundaries were usually the slopes of the hills surrounding the Kathmandu Valley. Hill people in the far reaches of the territory of modern Nepal still speak of the Kathmandu Valley as "Nepal." The Newars were the citizens of this now submerged polity whose arts and traditions still constitute most of "Nepalese Culture" when "Nepal" is represented in museums and in art and religious history as a South Asian High Culture. Modern Nepal began with the submerging of the Kathmandu Valley nation and the amalgamation of "over 50 principalities and tribal organizations" (Gewali 1973) into a much larger unity through the conquests of the western Nepalese Gorkhali hill tribes and their allies under the chief, Prthvinarayana Saha, who after a number of campaigns against the Valley profited from the internal disarray and jealousies of its Newar kingdoms to conquer them in 1768 and 1769.^[2]

Because we are concerned with the Newars, not with "greater Nepal," our focus is on the Kathmandu Valley, which remained even after Newar incorporation into greater Nepal and some Newar dispersal (mostly as traders and businessmen to the developing cities of the new state) the main center of Newar life.

The Kathmandu Valley

The Kathmandu Valley is a rough ellipse measuring about 151/2 miles along its east-west axis and 12 miles at its greatest width, with a base area of some 218 square miles. The Valley is about 4,400 feet above sea level and ringed by hills that rise from 1,000 to 4,000 feet above the level of the Valley. Visible on the horizon to the north of the Valley in clear weather are the ranges of the high Himalayas. The Valley is the bed of an ancient lake. Its alluvial soil contains deposits of peat and of clays with high phosphate content which were traditionally dug and used as fertilizer. Now it is drained by a network of rivers that, almost dry during the dry months, swell during the rains and join in the main course of the Bagmati river, which drains the Valley at its southwestern boundary. Recorded mean monthly temperatures are reported as varying between maximums of 24°C (73.2°F) in June and a minimum of 7°C (44.6°F) in January. The climate is usually temperate, and it is rare

that temperatures dip a degree or two below freezing. The summers are first warm and dry, then more and more humid until the onset of the monsoon rains.

In the years 1967-1969 the Kathmandu Valley had between forty-four and sixty inches of annual rain (Central Bureau of Statistics 1974). Nearly half of the annual rainfall occurs during the monsoons of July and August, while the lowest rainfall, usually less than an inch in all, falls during November, December, and January, when the ground and air become progressively drier and dustier.

Valley farmlands, such as those around Bhaktapur, are in the flat-lands at the base of the hills and on terraces on the hill flanks. The fields are irrigated after the rainy season through a system of connecting ditches that are periodically unblocked to allow water to flow from collection basins in the hills. Various crops—rice, wheat, and a variety of vegetables (see chap. 4)—are successively raised in these fields during the course of the year.

The Kathmandu Valley, particularly the city of Kathmandu, is now the center for national government and administration. Light industry, tourism, and a multitude of commercial activities are centered there. It is estimated that about 5 percent of Nepal's people live in the Kathmandu Valley, some 600,000 people according to the 1971 census. They live^[3] in the three major Valley cities of Kathmandu (150,402), Patan (59,049), and Bhaktapur (40,112),^[4] a large number of secondary towns and villages, and in scattered hamlets and farms. Most of the country's ethnic groups are represented in the Valley. Census data in 1961 suggested that about half the Valley population were Newars.^[5] ,^[6]

Notes On Early Newar History

According to D. R. Regmi (1969, 14), the first written examples of the term "Newar" to denote the people and society of the Kathmandu Valley date from the seventeenth century, but, as he remarks, the term may well have had a long usage before then. Although, as we shall see, contemporary Newars in some contexts limit the "Newars" to the "climax" society that began to form in the time of the "medieval" Malla kings, as the society and culture seems to have developed more or less continuously from its most ancient roots, we can follow Regmi in referring to the Kathmandu Valley society, culture, and language from the earliest days until its capture by the Gorkhalis in the late eighteenth century as Newar.

Local inscriptions and foreign accounts, mainly Chinese, on which a

history of early Valley Nepal can be based date only from the fourth century A.D. In the absence of adequate archaeological studies, which may some day clarify and alter our conceptions of the early history, inferences about early periods are based on Nepalese chronicles and legends and on problematic allusions in Hindu epic literature.^[7] There is still much debate on the interpretation of these sources for histories of political dynasties and events, and even for a correct chronology. But for the purposes of locating Bhaktapur, a provisional history can be sketched out.

The earliest written inscriptions (from the period of the Sanskrit-speaking court of the Licchavi dynasty) show that more than 80 percent of the place names in the Valley were non-Sanskritic. This supports a tradition that non-Sanskritic dynasties ruled early Nepal, perhaps from (at least) as early as the seventh century B.C. This society, referred to as "Kirata," was apparently of Mongoloid origin, speakers of a Tibeto-Burman language.^[8] According to P. R. Sharma (1973, 67f. [spelling standardized]):

Despite the lack of proof, the Kirata tradition in Nepalese history is too deeply rooted to be dismissed easily. The Kiratas are a widely mentioned tribe in ancient Sanskrit literature, especially the Epics. Many references point to the northeastern Himalayan foothills as the home of these people. The Himalayas were still an area outside the sphere of Aryan domination, and the Kiratas therefore seem to differ from them racially. The Rais and Limbus [of contemporary Eastern Nepal] claim to be the Kiratas. The features of these people distinctly betray their Mongoloid origin. The use of the term Kirata in ancient literature seems to have been wide enough to encompass all groups [in Nepal] of Mongoloid stock. . . . The matrix of Nepalese culture in the valley must have been laid by these Kiratas. The modern inhabitants of the valley, the Newars, are believed to be an intermixture of Aryan and Mongoloid strains resulting from the unions between the Kiratas and the Aryans migrating from the plains of India. The early prototype of the Newari language might have struck its first roots also during this time, as the language is considered to be basically of the Tibeto-Burmese group. The liberal assimilation of the Indo-Aryan Sanskrit into the language proceeds only from the time of the Licchavis, who were responsible for introducing Sanskrit into the land.

By the first or second century A.D. , a Sanskrit-using and Prakrit-speaking court, the Licchavis,^[9] had replaced the Kirata court. They were presumably related to the Licchavi rulers of Vaisali in Bihar in North India. This was the beginning of a continuing pattern of Sanskritic courts derived from North India ruling over a Tibeto-Burman-

speaking people.^[10] Gradually the language and customs of the courts and the people were to blend in a Newar synthesis. Always within this synthesis, however, there were certain segments of religion and court life that followed Sanskrit models and some aspects of the life of the people that maintained residues of ancient Himalayan and Northern modes.

Irrigation of the Kathmandu Valley was developed under the Licchavis as many inscriptions attest,^[11] with the construction of tanks and canals enabling farmers to husband and distribute the monsoon rains In concord with the rich soil of the Valley, irrigation led to the kind of agricultural surplus that eventually made extensive urbanization possible.

In the later days of Licchavi rule (from the late sixth century A.D. ) Tibet was developing a unified state, which was eventually to center at Lhasa. Now "Himalayan passes to the north of the Valley were opened. Extensive cultural, trade, and political relations developed across the Himalayas, transforming the Valley from a relatively remote backwater into the major intellectual and commercial center between South and Central Asia" (Rose 1974, 956). Much of the art and religion of the Newars and the Tibetans grew out of shared Indian sources, but also in mutual interchange and stimulation, and thus had many common features.

According to Prayag Raj Sharma (1973, 71):

In the early Licchavi period, Nepal, together with India undertook the cultural colonization of Tibet. Buddhism and its concomitant art spread from Nepal to Tibet in the 7th Century A.D. According to Tibetan tradition the famous Nepali King Amshuvarman^[12] married his daughter to the first historical King of Tibet, Srongtsan-Sgam-po. Brikuti is said to have carried an image of Buddha among other things as her nuptial present to her husband, and during her lifetime in Tibet knowledge of Buddhism spread far and wide. . . . From the Seventh Century to the present days, Nepal's relationship with Tibet has been continuously reaffirmed. Nepalese [that is Newar] artists, especially bronze makers, painters, and architects went to work in Tibetan monasteries and seminaries. Buddhist scriptures were taken to Tibet to be copied or translated. Ranjana, an ornately elaborate Newari script became the divine script in Tibet. . . . The different Tantric schools which overwhelmed Tibet, also found their way from Nepal as well as India.

Nepal and her princess were, of course, only one component of the influences forming seventh-century Tibet, but one of considerable importance.

Nepal during the Licchavi period reflected most of the Indian reli-

gious developments of the times. Early inscriptions and art indicate that there were sects devoted to Visnu^[*] , Siva, and the Buddha and their associated deities. Visnu^[*] and his cult may have been more associated with the courts, and Siva, in this early period, perhaps somewhat more with the non-Ksatriya^[*] classes.^[13]

Some writers, notably the Sanskritist Sylvain Lévi (1905), believed that the major popular Indian religion of Nepal during this early period, the religion of the Tibeto-Burman segment of the people, was Buddhism superimposed on old Himalayan forms, while the religion of the court aristocracy was one or another sect of Hinduism. During this period both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist monasteries were founded.

Lévi (1905, 255 [our translation]) proposed further that the first form of high Indian religion introduced into Nepal had, in fact, been Buddhism:

Buddhism, malleable and accommodating, was able to introduce itself into the organized life of the Newars, without greatly disturbing it; it discretely sowed Indian ideas and doctrines, and let the harvest ripen slowly. But from the moment it was ripe, a brutal adversary came to dispute it. Sacerdotal Brahmanism menaced with death by the triumph of heresies had skillfully searched for refuge in popular cults; it had adopted them, consecrated them, and took up the struggle with rejuvenated gods and a renewed pantheon.

The rejuvenated Hinduism that contested Buddhism was Saivism.

David Snellgrove noted that the earliest Kathmandu Valley monuments are "definitely" Buddhist. "It is likely therefore that Buddhist communities established themselves in this valley well before the beginning of the Christian era" (1957, 93f.), which would mean that the Licchavi dynasty found themselves from the beginning in contact with a Buddhist community, adhering also presumably to local Himalayan religious forms. Whether or not Buddhism preceded "Brahmanical religion," all early evidence shows them operating side by side, Brahmanical religion presumably being that of the "foreign" court and its "foreign" Brahmans and, Buddhism, being that of the "people." These speculations, like those regarding an early courtly Vaisnavism versus a popular Saivism, reflect a scholarly conviction that the Brahmanical ideal of an intimate organic interrelation of Brahman, king, and people was still on a far horizon.

There is also evidence for the Licchavi period of Sakti worship, of the worship of the sun and other astral deities, and some indication of early Tantric forms^[14] that were to become of major importance for the Kathmandu Valley, and for Lhasa beyond it. These latter were the precur-

sors of the massive invasion of Tantrism which was to come later as a result of the dislocations produced by the Islamic invasions of India.

Bhaktapur's Beginnings

By the end of the Licchavi period most of the ingredients were present that were eventually to lead to the climax community of the royal Malla city-states, a community in which various preexisting elements developed fully, flourished, and became, for a time, related to each other in a closely interdependent and stable system.

The Licchavi dynasty fell in the ninth century, and there followed a period of historic and historiographic confusion out of which emerged the Malla dynasty. In this period Newar society and culture were to develop and flourish in its urban centers—Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur—and their dependent hinterlands. The Malla dynasty lasted in one form or another until the late eighteenth-century conquest by the Gorkhalis, which tranformed Nepal and the Newars into something different.

We must now begin to bring Bhaktapur toward the center of the scene, and consider the Malla period from its perspective. From the beginning of the thirteenth century there were a number of contesting ruling families bearing the name "Malla," interspersed with rulers who did not use this name. Eventually one man, Jayasthiti Malla, who married into the royal family of Bhaktapur and who began his reign in 1382, established an order and a dynasty that was to be remembered by the Newars as the Mallas, the Newar kings, their kings. His direct descendants ruled as Malla kings for more than four hundred years until the Gorkhali conquest of the Valley.

Bhaktapur seems to have been founded as a royal city by Ananda Deva,^[15] who is believed to have reigned from 1147 to 1156 A.D. According to two early chronicles (D. R. Regmi 1965-1966, part 1, p. 180), Ananda Deva built a temple and royal palace in Bhaktapur.

According to the Padmagiri Chronicle, which substitutes Ananda Malla for Ananda Deva (Hasrat 1970, 49):^[16]

Having left his throne in charge of his elder brother he [Ananda Malla] went to the western direction where he founded a new city which he called Bhaktapur, in which he erected 12,000 houses of all descriptions. When the city was built, Ananda Malla sent for [the goddess] Annapurna^[*] Devi from Benares and had the goddess settled there in an auspicious hour. . . . Afterward he built a palace in Bhaktapur . . . where he beheld the Nine Durgas whose images he placed in a temple.

The chronicle published by Daniel Wright, known as "Wright's Chronicle,"^[17] adds some details. Ananda Malla "founded a city of 12,000 houses, which he named Bhaktapur and included sixty small villages and seven towns in his territory. He established his court at Bhaktapur, where he built a Durbar; and having one night seen and received instructions from the Navadurga [Nine Durgas],^[18] he set up their images in proper places, to ensure the security and protection of the town both internally and externally" (Wright [1877] 1972, 163).

The chronicles assert that the city was founded and developed as a royal center. There was something there before, however, and the attempts to construct a symbolically rationalized space that were to follow had to account for and work with preexisting structures. The most extensive work on the incorporation of previous structures into the "ordered space" of Bhaktapur is that of Niels Gutschow and his associates (Auer and Gutschow 1974; Gutschow and Kölver 1975; Gutschow 1975, Kö1ver 1980). They believe that the founding of Royal Bhaktapur involved a unification of a number of small villages that had developed in the area from perhaps the third century, following the development of irrigation in the Kathmandu Valley.^[19]

Bhaktapur and the settlement that preceded its official Royal founding, has been referred to by a variety of names. Its early names were all Tibeto-Burman. According to the linguist Kamal Malla, its modern Newari name Khopa is derived from the earlier form khoprn , derived in turn from the Tibeto-Burman terms kho (river) and prn (field). The chronicles and inscriptions also refer to Bhaktapur as Khrpun, Makhoprn, and Khuprimbruma. The first usage of an Indic name, Bhaktagrama, dates from A.D. 1134 (Malla, personal communication). Its modern Nepali names are Bhaktapur, Bhadgaon, or Bhatgaon. Bhaktapur is taken to mean "city of devotees," the other names are said to mean "city of rice."

Bhaktapur, situated on the Hanumante river and bordered by rich farmland, was surrounded by a hinterland traversed by routes to the mountain passes to Tibet. Trade with Tibet became important for the Bhaktapur economy, and was to be of particular advantage during the periods when the Valley was divided into three semiindependent states.^[20]

Bhaktapur eventually became the "metropolis of the Malla dynasty and the nerve-center of its culture and civilization" (Hasrat 1970, xxxix). The steps by which this happened can be only dimly glimpsed in records and monuments. Some historians believed that there was an early period of joint rule by the three Valley cities^[21] which was some-

times peaceful, sometimes contested. But although earlier historians (e.g., D. R. Regmi 1965-1966, part I, p. 256) believed that the eventual hegemony of Bhaktapur in the Valley was not established until the later fourteenth century, later studies suggest that "since [its establishment in] the mid-twelfth century, Bhaktapur had been the capital city, de facto and de jure, and the Kings who titled themselves Malla continued to rule from it" (Slusser 1982, 54).

The fourteenth century marked the expansion of the empire of the Turkish Tughluq dynasty in northern India to and beyond the borders of Nepal. For the Newars the most important consequence was the dispersal of threatened Indian Buddhists and Hindus in the path of the Turks. Many of them came to the Nepal Valley where they greatly reinforced the Tantrism that was beginning to dominate and transform the earlier introduced forms of South Asian religion. The chronicles personify this movement in Harisimhadeva^[*] , a king of Mithila, who was said to have been driven into exile in the Valley, where he became king of Bhaktapur, installing his kul deveta , or lineage goddess, Taleju, in the royal palace (Hasrat 1970, 52f.; Wright 1972, 175-177). Harisimhadeva's^[*] conquest of Bhaktapur is legendary, although it is generally believed in by Bhaktapur literati, and we will hear much of him, but the introduction of the Maithili deity Taleju as the Newar king's royal lineage goddess (chap. 8) along with her associated Tantric cult seems to have clearly been due to the effects of Turkish movements in northern India during this general period.^[22]

Another chronicle, the Gopalarajavamsavali, only recently made generally available, is a unique witness to what seems to have been the actual relation of Harisimhadeva^[*] to Bhaktapur. As its editors note (Vajracharya and Malla 1985, xvi):

Unlike the later chronicles which almost unrecognizably distort the truth by presenting Harisimha^[*] as a conqueror of Nepal and his descendants as legitimate rulers, the Gopalarajavamsavali notes that he was a political fugitive who died on his way to the valley, and his wife and son sought political asylum in Bhaktapur. Although they ultimately managed to rise to power by manipulating the local politics, the Queen and the Prince of Mithila had entered Bhaktapur as refugees.

The Maitili queen and her son, the prince, became involved, apparently, in struggles for power. Eventually a protege of hers, Jayasthiti Malla, whose marriage had been arranged to the queen's granddaughter, was to become ruler of Bhaktapur and the remembered architect of its present order.

Nepal itself suffered an invasion in the mid-fourteenth century when

Shams ud-Din Ilyas raided the Valley from Bengal in 1349.^[23] "The Muslim invasion shook the foundations of the kingdom, the invader having destroyed the city of Patan, laid waste the whole Valley of Nepal. He indulged in an orgy of mass destruction and incendiarism, plundered the towns and sacrileged the temples of Pasupati and Svayambhunath" (Hasrat 1970, p. xli). According to another chronicle, the Gopala Vamsavli (folio 52 [a ], pp. 4-5), in Nepal Samvat 470 on the ninth day of the dark half of the month of Marga (January 1349), Sultan Shams ud-Din burned the city of Bhaktapur during seven continuous days. Petech (1958, 118-119) believed that this invasion was responsible for the disappearance of "all the monuments of ancient Nepalese architecture."^[24]

Bhaktapur was now on the eve of its experiment in the construction of an ideal urban order. The partial destruction of the haphazard forms of a more ancient Nepal must have greatly facilitated and stimulated the undertaking.

Jayasthiti Malla and the Ordering of Bhaktapur

In 1355 A.D. , shortly after the Muslim invasion of Nepal, Jayasthiti Malla, "a figure of obscure lineage and controversy with regard to his status as a sovereign ruler" (Hasrat 1970, xli), married the granddaughter of Rudramalla, a powerful Bhaktapur noble. After a period of shifting rulers and alliances he eventually emerged as the paramount ruler of Nepal, beginning his de jure reign in 1382.^[25] "To Jayasthiti Malla goes the credit of saving the kingdom from the throes of disintegration and confusion. He curbed the activities of the feudal lords, brought the component units of the kingdom into submission, and with a strong hand, restored order" (Hasrat 1970, xlii).

Jayasthiti Malla was credited by some of the later chronicles—and by the present people of Bhaktapur—with the establishment of many of the laws and customs of Bhaktapur, particularly those involving caste regulations, with standardizing weights and measures, with establishing an order. Let us review some of the achievements traditionally ascribed to him. "Each caste [in Bhaktapur now] followed its own customs. To the low castes dwellings, dress and ornaments were assigned, according to certain rules. No sleeves were allowed to the coats of Kasais [butchers].^[26] No caps, coats, shoes, nor gold ornaments were permitted to Podhyas [untouchables]. Kasais, Podhyas, and Kulus were not

allowed to have houses roofed with tiles, and they were obliged to show proper respect to the people of castes higher than their own" ("Wright's chronicle," Wright 1972, 182f.). The chronicles credit Jayasthiti Malla with dividing the people into a large number of "castes" (sixty-four in some accounts, thirty-six in others). "The four highest castes [here varna^[*] is meant; see chap. 5] were prohibited from drinking water from the hands of low caste people, such as Podhyas or Charmakaras. If a woman of a high caste had intercourse with a man of a lower caste, she was degraded to the caste of her seducer" (Wright 1972, 186f.). According to the Padmagiri chronicle, "He constituted a fine for all such persons as follow the profession of others, as if a blacksmith follow the profession of goldsmith, he shall be fined" (Hasrat 1970, 56).

"He ordered that all the four castes of his subjects should attend the dead bodies of the Kings to the burning-ghats, and that the instrumental music of the Dipaka Raga should be performed while the dead bodies were being burned. . . . He constituted for each of the 36 tribes a separate masan or place for burning their dead and the corpses were decreed to be conveyed by four men proceeded by musicians" (Wright 1972, 182). Jyasthithi Malla classified houses and lands and standardized a system of measurement. "To the four principal castes, viz., the Brahman, Kshatri, Vaisya, and Sudra, were given the rules of Bastuprakaran and Asta-barga for building houses" (Wright 1972, 184). He changed the criminal laws. Previously criminals had been punished "with blows and reprimands, but this Raja imposed fines, according to the degree of the crimes" (Wright 1972, 182).

Jayasthiti Malla "made poor wretched people happy by conferring on them lands and houses, according to caste" (Wright 1972, 187). This particular aspect of reordering may explain, in part, reports of one set of laws that seem to run counter to the rigid codifying of social hierarchy and custom generally attributed to him. That is, Jayasthiti Malla "made many laws regarding the rights of property in houses, lands, and birtas^[27] that hereafter became saleable" (Wright 1972, 182). Or as Padmagiri's chronicle has it, "He allowed his subjects to sell or mortgage their hereditary landed property whenever occasion required it." One may assume that this increased negotiability of property rights had something to do with the reforming of the status system and facilitated the economic base of the new regulations.^[28]

A manuscript in the Hodgson Collection (vol. 11, n.d.) collected between 1820 and 1844 entitled "Institutes of Nepal Proper under

the Newars or the Jayasthiti Paddhati" includes detailed regulations for the "four varna^[*] s and thirty-six jat s" on rites of passage, and detailed regulations on such matters as payments to various specialists. It includes fines and punishments of various kinds, including those for illicit sexual intercourse. It prescribes the functions and some of the internal regulations (particularly the periods of pollution for birth and death, and whether they must purify themselves or be purified by a 'barber") of various groups, beginning with the lowest and ascending through the hierarchy.

Moreover, along with all this, it is said of Jayasthiti Malla in the chronicles that he built and repaired, established and consecrated temples and images of the gods. As the Wright Chronicle sums it up, "Thus Raja Jayasthiti Malla divided the people into castes and made regulations for them. He also made laws about houses and lands, and fostered the Hindu religion in Nepal, thereby making himself famous" (Wright 1972, 187).

Jayasthiti Malla came to represent to Newars the Hindu ordering of Bhaktapur, an order built on an ancient plan. "In making laws about houses, lands, castes, and dead bodies, he was assisted by his five pandits. . . . Such laws were formerly in existence, but having fallen into disuse through lapse of time, they were again compiled from Shastras and brought into use" (Wright 1972, 183f.). Certainly, as D. R. Regmi argues (1965-1966, part I, p. 367), he built on preexisting hierarchical structures of some kind and on preexisting principles and forms of Hindu and Newar order. As Slusser notes, already during the Licchavi period "society [had been] hierarchically stratified by caste, and occupations were not only caste-determined but enforced through a special office." (1982, 38). During Jayasthiti Malla's reign (Slusser 1982, 59):

New concepts of administration, nascent in the early Malla years, became clearly established. . . . But he cannot be credited with introducing the caste system into Nepal, nor with single-handedly infusing hierarchy into Nepalese society, two deeds on which his fame popularly rests. The Indian caste system was in effect in the Nepal Valley from at least the beginning of the Licchavi Period, as inscriptions attest. Similarly, the complex system of subcastes that ordain Valley social behavior must be viewed as the product of centuries, of gradual accretion, not a sudden imposition by law. Significantly, Sthitimalla's own annals make no mention of these undertakings. . . . Nonetheless, Sthitimalla may well have codified the particular social patterns that had developed by his time, and thus given established local custom the force of law.

Jayasthiti Malla revivified, extended, and codified an order that built on preexisting forms and forced them into Hindu ideals of the proper form for a little kingdom, a city-state. Subsequent developments of this order must have been retrospectively credited to him, validated by his name. This order was the mesocosmic order of the Newar cities, which was to last in Bhaktapur for some 600 years.

From Jayasthiti Malla to the Fall of the Newar Polity

Jayasthiti Malla died in 1395. There followed almost 400 years of complex and shifting relations between the three major Valley cities and their hinterland "states." "His weak and inefficient successors discovered the formulae of collegial rule and remained joint sovereigns without the division of the kingdom until 1428 A.D. But the adoption of this extraordinary mode of rule by common consent proved a dismal failure; it tended to create administrative chaos, irresponsibility and encouraged intrigue and partisanship in the councils of the government" (Hasrat 1970, xliii). The period of joint rule and, apparently, decentralization and the beginning of fragmentation, lasted some twenty years, until the rule of Yaksa Malla, the grandson of Jayasthiti Malla. Reigning from Bhaktapur he reunified the Valley and continued the special development of Bhaktapur. It was he, according to the Wright Chronicle, who began to build a moated wall around the city.^[29] The inscription placed on one of its gates was said to have asserted "Yaksa Malla . . . made this fortification and ditch and a high citadel, in which to keep troops and ammunition. In building this fortification the people of the four castes willingly bore loads of bricks and earth." In part, this was for defense, but it also effected a further bounding and containment of the city at whose boundaries Ananda Malla had long before placed protective goddesses.

At this stage Bhaktapur was the central seat of a larger Valley government; Yaksa Malla was also paramount ruler of the other major Valley cities. But when in the time of his sons the three city-states became divided, Bhaktapur, like the other Newar cities, would become in the face of growing Valley conflict even more concentrated and isolated within its boundaries.

Yaksa Malla ruled for fifty-three years. His reign, as D. R. Regmi (1965-1966, vol. 1, p. 446f.) has it, constituted a glorious chapter in the history of Nepal:

[He was] a builder, a devotee leading a pious life, a patron of art and learning and a ruler who had given peace and stability to the hitherto strife ridden country. In his time the Rama Vardhana feudatories were liquidated, and though certain others within the confines of the Valley were yet m a position to challenge the authority of the kingdom, he was able to curb them by persuading them to accept his plan of peace. Yaksa Malla built by himself many temples and shrines. His records are the most numerous for any monarch of Nepal for the age. These extend over the entire Valley of Nepal, and commemorating as they do inauguration of the completion of many water conduits, tanks and canals they bear testimony to his efforts to make Nepal happy and prosperous. During Yaksa Malla's time Nepal witnessed [the] flourishing of art and literature. In the list of original works written in Sanskrit and Newari we find that a majority of them belong to this period.

On Yaksa Malla's death the kingdom, after a period of joint rule among his sons, eventually became divided into three small kingdoms, Bhaktapur, Kathmandu, and Patan, each comprising a royal city and its hinterland. Around them in the Valley were other vaguely bounded tiny ministates which were variously related to and incorporated into the three larger units.

Now, as Gewali sums it up, these three "kingdoms of the valley were well-developed city-civilizations. The countryside surrounding them was fertile and large and they had a lucrative trade with Tibet, inherited from the ancient Licchavi rulers of Nepal. The division of the valley into three kingdoms was, therefore, the division of wealth, or [of] the potentiality of earning wealth by trade. This led to mutual jealousies and hostilities among these kingdoms and rendered them an easy prey to the lean and hungry invaders from the western hills" (Gewali 1973, 52). This denoument, looming large in the minds of modern Nepalese historians was not to occur for some 300 years, and Bhaktapur entered on its long period of relative isolation.

The chronicles and inscriptions of those next three centuries give some dim glimpse for Bhaktapur of successions, conflicts, the introduction of new festivals, and the completion of new buildings (D. R. Regmi, 1965-1966, part II, chap. III). We hear of the introduction of a dance cycle, the Nine Durgas (which will later concern us) at the beginning of the sixteenth century, of the introduction of aspects of the festival of the solar New Year in the mid-sixteenth century, of the development of temples, including in the seventeenth century, the building of a large new royal palace and an associated temple of the royal goddess Taleju as well as of a major temple of the Tantric god Bhairava and a complementary one, Natapwa(n)la, to his consort in an adjoining

square. The urban religious geography of Bhaktapur continued to be developed throughout the Malla period.

The additions were variously motivated. "Bhupatindra Malla built a three-storied temple, the length of which ran north and south, and placed in it, facing west,^[30] a Bhairava for the protection of the country, and the removal of sin and distress from the people" (Wright 1972, 194). Omens, dreams, desires for emulation, and desires for personal merit of the rulers, seemed to have played their part. But the additions were woven in one way or another into the ongoing present of the city.

We have one, at least, European view of Bhaktapur under the Mallas, contrasting it to the two other Valley cities in terms that would be reflected by later observers after the Gorkhali conquest. Father Ippolitio Desideri wrote in 1722 "Badgao [Bhatgaon, Bhaktapur] stands on a hill some six or seven miles from Kathmandu. The air is much better, and with its fine houses and well laid out streets it is a much gayer and more beautiful city than the other two; it has several hundred thousand inhabitants who are engaged in trade" (as quoted in D. R. Regmi [1965-1966, part II, p. 1013]).

The Gorkhali State, And the Submerging of the Newars in Greater Nepal

In the latter part of the eighteenth century Prthvinarayana Saha, the ruler of a tiny principality, Gorkha, in the western part of present-day Nepal, began a series of campaigns that were to lead to the fall of the ancient Valley dynasties and a transformation of the situation of the Newars. The conquest of the Valley was a result of twenty-five years of coordinated effort. Ludwig Stiller (1973, 104f.) has delineated the "phases" of the conquest:

Phase one, 1744-54 aimed at sealing off the northern and western passes, therby cutting off the flow of money into the Valley from Tibet. . . . Phase two, 1754-64, aimed at cutting the Valley off from the states to the south, and preventing any flow of help or supplies into the Valley. [This phase] was chiefly characterized by a stringent blockade that seriously weakened the Malla Kings and reduced the people of the Valley to a total dependence on the produce of the Valley itself. . . . Phase three, 1764-69 provided the coup de grace to the Malla Kings. With their isolation complete, the Malla Kings were forced to watch in morbid fascination as the Gorkhali troops pushed their outposts right up to the walls of their capitals and finally to see them break through [to] the final victory.

The combination of careful strategy, the determination of the tough invaders, and the internal division of the comfortable, long-settled Valley kingdoms led to the fall of Kathmandu on September 25, 1768 and of Patan on October 6, 1768.

Bhaktapur held out for more than a year, and was the last of the Valley kingdoms to succumb. "On the night of 10 November 1769 the Gorkhalis burst through the eastern gate [of Bhaktapur] and poured into the city. . . . The battle for the city lasted until 12 November, with the defenders gradually withdrawing to the more protected places in the palace and the Gorkhalis edging nearer and nearer. . . . Jaya Prakash [the king of Kathmandu, who had taken refuge in Bhaktapur] had taken virtual command of the defenses and it was only after he had been wounded by a musket ball in the leg that the defense collapsed" (Stiller [1973, 129f.], taken from the Bhasha Vamsavali, 887-892).

The old Nepal, the Nepal of the Newars was now to be radically transformed. This was not, as it had been from Licchavi times, to be a new dynasty fitting into and ruling from inside an established community, eventually to be integrated into it. For now the Newars—Malla kings, Brahmans and all—were considered to be just another of the many ethnic groups that were to be brought together in a greatly expanded territory and ruled over by the Gorkhalis and their allies from the western hills.

The historiography of Nepal now turns to the new, larger Nepal and to Kathmandu, its national capital. It becomes even more difficult to find in the available written sources the specific history of the now submerged Newars, deprived of their kings but to a considerable degree otherwise left to get on with their affairs in the traditional manner, with the new kings of the Saha line established (in Gorkhali perspective, at least) as the legitimate political and ceremonial heirs of the old dynasty. The situation in Kathmandu was special, for Prthvinarayana Saha chose it as the capital of his new kingdom, and it became his royal city. The other cities, Patan, and even more so the more distant Bhaktapur, were peripheral to the events at the center.

The general policy of the Gorkhali rulers toward the multiple ethnic and political units that made up their new state was, as Stiller (1973, 225f.) remarks, to rely on the existing structures in the annexed kingdoms:

It has been said by historians of Nepal, and very wisely too, that the Gorkhali conqueror did not introduce large-scale change because to do so would unnecessarily disturb the people of the conquered territories and lead to un-

rest and possibly m uprisings. This is basically true. But the failure of the Gorkhalis to introduce such changes goes much deeper than that. For the typical Gorkhali administrator of the time, limited as he was by his own experiences in his own tiny state, merely to grasp what was being done m other localities was an accomplishment. . . . He did not introduce changes, largely because he did not know how things could be done better, and this was true because he did not understand, at least initially, how things were done at all. The Gorkhali was thus forced by the very magnitude of the problem to rely at the outset on local administrative structures in the areas conquered.

Those traditional forms that assured some stability were useful to the Gorkhalis. As long as they maintained order and were able to collect revenues the internal structure of the various units, even in nearby Bhaktapur, seems to have been of little concern to them. They were, however, in closer contact with the Valley Newars than with the outlying tribal and hill people. A kind of division of function took place. The Newars were the farmers, the craftsmen, and the merchants. The Gorkhalis and their old allies were the rulers, administrators, and soldiers. In time, Newars were used as advisors and in lower-level government positions. Yet, Bhaktapur, although some few of its people had some business or position in Kathmandu, remained albeit without its king, a Newar city.

We now begin to have descriptions of Bhaktapur by foreign observers during the period of the Grokhali kings and their Rana prime ministers (who during a period of 100 years became de facto rulers of Greater Nepal). Colonel Kirkpatrick, on a mission to the Kathmandu Valley in 1793, noted that Bhaktapur (which he called "Bhatgaong") was the smallest of the three Valley cities^[31] but "its palace and buildings, in general, are of more striking appearance, and its streets, if not much wider, are at all events much cleaner than those of the metropolis" (Kirkpatrick [1811] 1969, 163). This was faint praise for he had remarked that the streets of the "metropolis," Kathmandu, were "excessively narrow and nearly as filthy as those of Benares" (ibid., 160).

Of the Newars, after noting that they differ from the other Hindu inhabitants of Nepal in character, customs, manners, features, religious rites, and language, he writes that they were "a peaceable, industrious and even ingenious people, very much attached to the superstition they profess, and tolerably reconciled to the chains imposed on them by their Gorkhali conquerors, although these have not hitherto condescended to conciliate them by the means which their former sovereigns . . . adopted" (Kirkpatrick 1969, 186). He also notes the stigmatization

that was beginning to be applied to the Newars by their conquerors, "their courage is at present spoken of very slightingly by the Purbutties [Parbatiyas, or "mountain people"]" and, he notes, "Instances of their being employed in the armies of the state are exceedingly rare. Their occupations are chiefly those of agriculture, besides which they almost exclusively execute all the arts and manufactures known in this country" (ibid., 186).

Ambrose Oldfield, writing of Nepal in 1880, has some notes on Bhaktapur. He echoes Kirkpatrick's favorable comparison of Bhaktapur's condition with Kathmandu and Patan, which he attributed to a relative leniency of the Gorkhalis toward Bhaktapur (Oldfield [1880] 1974, vol. I., p. 132f.):

The great majority of its inhabitants being Hindus, the Gorkha King—himself a bigoted Hindu—appears to have respected their temples, and to have restrained his followers from committing any flagrant or open violence against the public buildings with which the city abounded. Prithi Narayan may also have felt some sympathy for the fallen fortunes of his former ally, Ranjit Mall, whose applications for assistance against the Kings of Kathmandu and Patan had been the immediate cause of bringing Gorkha into the territories of Nipal. From these various causes the aged King of Bhatgaon was treated by Prithi Narayan with considerable leniency; his capital was respected, and though the Gorkhas . . . appropriated the entire revenues of the state, and the greater portion of those of the church, yet they fortunately spared enough of the latter to enable the Niwars to keep the majority of their temples in a state of very good repair. It is in consequence of this unusual moderation on the part of the Gorkhas that, in comparison with Patan or Kirtipur, Bhatgaon still presents a flourishing appearance; its streets and inhabitants have a cheerful aspect, and its religious edifices generally are, even at the present day, in fairly good preservation.

Nevertheless, he notes, "the ancient walls and gateways of Bhatgaon, like those of the other capital cities, are fast crumbling into ruin" (ibid., 133).

Forty years later, in the 1920s, Perceval Landon ([1928] 1976, vol. 1, p. 219f.) wrote:

A little apart from the main traffic ways of the Valley, and busy with its own concerns, Bhatgaon has retained an individuality and an aloofness that other towns in the Valley have to some extent lost in the ever-growing influence of Kathmandu—and naturally none has lost it more than Kathmandu herself. it is commonly said that m her daily life Bhatgaon resembles the outlying and, to Europeans, unknown parts of Nepal more than does any other town in the Valley. She rests upon the fold above her curving river cliff, adjusting herself to its couch-like shape, and cultivates her well-watered fields below,

remote—willingly remote—from her neighbors, and one of the most picturesque towns in the East.

The 1950 Revolution Against The Rana Regime

Soon after the death of Prthvinarayana Saha the Saha family, although continuing to be the nominal and legitimate dynastic rulers of Nepal, lost control of the governance of the new nation. A long turbulent period followed in which various families of the western mountain conquerors strove for control. In the mid-nineteenth century a family that was to take the name of "Rana" rose to power following the violent seizure of power by one of their members, Jang Bahadur Rana. The family provided the successive "prime ministers," the de facto rulers of Nepal for the next century. The Rana regime continued their predecessor's policy of isolation from potentially disturbing forces elsewhere in the world and of a quasifeudal rule of a decentralized nation. As the Nepali political scientist Rishikesh Saha (1975a , 164-166) characterized the Rana period:

The basic objective of the Ranas was to keep the power within the family by maintaining the status quo in every field. Even m the sphere of internal affairs, every effort was made to insulate Nepal from the impact of Western influence and ideas, which was being felt in Asia during the latter part of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. In accomplishing this policy of isolation the Ranas were aided by the geographical location and topography of Nepal. Nepali people were not merely deprived of the influence of Western ideas but were also discouraged from any contact with the neighboring people of India. . . . Change of any kind was suspected of weakening the foundations of Rana rule. Educational development was very slow, and the number of high schools and colleges could be counted on one's fingers. Public works programs during the Rana period were almost non-existent and were particularly deficient with respect to transportation and communication.

In the late 1950s a complex and complexly motivated series of events led to the loss of the Rana monopoly of power and the restoration of power to the Saha king, Tribhuvan. This "revolution" initiated experiments in modernization of the government and of the country, a series of tentative efforts at liberalization, followed by retreats, and yet again by new efforts. Old structures of political order, needs for modernization, new ideas introduced through travel and education, the need to survive the dangers and to try to make use of the rivalries of the border-

ing giants, India and China, all have made this period of modernization difficult and uncertain.^[32]

Although during the period following the Gorkha conquest the politics of national Nepal were Gorkhali, as was the language, the Gorkhalis in the Kathmandu Valley began to become influenced by Newar religion and culture, which they came to think of as being to a large degree the distinctive Nepalese religion and culture. Kamal Malla quotes the Nepalese historian Karidar Baburam Acharya, "Prthvinarayana Saha founded a new nation by defeating Jaya Prakash Malla and other kings. But he was unable to conquer Nepali [i.e., Newar] culture. The Gorkhalis had nothing except a common language in the name of cultural heritage. . . . So being completely overwhelmed by Nepali [Newar] culture, although Prthvinarayana Saha was able to defeat an individual called Jaya Prakash, he was defeated by Nepali culture."

Both Gorkhali and Newar began to be affected together—and to grow more like each other—in consequence of the tentative modernization of Nepal. Yet, as a major governmental development plan for the Kathmandu Valley of the Nepal government put it, Bhaktapur "has shown very little change throughout the last several decades and thus remains the purist existing documentation of historic Newar towns in the Valley" (His Majesty's Government, Nepal 1969, 76).

Which brings us to the time of our present study.

Chapter Four
Bhaktapur's Other Order

Introduction

In the later chapters of this book our central concern will be with Bhaktapur's marked symbolism. The city has, of course, another sort of life that must be described and analyzed in its own terms and whose relations to the particular sort of symbolic order we are concerned with are various. This other order is often dealt with as more real in some sense than the "merely" symbolic order—as one or another kind of "infrastructure." It includes spatial and ecological constraints, aspects of production and distribution, demography, and the like. In still other scholarly traditions "social structure" is given the privilege of a more fundamental reality. These privileged realities are set against what we call "marked symbolism," which is often degraded to epiphenomenal or "expressive" or at best to some modestly supplementary status. We will claim more for Bhaktapur's marked symbolism, but we are not reversing the ideology to argue that the other orders are unimportant or secondary. The interrelations of the realm of marked symbolism and other kinds of order (suffused with their own embedded symbolisms) are diverse. We will touch on some of this in the course of this book. For the reasons urged in chapter 2, however, marked symbolism is our centerpiece.

Bhaktapur's other orders thus become peripheral, but hardly trivial. Their presentation, the subject of this and the following two chapters, is relatively summary, and for this chapter heavily indebted to the work of others.

[Full Size]

Figure 1.
Bhaktapur, looking north to the Himalayas.

The Physical City

Bhaktapur (see fig. 1) at the time of this study had not, at first sight, changed very much in appearance from nineteenth-century descriptions and aside from a general weathering and decay, probably not much from its appearance at the end of the reign of the Malla kings. Built on the sides and summit of a broad hill rising from the valley floor, the city suddenly appears, clearly demarcated from the extensive farmlands around it. The city is roughly elliptical, about one mile in length and about one-half mile in breadth, with its long axis running from west to east with a slight southwest-northeast rotation. A main road enters the city from the west and meanders along the central axis running parallel to the Hanumante River, which borders Bhaktapur to the south. This road soon becomes the bazaar, a dense conglomeration of small shops that line the street for much of its extent. At intervals the road widens out into various public squares full of temples and shrines as is the case in many Newar settlements. Its inhabitants think of Bhaktapur as consisting of a lower city to the southwest and an upper city to the northeast. The bazaar street has two prominent large squares, Ta:marhi Square in the lower city and Dattatreya in the upper. The main axis is intersected by a number of routes that have bridged the Hanumante and entered the city from the south. It leads finally to a road leaving Bhaktapur to the east, once an important route to Tibet.

To the north of the central axis in the western part of the city is the former Malla Royal center, the Durbar square or Laeku. At its northern side is a prominent gateway covered with golden images of gods, the entrance to a complex of courtyards, shrines, and sanctums—the temple of Taleju, the tutelary goddess of the Malla kings. Adjoining the Taleju temple is the large palace, formerly the seat of the Malla kings of Bhaktapur, now administrative offices for a new polity. Around the Durbar square are the tall, tile roofed houses of many of the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, once closely associated with the court, as well as houses of descendants of the old court aristocracy.

In various parts of the city there are clearly differentiated neighborhoods. There is the potters' quarter with its potting wheels, its kilns and open spaces for the firing and sun-drying of pots; the dyers' quarters with various brightly colored woolen yarns hanging to dry near the dying vats; farmers' quarters with—depending on the season—rice, wheat, corn, peppers, and other crops being threshed, winnowed, dried. There are neighborhoods of Buddhists, mostly in the northern parts of the

city, surrounding their old monasteries, now centers of Tantric, non-monastic Buddhism. There are other neighborhoods not so clearly marked by external contrasts, but clustered around a central square with its temples or shrines. Toward the borders of the town are generally poorer areas with lower, simpler houses. But among them there are groups of taller, more elaborate houses, those of the butchers whose low status places them toward the periphery of the city, but whose comparatively high earnings have allowed them to build larger houses than their neighbors. To the south of the city, in an area that is said to be outside its boundaries, in squalid small houses, tightly grouped together, live the untouchables.

Along the Hanumante River at a number of places are clusters of shrines and ghats or steps leading down to the river. Here clothes are washed, and here and there are ramps for dipping the feet of a dying man into the river at his last breath. Along the Hanumante River, mostly on the far side, are cremation grounds. There is another river, the Kasan, to the north of Bhaktapur, which joins the Hanumante to the west of the city. This northern river has little to do with the life of the town.^[1]

Everywhere there is a bustle of activity, of people coming and going, of processions, of music, of business, of craftsmen working. Scattered here and there are new buildings in modern styles, offices and houses for officials, modern houses for some rich merchants, schools, a hospital, a cinema.

And everywhere are dirt and foul smells, the dust and wear of centuries, the feces of animals and children in the streets, of adults in the fields and at the riverside. There are houses cracked and fallen during the last of the series of earthquakes that regularly trouble the Kathmandu Valley. The fields and streets are full of scavenging emaciated dogs and of large carrion crows. Huge fruit bats hang in some seasons in the trees, and on clear nights jackals howl in the fields outside of the city and occasionally a predatory, hungry leopard snatches off the infant of an unwary farmer in a field bordering on the forest. All this is a reminder that Bhaktapur was and is still a clearing in h yet more ancient world.

Some Demographic Notes

According to the 1971 census report (published by the National Planning Commission of Nepal's Central Bureau of Statistics), Nepal then had a total population of 11,555,983. Of these, 618,911 lived in the

Kathmandu Valley, which was divided into three districts—Lalitpur (Patan), Kathmandu, and Bhaktapur. These districts comprised roughly the three old Newar kingdoms, each with its central city and surrounding secondary towns, villages, and scattered hamlets. Of the three districts, the Bhaktapur district had the smallest population, 110,157, in comparison with Patan's 154,998 and Kathmandu's 353,756.

Within these districts the city of Bhaktapur had a total population of 40,112 people, in comparison with urban Patan's 59,049 and urban Kathmandu's 249,563. The census for Bhaktapur conveniently distinguishes categories of prisoners incarcerated there and of military and police stationed at Bhaktapur, people who represent for the most part an "external" population. Without these two categories (133 prisoners and 918 police and military) Bhaktapur's population consisted of some 39,061 people, living in 6,484 households.

Between 1961 and 1971 the population of Bhaktapur had reportedly grown by 17 percent, somewhat less than the 22.8 percent reported for Nepal as a whole, and the 25 percent reported for Kathmandu. (Kathmandu's population increase is augmented by internal migration within Nepal.) These increases were probably due to recent improvements in public health and nutrition and, perhaps, changes in census techniques. Overall, however, there is no indication that Bhaktapur has increased in population very much since the eighteenth century; that increase is just beginning now.^[2] We have noted Kirkpatrick's report for 1793, that he was told that Bhaktapur and its dependencies (approximately equivalent to the present Bhaktapur district) had some 12,000 homes. If we guess that houses had something like the present number of inhabitants, such a figure would not indicate a great increase in the population of Bhaktapur district over the past 200 years. Similarly, Oldfield writes that in the 1850s there were supposed to be about 50,000 inhabitants in Bhaktapur city itself ([1880] 1974, vol. 1, p. 131).

The age structure of the population of Bhaktapur in 1971 was that of a young population—15.3 percent of the population of the city being under five years, and some 47.7 percent of the population under the age of twenty. The figures for sex (for the nonmilitary and prisoner populations) show a slight excess of males over females of 2.5 excess males per hundred males. This sex ratio, when compared to the much larger predominance of males over females in other Nepalese cities, is an index of Bhaktapur's lack of in-migration, which for other cities was mostly male.^[3] This lack of in-migration was confirmed by a sample survey by the United Nations Fund for Population Activities done in 1976, which

during a period when there was an immigration into the Kathmandu Valley of about 2,000 people a year, showed a "negative migration" for Bhaktapur where there was no appreciable immigration and a small annual out-migration of some 100 to 150 persons a year, mostly "to seek jobs in Kathmandu" (Acharya and Ansari 1980, 106).

All available indexes suggested that at the time of this study Bhaktapur's population was, and had been for a very long time, quite stable.

Population Density

The most significant demographic aspect of Bhaktapur for the purposes of this study besides its stability is its population density. In a pioneering study of the physical and cultural geography of Nepal, Pradyumna Karan (1960, 51) remarked that:

Few parts of the world are more empty than the snow-covered ranges of northern Nepal; few parts are more crowded than the Kathmandu Valley. . . . In the major areas of concentration the average population densities range from 500 to 700 per square mile, and there are rural densities in a few small areas of more than 800 per square mile. Such density of rural population is hardly approached in Western Europe or North America; it is equaled only in monsoon Asia and in a few small areas of Africa and the Caribbean. Despite the many empty areas, virtually all of Nepal's space is fully used in terms of the number of people it can support with its present technology. . . . The population of Kathmandu's urban area attains a density of 47,783 per square mile, almost twice that of New York City.

Bhaktapur's density is still higher. A survey cited in Acharya and Ansari (1980, 105f.) estimates that when the open spaces are removed the concentration of people in the built-up residential areas of Bhaktapur is 110,334 people per square mile. Most of those open spaces are at the outskirts of the city, and our own estimates of the settled area give a density of some 117,000 people per square mile for the remainder of the city, including its inner open spaces. Such population density is even more striking in that the city has a considerable number of such open spaces and public squares and that, in contrast to modern inner cities, most of its houses consist of five stories or less.

Such figures are astonishing not only in themselves but also because for those familiar with "downtown" areas of New York, London, or Calcutta, Bhaktapur in no way seems crowded . Throughout the entire city space there is an orderly and widely distributed placement of people and of their movements. it is only during certain of the city's annual

festivals when much of the population gathers together at one or another focal point or area that the great mass of population becomes apparent in an unusual concentration that in itself generates some of the meaning of the festival.

Bhaktapur's Demography: Newars And Hindu Newars

We shall present in later chapters other demographic characteristics of the population of Bhaktapur—its ethnic, religious, and social composition and aspects of household size and composition. It is essential to emphasize, however, that less than sixty households among Bhaktapur's more than 6,000 households are, by criteria that we will discuss in the next chapter, not Newars. That is, the city is almost entirely a Newar city. It is, in addition, almost entirely a Hindu Newar city. In the 1971 census 92 percent of the Newar population called themselves "Hindus"; the rest, the remaining 8 percent, identified themselves as "Buddhists." It is this great preponderance of Hindu Newars who are at the center of our treatment of Bhaktapur's symbolic organization. Some individuals in the other groups are, in fact, involved in that organization—in sometimes illuminating ways—but their involvement is peripheral, and they themselves are most centrally related to other centers of community and of identity.

The Hinterland

Bhaktapur district, the area containing the city of Bhaktapur and its surrounding towns, villages, and open lands, with its 110,157 people in 1971, is the most densely populated of the three valley districts. There are some seven settlements (other than Bhaktapur) in the district with more than a thousand population. Six of these ranged between 1,200 and 3,000 people in 1968. One of them, Thimi, had more than ten thousand people (His Majesty's Government, Nepal 1969, 81). The other district settlements are hamlets and small villages. Some of the Newar towns in the various Valley districts have been studied (Barré, Berger, Feveile, and Toffin 1981; Toffin 1977; Müller 1981). What remains still to be done is a study of their past and present relations with the main cities, and the systematic transformations of Newar social and cultural life illuminated by the contrast in size of the central and peripheral communities. The relation of the city of Bhaktapur to

the rest of the district is for reasons given in chapter 2 only minimally considered in this present study.

Relation To The Central Government

In the early 1970s Bhaktapur, like all settlements of more than 10,000 people in Nepal, was treated as a "Nagar (town) Panchayat ." It was administered as part of a complex four-tiered system of representative councils called panchayat s, which was an attempt to form a connection between the strong, relatively autocratic central government at Kathmandu, centered on the king and his immediate advisors and peripheral political or potentially political structures. The system starts with village or town panchayat s, which, in turn, send representatives to a district panchayat , which is supposed to be more important for administrative purposes than the village and town panchayat s below it or the zonal assembly above it made up of representatives of the various districts amalgamated into larger zones. In the early 1970s Nepal had 3,860 village panchayat s, 16 town panchayat s, 75 district panchayat s, and 14 zonal assemblies. The zonal assemblies, in turn, elected some of the members of a national unicameral legislature, the Rastriya^[*] (National) Panchayat . Of the Rastriya^[*] Panchayat 's 125 members, 90 were elected by the zonal assemblies, 15 by seven "Class Organizations" (e.g., Farmers, Youth, Labor, Ex-Servicemen, and Women), and four from the "Graduate Constituency" made up of college graduates. The king nominates an additional 16 members. (For the panchayat system and its development, see Prachanda Pradhan [1973], Sinha [1972], K. P. Pradhan [1968], Rose and Fisher [1970], and Joshi and Rose [1966].)

Following the restoration of the Shah dynasty in 1950 there were a series of tentative oscillating experiments in the extension and retraction of decentralization and of participatory democracy. In the early 1970s the central government was strong. As Rishikesh Shaha (1975b , 73) wrote:

The new Panchayat system does not reflect any real decentralization or de-concentration of political and administrative power. . . . The Village Panchayats, the Town Panchayats and the District Panchayats have been given limited taxation and administrative powers. Their administrative functions include assisting development programs, supervising and managing the village, the district or the municipality owned or controlled property, and maintaining certain records and statistics. The Village Panchayats are

granted judicial jurisdiction in minor civil and criminal cases. The claim that the new Panchayat system represents decentralization of political power and functions is completely invalid in as much as the central government's ultimate authority is maintained intact by granting the Panchayat Ministry discretionary power to suspend or dissolve a Panchayat and replace it with a provisional Panchayat authorized to exercise the same powers.

Even within the terms of this sytem the town panchayat is comparatively insignificant. The village panchayat includes a Village Assembly, "a legislative body charged with the power to ventilate grievance; to question the . . . members of the executive body; . . . to move a resolution of . . . no confidence [against] the executive. . .; to make decisions regarding taxes" (K. P. Pradhan 1968, 107). However (Pradhan 1973, 151):

In the case of Town Panchayats no direct relation between the elected members and the town people are established. In the case of Village Panchayats, there is a Village Assembly which at least twice a year makes the Panchayat members answerable and responsible for the projects initiated by the assembly. In many ways, Town Panchayats are weak bodies. In the deliberations of the District Assembly, Town Panchayats are particularly weak and become a target of attack for the village people who have an overwhelming majority of representation m the District Assembly.

The town panchayat helps to identify problems of certain kinds and helps implement centrally originated decisions. Greatly limited by the funds made available to it, and by the requirements and decisions of the district and central administrations, the town panchayat is responsible for maintaining and developing local facilities and services.^[4]

The city of Bhaktapur was divided into seventeen "wards," as they are called in official English translations, for the purposes of panchayat organization.^[5] The wards elect the town council, the Nagar Panchayat, which, in turn, selects two of its members as executive administrators. In the early 1970s the activities initiated by Bhaktapur's Nagar Panchayat were limited, concerned mostly with repair and maintenance. The Town (Nagar) Panchayat was intended as a device for encouraging participation in centrally directed modernization, and was, as Joshi and Rose have put it for the panchayat system in general, "an attempt to rationalize administrative process by creating viable institutions in areas where a serious lacuna had previously existed, thus providing the basis both for a modernized administrative system and for agencies through which economic development programs could be implemented" (1966, 400).

Decisions were usually made for town projects by the Home and Panchayat Ministries of the central government, often in consultation with Bhaktapur leaders. After the decisions were made it was the responsibility of the Town Panchayat to help carry them out. The formal local political leadership of Bhaktapur could not be said to involve much power. It was minimally significant for the organization and movement of the daily life in Bhaktapur. This may well change in the future as the traditional sources of order in Bhaktapur break down and as the city becomes more "modern." For the time being, however, at the city level Bhaktapur has little effective local political control. There is plenty of politics within some of the component units of the traditional city organization, but that is another matter.

The Agricultural Economy

The economy of Bhaktapur, like that of Nepal as a whole, is fundamentally agricultural.^[6] The city is ringed with farmlands. Bhaktapur's farmers, typically of Newar farmers (and in contrast to Indo-Nepalese farmers who live in isolated farmhouses on their farmlands) live within the city—where they are integral members of its urban life—and walk to their farms to work them as necessary. Some 66 percent of the "economically active" population of urban Bhaktapur worked in farming according to the 1971 census. For the rural communities, the smaller towns and villages of Bhaktapur district, the figure was 76 percent. This relatively small difference illustrates the fact that Bhaktapur and its hinterland do not represent the familiar urban-peasant polarization, which is, and has long been, prevalent elsewhere. Bhaktapur is an agricultural city surrounded by smaller agricultural towns and villages. Most of its crops are grown for local consumption, mostly for the consumption of the farming families themselves.

The main crops grown in Bhaktapur (listed in order of the amount of land devoted to their cultivation) are rice, wheat, and maize (used for animal feed), followed by crops grown in much smaller quantities—millet, potatoes, oil seed, barley, sugarcane, and a large variety of vegetable crops, such as pulses, peppers, onions, soya beans, tomatoes, and ginger.^[7] The fields are irrigated, and those on the hillsides are terraced. Land use is very intense.^[8] Crops are rotated between a rice crop, and, depending on the nature of the field, a wheat or vegetable crop. The fields are cultivated by means of small hand tools.^[9]

Farms are worked by most able bodied members of a farming family,

male and female.^[10] In a study of the total income (that is, both cash and kind) of a sample of farming families in Bhaktapur Wachi (1980) reports that for 70 percent of her sample farming accounted for more than 70 percent of their household cash income, while for 11.5 percent of the households it accounted for 50 to 70 percent of their income, and for 11.5 percent it accounted for 30 to 50 percent of their income. All of the households in her survey supplemented their crop income in various ways—by some limited sale of animal products (meat, eggs, milk), by income from various trades and crafts (such as weaving, cap-making, yogurt-making), by wage labor (construction, working for other farmers, as assistants in city offices or as laborers on city projects), and from the rental of land or, rarely, through local commerce in something other than farm products. Time devoted to other sources of income is flexible, allowing people to work on the farms at the times when most labor is needed.

Farming households were able to barter grain for some supplies and services, but they needed cash to pay land taxes, to buy goods at bazaar shops, for trips to Kathmandu, and so on.^[11] That cash came from the nonfarming activities noted, and from the sale of some farm products, particularly grain, some of which is sold to intermediate merchants for the Kathmandu market.

Wachi (1980; also personal communication) reports that about 60 percent of the farming households owned some of the lands that they farmed. Only 2.3 percent of the households owned all the land that they cultivated, but another 58 percent owned some of the land they worked and supplemented it with additional rented lands. The remainder were non-land-owning tenant farmers,^[12] and a very few itinerant farm laborers, working only for others. According to Wachi's study, the land rents amounted to about 25 to 28 percent of the value of their produce. The high ownership of land and the relatively low rents for tenancy are the results of a series of land reforms, or Land Acts dating from 1957, which attempted to limit and distribute the amount of agricultural land in individual possession, and to limit the rent that could be charged to tenants.^[13] Furthermore, attempts were made to protect tenants against manipulation and eviction by landowners.

M. C. Regmi (1976, 208) summed up the effect of the series of Land Acts for Nepal:

With the imposition of ceilings on landholding, the existing concentration of landownership has been broken, both through the redistribution of lands in

excess of the ceilings and through voluntary transfers m anticipation of land reform. Big landowners no longer constitute a dominant economic class in the agricultural community. . . . The land-reform program has also conferred greater security of tenure on tenants and made it possible for them to appropriate the major portion of the produce. . . . Their rights are clearly defined by law and are actually being enforced by courts in their favour. Nevertheless, the land reform program has had little impact on the [traditional] agrarian structure.

The land reforms with their resulting marked improvement in the economic and social position of the farmers in Bhaktapur has had an unintended effect. To the degree that the traditional landowning classes, the Brahmans and merchants, lost their lands and land revenues and the farmers gained them, the newly wealthy farmers have come to be the supporters and clients of much of the traditional religious system as well as important employers of Brahmans. Less educated and less open to modernization than the higher classes, this transition has helped to slow down change and to support and conserve the old system.

As we have noted, the agricultural fields are in active use during most of the year. However, one (and only one) part of the year's agricultural activity is fundamental for Bhaktapur's symbolic life. This is the rice growing cycle (see fig. 2), which is what we will mean in our references to the "agricultural cycle" in this volume. It is the reference and source of much of the meaning of the segment of the annual festival cycle that we treat as the "Devi cycle," and for much of the meaning of the "dangerous goddesses." Ulrike Müller (1981, 57f.) summarized the sequence briefly for the town of Thimi in Bhaktapur's hinterland in a description that will serve exactly for Bhaktapur itself:

According to the variety of rice and the locality, the farmers begin with the digging of the fields at the start of the rainy season (June). This work is done by the men with a short-handled hoe (kodali [Nepali], or ku [Newari]). . . . Whilst the fields are still being dug and whilst the women are breaking up the clods with a long-handled, wooden hammer and carefully leveling the ground, rice is already being raised in seedbeds. Two or three weeks after being sown, the rice plants are [re]planted [from the seed bed] out in the main field. . . . By the fifteenth day of the Month Sravan (the end of July) all the rice plants would be replanted. [The rains are now expected and the fields will be watered directly by the rains and by means of controlled irrigation from water catchments on the hillsides.] After the water has been drained from the fields at the end of September (or even earlier in the case of some varieties), the main harvest takes place m October and November. The rice is cut with a sickle and threshed directly in the fields. . . . The grains of

[Full Size]

Figure 2.
Jyapu women planting rice paddy plants.

rice are brought home, whilst the straw remains in the fields to dry. . . . After the winnowing [which takes place m the farmers' quarters within the city] the grains of rice are dried for a few days in the sun if the weather is good. During this time, streets and squares, yards and roof-terraces are full of rice, which is spread out on straw mats and turned over several times. . . . After drying, part of the rice is taken to one of the [town's water-driven] rice mills and there the husk is removed. The largest part of the harvest however, is stored with the husk still on [in special granaries in the farmer's houses].

The Nonagricultural Economy

An inventory of the small stalls and shops that crowd the bazaar street gives some idea of the variety of the supplies and of the specialists who provide them, which are necessary for the material and symbolic life of Bhaktapur. There are (in no particular order) specialized shops or market areas selling: cloth for saris and clothes; ready-made clothes; Ayurvedic medicines; modern medicines; cigarettes, tobacco, and smoking supplies; rice and other grains; mustard oil, kerosene, and other fuel oils; metal cooking pots; curds; water buffalo meat; curios for the tourist trade; books; gold and silver ornaments and small religious figures in gold and silver; wood for construction; tools and nails; house paint; hair decorations and arm bangles; caps; sweetcakes; red peppers; electric goods; fruit; betel nuts; sewing thread; fertilizer; vegetables; salt; metal sheetings for roofing; woolen blankets; religious drawings and pigments for use in rituals; brass and copper pots of various kinds; brass religious images; animal feed; goats; chickens; locally made furniture; clay pots. And there are also stalls for serving tea and soft drinks, stalls for serving alcoholic beverages, stalls for serving cooked food. The shops and stalls are owned and run by members of a socioeconomic class, the sahu or shopkeepers.^[14] Most of these are from the high-ranking Chathar and Pa(n)cthar groups of thar s (see chap. 5)—collectively referred to as "Shresthas^[*] " or "Sresthas^[*] " in some writings on the Newars—but some come from lower ranks of the traditional status system.

Besides the craftsmen, bakers, butchers, collectors and grinders of herbal medicines, spinners and weavers, blacksmiths, metal image casters, and the like who provide the goods for the shops, there are the city craftsmen—masons, carpenters, wood carvers, stone carvers, and so forth who are involved in construction and repair in the city. Finally, there are all kinds of specialized performers and providers of services—musicians of various types, ritual "dancers," barbers, medical special-

ists of various types, various kinds of priests and ritual specialists, midwives, cutters of umbilical cords, astrologers, tailors, fishermen, sweepers, and many more.

In contrast to the limited sample of specialists found in South Asian villages, Bhaktapur has a full panoply. They are, for the most part—as we shall see in following chapters—organized in the city's hierarchical system, and made use of for the symbolic life of the city.^[15]

The 1971 census reported for Bhaktapur that 65.8 percent of the workforce was engaged in agriculture, 8.5 percent in commerce (shops and trade), and 8.2 percent in manufacturing, primarily crafts. The census also listed a small number of people engaged in electrical, gas, and water services (0.1 percent, some 20 people), in construction (0.8 percent, some 115 people, mostly house builders and masons), in transport and communication (1.1 percent, 153 people, including the mail service, an elementary telephone service, and truck drivers), and in finance and business (0.4 percent, some 53 people working mostly at a local branch of the Nepalese bank). The census also enumerated some 2,197 people, 15.1 percent of the economically active population, engaged in "personal and community services."^[16] Many of these are the barbers, washermen, healers of various sorts, and so forth, who provide traditional services, often for patron families. Some of these providers of personal and community services work for the City Panchayat as sweepers and in repair and maintenance. Some work in the Bhaktapur administrative offices, some are teachers in Bhaktapur schools, and some, finally, of this group commute on buses, the electrified trolley (which was inaugurated in the early 1970s to connect Bhaktapur and Kathmandu), or occasionally by automobile or motorcycle to Kathmandu to work in one of the many offices of the Central Government's bureaucracy.

In short, the economy of Bhaktapur was at the time of this study concerned mostly with the production and distribution of goods and services for itself, most goods were produced and distributed within the city or its near environs,^[17] few people were involved in administrative or bureaucratic jobs within the city itself, and much of the household income was "in kind" rather than in cash.^[18]

Bhaktapur also had in comparison with many other modernized cities and towns in Nepal less differentiation of income. Compared to Kathmandu and Patan there is a "low level of income even for the rich people in Bhaktapur" (Acharya and Ansari 1980, 113). This is in part

because of the importance of agricultural wealth in Bhaktapur, and the extensive ownership of land by the farmers themselves.

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.

Chapter Five
The Distribution of Roles: The Macrostatus System

When every one is somebodee, Then no one's anybody!
—W. S. Gilbert, The Gondoliers

Introduction: Thar And Macrostatus Levels

Bhaktapur, like Fustel de Coulange's Ancient City, has a social organization largely constructed out of bounded, relatively autonomous units, or "cells" that are combined in successively more inclusive ones. Households with their own deities and religious practices are joined in patrilineal extended families with their own deities and practices. Patrilineal groups are in turn joined in wider inclusive units called thar s whose members have a common surname. The thar s are in turn organized into what we will call "macrostatus levels."

There is an essential difference between thar and macrostatus levels and the smaller units. The latter, household and extended families—as well as some smaller units within the family and some groupings of extended families—are all more or less alike throughout the city and provide vital nested "structural units" for the city. There is an essential difference between a certain man's role as, say, father, husband, leader of an extended patrilineal family group, that is his role within one of the constituent cells of the city, and his urban role as a Brahman, farmer, or untouchable, a role that is of direct importance to the city as a whole. Such urban roles are ascribed through membership in—that is, through being born into—a thar .

In contrast to smaller constituent units thar s and macrostatus levels are differentiated so that their outputs are elements in the pattern of the

city. For the city organization it is the public functions of thar s—their outputs into the public city life and their external relations with and hierarchical position in relation to other thar s and groups of thar s—that is important, not their internal organization. From the point of view of the city as a whole, what goes on within the thar s is of no importance as long as their essential outputs of goods, services, and differentiated kinds of social persons are maintained. Internal practices and organization vary considerably from thar to thar , but as long as they produce their necessary public effects, internal matters are not only immaterial to outsiders, but unknown and in fact hidden from them. In the same way the still smaller nested units that compose the thar s must have their proper outputs into larger units, but their inner affairs are no business of others. In fact, hidden and secret knowledge, procedures, spells, and protective deities are often thought to be essential to the unit's effective output into larger units, and eventually into the life of the city.

Thus for the kind of city organization we are concerned with—the city at its own level as an organized and organizing mesocosm—the outputs and groupings and hierarchical organization of thar s are the relevant elements. The internal organization of the thar s, and particularly of their component kin-based units are the city forms that most closely affect the "private" experience and early education of the city's people. "Private" in Bhaktapur begins with the internal affairs of a thar , and takes a deeper meaning as action jumps from each unit to the next smaller—that is extended family, household, one or another internal household grouping, and finally to an individual's "self" and "inner thoughts." We will in the next chapter discuss some of the "sub-thar " organization. This will be necessary for discussions elsewhere of "private lives," but for the purposes of this book it will be an excursus.

We will be writing about a variant of a kind of South Asian social organization that is usually, of course, called a "caste system," a system that is said to have elements called "castes" and "subcastes" and various clusters of such units. It has seemed proper (for reasons that will follow) for our discussion of Bhaktapur's social categories to avoid such terminology and some of the assumptions that it entails and to use either local terminology, or neologistic terms. Thus we will call that aspect of the city's hierarchical organization that provides a pattern to the city as a whole the macrostatus system , and distinguish it from the systems of status and social organization within the smaller cellular units, the city's collection of microstatus systems. We have called the gross hierarchical

arrangements of thar s that make a difference to the city as a whole macrostatus levels . In contrast to these there are, for example, hierarchical arrangements of the thar s within a macrostatus level , which are of no concern to people outside of that level, as there are also status rankings within the groups that constitute thar s.

To return to our conceit of the city as a ballet, it is thar membership that assigns the roles of the dancers. There are other miniballets within the thar s and within their component units, but they are not our present concern, although we will say something about them in chapter 6.

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.

An Excursion. Caste, Class, And Varna^[*]

If we take any summary definition of a "caste system," such as Bouglé's (as given in Dumont [1980, 21]), that a caste system is one that, "divides [a] whole society into a large number of hereditary groups, distinguished from one another and connected together by three characteristics: separation in matters of marriage and contact . . . ; division of labor, each group having, in theory or by tradition, a profession from which their members can depart only within certain limits; and finally hierarchy , which ranks the groups as relatively superior or inferior to one another,"—does Bhaktapur have a caste system? It has a hierarchical system of separated units (separated by marriage and aspects of contact), and the system ensures and controls most of the city's division of labor. It thus has a caste system by these criteria.^[5] The problem with such a definition is that real local groupings, that is, thar s and status levels, are not necessarily characterized by all three of Bouglé's condi-

tions and the idea of "a caste" as a particular group in which all of Bouglé's criteria coexist is not generally useful, although it works for some groups, such as Brahmans and untouchables.

Some thar s resemble the units that are called jati in some other South Asian settings, while the macrostatus levels resemble more closely what David Mandlebaum has called "jati clusters."^[6]Thar s are not always jatis in Mandlebaum's sense, however. In some clusters of thar s constituting a status level, the thar s may consider themselves equal and intermarry, and the cluster of thar s becomes in itself something like a jati , although the cluster itself is not, usually, named. In other clusters there is a disputed or agreed-upon internal hierarchy within the same macro-status level, and thar members do not marry other thar s within the level but only within the thar . It is in this situation where the thar s are like jati , and the thar cluster like a "jati cluster."

By avoiding terms such as "caste," "subcaste," and "jati " and rather discussing the variety of relations of thar s with occupation, marriage arrangements and macrosocial rankings, however, one can present Bhaktapur's status system without forcing it into a procrustean bed of generalizing analytic terms.

There is another kind of status designation superimposed on the system of macrostatus levels. Although many professions are thar -specific, there are some professions as there are elsewhere in South Asia that involve people from many thar s and more than one status level. The main ones in traditional Bhaktapur are farmers (jyapu ) and shopkeepers (sahu ).^[7] There are other groupings that have some unity of definition, characteristics, or interests. There are craftsmen, priests, "unclean" thar s, and in earlier times (but still vividly represented in various symbolic enactments) the city's own royalty, court, and military.^[8] Such groups are associated directly with differentiations in power, kinds of production, and differential control of resources and represent something like a "class" stratification superimposed on "caste." In recent years shifts in the economic and political system have caused the beginning of a dissociation of the relative unifications of the traditional system in which prestige, wealth, power, and purity were all controlled and ranked to reflect a common order. There has been a disruption of this unity for Bhaktapur, and a further disequilibrium produced by people's awareness of their relative poverty and low living standards in comparison to Newars and non-Newars elsewhere in Nepal—particularly Kathmandu and the towns in the relatively wealthy agri-

cultural and industrial area along the southern border of Nepal, the Terai. Some people in Bhaktapur speak of "class," barga (from Nepali). Thus Brahmans and members of other upper status levels talk of themselves as "middle class," madhyambarga , when thinking of larger, modern Nepal and its modern upper class, the pujipatti , people of a wealth and power that has nothing to do with their traditional thar heritage.

The classical concept of varna^[*] , the ideal ancient Vedic four-level hierarchy of Brahman, Ksatriya^[*] , Vaisya^[*] , and Sudra, has as elsewhere in South Asia, a vague residual existence in Bhaktapur. People occasionally speculate on the relation of the macrostatus groups to these ancient classifications and occasionally make use of them to add further metaphorical point to some status distinction,^[9] but the use of varna^[*] is mostly an intellectual game, with no implications for Bhaktapur's society.

Who In Bhaktapur Is A Newar?

We will be concerned in this volume with the social and symbolic organization of the 99 percent of the city's population who are called by others and by themselves Newars, and, for the most part, with the 92 percent of the city's population who call themselves not only Newars but also Hindus.

The term "Newar" is used by those people whom other groups in Nepal refer to as Newars in a complex way. It is used in a general way by the "Newars" themselves to differentiate themselves from various kinds of outsiders, usually lumped as "Khae (n)," the western Indo-Nepalese "invaders" on the one hand and the "Sae(n) ," or Mongoloid hill peoples of northern origin, the Sherpas, Tibetans, Tamang, and so on, on the other. In Bhaktapur in reference to people living in the city, the maximal use of "Newar" distinguishes those groups who "follow Newar customs," from others living in the city, whom we will introduce later in this chapter as "non-Newars." Some of those non-Newar groups have lived in Bhaktapur since the time of the Newar Kings (for example, the Jha and Bhatta^[*] Brahmans, and the Lingayat temple priests). These groups (and other "outsider" groups) are not Newars because although they have various functions in the city, they are not members of the central hierarchical and symbolically integrated system. They have not, in contrast to so many other groups over the centuries,

become incorporated into the "Newar" sociocultural synthesis. Such people are simply omitted from the listings "Newars" make for themselves and for inquiring outsiders of the members of Bhaktapur's "caste system." No one including members of those outsider groups seems to have any hesitation in saying that they are not Newars, in much the same way as tourists and visiting anthropologists are not Newars.

The usage of "Newar" is further differentiated internally within the "Newar community" in certain contexts. Middle-status and upper-status people will often use the term "Newar" to refer to the upper-status "ksatriya^[*] " and merchant thar s, those that were traditionally attached to the courts, in distinction to the Brahmans above them and the Jyapu farmers and others below them. The "Newar Brahmans," the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans (below), although, in most contexts they consider themselves Newars, conform to this usage in certain contexts, and refer to those upper-status groups who were their traditional patrons in the Malla days as "Newars" in distinction to themselves on the one hand and to the remaining mass of people—that is, the farmers and all middle and lower groups—on the other. The very lowest thar s, for example, the Po(n) and Jugi, will also in some contexts refer to all the Bhaktapur's "core" thar s—including Rajopadhyaya Brahmans—above them as "Newars," and say that they themselves are not Newars. This may be considered perhaps as a rejection of the system in which they are disadvantaged and stigmatized, but it also reflects a hesitation by others above them as to whether they are in or out of the Newar society. They are, in fact, uniquely both. The same low-status people will refer to themselves as "Newars" in other contexts, where they are emphasizing their membership in the town system. For those groups that have been integrated into the core systems as "Newars" in the largest sense there seems to have been an historical process, where a group coming from elsewhere slowly finds a position in the system, perhaps functionally replacing or displacing another group, and slowly becomes defined as Newar, with some hesitation for decades or centuries among those people with long historical memories. These usages and equivocations should not obscure the point that there is a major difference between those who are essential role players and carriers of symbolic meaning within Bhaktapur's mesocosmic system—whatever play on the term "Newar" may be involved—and those, whatever their economic and occasional ritual contributions to the city may be, who are "non-Newars" because they are ignored by that system, not defined in or

given precise symbolic value by it except in perfunctory ways as one or another kind of foreigner.

The vast majority of the Newars of Bhaktapur think of themselves—and define themselves to the census takers—as Hindu, or more precisely as Siva margi (followers of the path of Siva) Newars, in contrast to Buddha margi Newars. We will return later in this chapter to the fairly complex question of what it means for a Newar to be a "Buddhist" rather than a "Hindu," and the various ways that such Buddhists are related to Bhaktapur's core macrostatus system.

The Macrostatus Levels: Newar Hindus, The Core System

In this and the following sections we will introduce all the thar s in the core system that have in themselves a differentiated macrosocial significance and the macrosocial levels into which these thar s are sorted. (In appendix 2 we list all of Bhaktapur's thar s, placed in their respective status levels.) We will also introduce m the following sections the Newar Buddhist groups and those non-Newar groups that are stable components of the city's population and who live within the city. We will return in much more detail to many of these thar s and other social units in later chapters. They are brought together here for a necessary overview of the city's social structure before we lose ourselves in the details and special issues of later discussions.

As we have noted, the list of thar names comes from Bhaktapur civic population records and is presumably complete. Their ranking in status levels is something else. Ranking is in the conception of individual rankers, among whom Brahmans—who represent and legislate the order that the "caste system" represents—have a privileged position. As seems to be true everywhere in complex South Asian social hierarchies, the Brahmans (and other upper-status people) are certain about the upper and lower ordering, but not sure of the details of the position of every one of the great number of middle—that is, for the most part farming—thar s, which are arranged in several middle-level strata. There are two bases for disagreements. One is the relative ranking of status levels—for example, are butchers higher or lower than some neighboring level? The other is the membership of a particular thar at one or another level. Ordering of status levels may be argued about by people in adjacent levels, but in these cases we accept the certainties of

upper-status people. We have rechecked membership in the middle-ranking levels with people of similar status, however, and accepted their disagreements as more "correct" than the Brahmans' disinterested guesses about such cases. There is still some uncertainty in our lists about the membership of some thar s in the farming ranks.

The view of the upper reaches of the system by low-status people is significant in ways that we will discuss later. Thus members of lower-level thar s consistently give certain of the upper-status thar s with priestly functions, such as astrologers and Tantric priests, higher status than they are given by their near peers. Members of lower-level thar s also tended to simplify and collapse some of the status levels.

Middle-level and upper-level thar s appear to agree exactly on the number and ranking of levels, however, and to a very large degree on the membership of each level. In Malla days the thar s were assigned to their proper levels in written documents setting out privileges, restrictions, and sanctions, as we have noted in our discussion of Jayasthiti Malla in chapter 3. The many legalistic written orderings of the status system in Bhaktapur helped stabilize and force agreement on status ordering,^[10] more so than in other South Asian communities where the order is not so anchored.^[11]

We will list the macrostatus levels (numbered by roman numerals) from the top down. In later sections we will discuss the "entailments and markers," that is, the significance of the levels. We will note some of the internal differentiations within the levels when they have some general significance elsewhere in the city organization.

I. Brahmans. These are all members of one endogamous thar ,^[12] the Rajopadhyaya thar . They are sometimes referred to as "Dya: ("God") Brahmans" or "Newar Brahmans" in those contexts where it is necessary to distinguish them from other, "non-Newar," Brahmans in Bhaktapur itself, or from the Indo-Nepalese Brahmans of elsewhere in Nepal. There is also a lower, separate, nonintermarrying section consisting of three or four families, the "Lakhe Brahmans,"^[13] with their own traditional low-status clients. We will discuss the Brahmans, along with Bhaktapur's other priestly practitioners, in chapter 10.

"Brahman"—or one of the Newari variants of the word—refers in Bhaktapur's usage to both the status level and the thar , which is (ignoring the Lakhe, as is usually done) its only member. This is characteristic of all levels with only one member thar . A problem in naming arises for

levels that contain more than one thar . Most of these levels are, in fact, not named, although they are clearly understood. They may be referred to, if necessary, sometimes by the name of one of their leading thar s, sometimes by some characteristic of the level that is relevant to the context of the discussion. The next two status levels (II and III) contain groups of thar s and do have names; these are the Chathar and Pa(n)cthar levels.

In the literature on the Newar social and economic system these two groups are collectively referred to as srestha^[*] or sesya :.^[14] These two terms are not used in Bhaktapur, where they are thought of as Kathmandu usages. The two groups of thar s are sometimes referred to as "Newars" (by themselves, by Brahmans, and by Jyapu s), and sometimes, particularly by the lower levels emphasizing their most visible economic function, as sahu or shopkeepers. Occasionally the lower thar s (who tend to separate out the two thar s with religious vocations in these two levels and to ascribe higher status to them) refer to the remaining secular thar s as girastha . That term, used in both Nepali and Newari, is derived from the Sanskrit term "grhastha^[*] ," "householder," one of the traditional stages of life of classical Hinduism, upper-status people who had not yet renounced the life of the household.^[15]

These two groups of thar s were traditionally the patron thar s who employed the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans as purohit s or family priests. They include the descendants of the Malla kings and the families of their advisors and administrators and also of the suppliers of various commodities required by the old court. All these families were traditionally landowners (with Jyapus as tenants before the land reforms), and many had members who worked as government functionaries, sometimes at high Royal Palace levels in Kathmandu during the Saha and Rana periods. These families now include most of Bhaktapur's shop owners and shopkeepers and people in various trading and business enterprises and provide many of the present-day members of the government bureaucracy in Kathmandu (to which they commute each day) as well as schoolteachers and other learned professionals. The two groups also include within them two thars with religious functions, astrologers, Josi (found at each of the two levels) and Tantric priests, Acaju, at the Pa(n)cthar level.

There are important contrasts between the two groups. Upper-level informants say that the term "Srestha^[*] " used elsewhere would properly apply only to the Chathariya.^[16] The Chathariya are thought to be "Ksatriya^[*] " in origin; the Pa[n]cthariya are thought to be "Vaisya^[*] "^[17]

and to have close connections in religious practices and origins with the farming thar s.

II. Chathar. The general term "chathar " for the group that now includes thirty-one thar s means the "six thar s," and is of unknown origin to present informants. The group includes, as has been noted, descendants of the Malla kings and families closely involved with the Malla court as officials and to some limited extent as Royal provisioners and is said to be of Ksatriya^[*] origin. One segment of the Josi or astrologers, are also included.^[18] There are also several thar s who are said originally to have belonged to level III—Pa(n)cthar—but who rose into the Chathar category at various times after the fall of the Mallas.

III. Pa(n)cthar. This is a group of thirty-five thar s that seems to have had as a core group a set of thar s that provided services and provisions to the Malla courts. They include one important group of auxiliary priests, the Acajus, who specialize in Tantric procedures (chaps. 10 and 11). They also include a thar , Josi, whose specialty was astrology, which is also (and mostly) represented in the Chathar, and a thar whose name (Baidhya) indicates that its members were, traditionally, Ayurvedic physicians. Within the Pa(n)cthar level there are thirteen thar s (called the "Carthar," the "four thar s") who claim to be at a higher level within the Pa(n)cthar group, and there is some restriction of marriage between these two internal levels. As we have noted, upper-status informants say that the Pa(n)cthar is of Vaisya^[*] origin, and that their religious customs are closer to those of the Jyapus than to those of the Chathar. This suggests a different origin for levels II and III. The Pa(n)cthar may have been derived in part from some earlier upper stratum of Newar society, while the Chathar may have shared with the Malla kings a more recent North Indian origin.

Brahmans, Chathariya, and Pa[n]cthariya are considered together, in some contexts, as the dominant high "castes" or levels of Bhaktapur society. The next large status-level cluster below them are the Jyapus or farmers. Between the high-status groups and the groups of farmers is another level, the Tini. This is one of several groups of priestly specialists scattered throughout the status hierarchy (chap. 11).

IV. Tini. This level consists of one thar , with the thar name Sivacarya, whose members have special priestly functions during the ritual

sequence following death for middle-level and higher-level groups. They are also auxiliary priests in an important rite of passage for girls, the mock-marriage or Ihi (app. 6). The Tini also serve as family priests, purohita , for one of the marginally clean thar s at level XIII, the Bha.

Male members of groups I to IV and of one anomalous thar of priests, the Jyapu Acaju, situated in the highest segment of farmers, have the exclusive right to wear the sacred thread upon initiation into their thar s, and, of very much greater importance in Bhaktapur's religious life, exclusive rights to Tantric initiation. Their families have special lineage gods, Aga(n) Gods. These rights place them in a special aristocratic sector of the city's Hindu religious life (chap. 9).

The next seven sections (levels V to XI) include the four separate levels of Jyapu or farming thar s (levels V, VIII, IX, and XI).^[19] Mixed with the farming thar s, sometimes at the same status level, sometimes at separate levels, are a number of "clean" craft thar s. These Jyapu and craft levels constitute the middle range of the ranked macrostatus system. The group as a whole are often referred to collectively as "Jyapu," although the term may be used in more restricted ways.^[20]

V. Jyapu (level 1) . A group of seventy-four farming thar s.

VI. Tama . This level has only one thar , with the thar name "Tamrakar." These are metalworkers in brass and bronze, makers of metal dishes, pots, small bells, and cast-metal god images and other equipment for rituals. As is the case with all thar s in the levels V to XII, some individuals also farm.

VII. Kumha: and Awa :. This section contains two thar s who are considered at the same level and who intermarry. They are the Kumha: or hereditary potters (whose thar name is Prajapati), and the Awa: or Awal, whose hereditary profession is masonry and tile roofing.

VIII. Jyapu (level 2) . This is a group of about 146 mostly farming thar s, but includes two thar s with occupational specialties who intermarry with other thar s at this level. One of the occupational groups is Kami (thar name Silpakar) who were traditionally wood carvers, one of the Newar high arts and now make furniture and do woodwork in the construction and repair of houses. The other is Loha(n)kami, or stone carvers.

IX. Jyapu (level 3) . This is a group of fourteen intermarrying farming thar s.

X. Chipi . This is a group of about six thar s, one of which uses the high-status name "Srestha^[*] ." They are shopkeepers, in government service, and farmers.^[21] There are two other thar s considered to be at the same level that are not usually included with the Chipi, and who form a separate section at this level.

XI. Cyo (or Cya) . A farming thar , with the thar name Phusikawa[n], which has some ritual functions during the death ceremonies of upper-level thar s.

XII. Dwi(n) . This level has one thar , Dwi(n). They farm and operate small shops and foodstalls. Their low status is now manifested in a thar duty to clean the courtyard of the Taleju temple.^[22]

Levels I to XII are those levels that are, in ways that will be specified later, "clean" levels. Although all the hierarchical differences between status levels are associated with relative differences in purity, manifested focally in regulations regarding the consumption of boiled rice, starting with level XIII, which we call the "borderline clean thar s," another issue, that of classes and degrees of "absolute impurity," associated with increasingly extensive avoidances and prohibitions, becomes salient. These groups can be designated not only as "less clean" than some other but also, in one or another degree and sense, as "unclean." Starting with this level whose "uncleanliness" is the concern of only Brahmans and the most orthodox individuals—that is, those who attempt to mimic Brahmans' ways of life—in the upper-status thar s, each successively lower level is progressively more contaminating, in relation to the extent of the upper levels who are vulnerable to them, to the conditions under which they become polluting, and to the "quantities" of pollution that they can transmit.

XIII. The borderline-clean thar s. This group contains ten (or in some listings eleven) thar s who perform personal services or who engage in crafts or in "ritual"^[23] activities that render them contaminating to high-status people. The thar s at this level do not intermarry or interdine together. Each group tends to marry members of the same thar in

other Valley towns. Each thar within the level tends to consider itself higher than the other thar s in the group. For Brahmans and for many or most individuals in the upper three or four levels, water touched by members at this level (and below) was considered polluting. in the last twenty or so years for less strict individuals in these upper levels, water-unacceptability has begun at level XV, the Jugi.

Many of the families and individuals in these thar s now make their living primarily from farming, small shops and business enterprises, and government jobs, but we will list the traditionally thar -ascribed occupations still practiced by some or many individuals in each group. Gatha are performers of the major ritual dance cycle, the Nine Durgas cycle, during which they incarnate a particular set of deities (see chap. 15). They are also growers of flowers for religious use. Bha perform actions in the course of upper-status death ceremonies to help assure a human form for the spirit of the dead person (chap. 10, app. 6). Kata: women cut umbilical cords and dispose of placentas following birth. Cala(n) lead funeral processions to clear the route and prevent inauspicious cross traffic at crossroads. Kusa: are litter or palanquin bearers. Nau are barbers, who do both cosmetic shaving and haircuts and are essential for major "ritual" purification (chaps. 10 and 11). Kau are ironworkers and blacksmiths. Pu(n) are painters of religious objects and makers of masks used in religious ceremonies. Sa:mi are pressers of mustard seed for the production of a commonly used kind of oil.^[24] Chipa are dyers of cloth. A few remaining families m a thar called "Pasi" are now considered to be at this level. Some members of the Pasi thar traditionally had the duty on the tenth day following a death to wash contaminated clothes worn during the ten-day mourning period by the chief mourner in upper-status thar s (app. 6). This thar probably once had a considerably lower status.^[25]

We call this group (level XIII) "borderline unclean" in that there is now an optional response to them by higher-status people as water-unacceptable and they are not considered by middle-ranked groups to be unclean. Their marginality is reflected in their treatment in previous descriptions and records of Newar status levels.^[26] In contrast to the groups still lower than they are, they participate along with the clean thar s in one of the most significantly Newar rites of passage, the mock-marriage, or Ihi (app. 6).

Starting with the next group, the Nae, we enter the clearly contaminating segments of the status system.

XIV. Nae . There is one thar at this level, the Nae, who use various thar names. These are hereditary butchers who slaughter water buffaloes and sell their meat.^[27]

Below this level there are some five or six (depending on whether the Halahulu are to be considered as a "macrostatus level") of the city's lowest ranks. Only two of these, Jugi and Po(n), now have more than a very few members, but those two are of major significance in the status system in both the services they perform and their use in giving intellectual representation and emotional significance to the low end of the status system (chaps. 10 and 11).

XV. Jugi . Members of this group use three thar names, Darsandhari^[*] , Kapali, and Kusle. There is another thar , Danya, which is ranked with the Jugis by others, but that the Jugis and the Danyas themselves consider an inferior thar , performing pollution-accumulating services for the Jugis in the Jugis' death ceremonies. The Jugis are musicians, hereditary performers on the mwali , a double-reed instrument, and also on certain kinds of drums (Hoerburger 1975, 71-74). They have important functions during the course of death ceremonies (chap. 10, app. 6).

XVI. Do(n) . Members of this thar play a kind of trumpet, used during funeral processions of high-status people.^[28]

XVII. Kulu . The members of this thar were traditionally drummakers, whose use of animal skins for drum heads accounted for their low status.

The next levels are the true "untouchables," whose functions and prescribed way of life follows traditional South Asian patterns. For Bhaktapur the focal and most clearly defined untouchables are the Po(n)s. The other two categories are ambiguous.

XVIII. Po(n) or Pore .^[29] The members of this level are one thar , whose thar name is Matangi^[*] . These are sweepers, cleaners of latrines, fishermen, and makers of certain kinds of baskets. They have important "ritual" functions as accumulators of pollution (in relation to death and more generally) and of "bad luck" (chaps. 10, 11). They must live just

outside the city boundaries, and thus help define those boundaries and the meaning of city space (chap. 7).

XIX. Cyamakhala :. The Po(n)'s function as transporters of fecal material may have been one of the occupations ascribed in earlier periods to a still lower thar , the Cyamakhala:. Nineteenth-century accounts give the traditional occupations of the Po(n)s such as fishermen, executioners, dog killers, and basket-makers (Oldfield [1880] 1974; Hamilton [1819] 1971; Earle 1901 [cited in Chattopadhyay 1923]; Hodgson n.d.), but specify that they will not remove "night soil" which is said to be the function of the still lower Cyamakhala: (Chattopadhyay 1923, 546, 558). One account (Hamilton) described the Cyamakhala: as "dressers of leather" and "shoemakers," which is what the Sanskrit origin of the name (Manandhar 1975, 123) means. There is one household in Bhaktapur that is still designated as Cyamakhala:. Some of its members have subordinate "ritual" relations to the Po(n)s, accepting polluting offerings during death rituals.

XXI. Halahulu . This is a miscellaneous category of true outcastes—drifters and beggars, Newars, and others, who have been excluded from the status system for one reason or another, but are sometimes listed as a lowest social category. There were none in Bhaktapur at the time of this study, but they were said to exist in Kathmandu.^[30] They are inferior to the Po(n)s (as well as the Cyamakhalas:) and, it is said, sometimes perform polluting ritual functions for them.

The Macrostatus System: Buddhist Thars and Some Notes on Newar Buddhism

Buddhism may well have existed in the Kathmandu Valley from the time of the Buddha's own teachings. During the Licchavi period there is evidence for both Theravada and Mahayana versions. By the seventh century A.D. Vajrayana forms are attested (Slusser 1982, vol. 1, p. 39) that reached their "full flowering" 200 or 300 years later (ibid., 48) to become the dominant form of valley Buddhism. All three forms had been monastic, centering around monks and monasteries, vihara s. Starting at the end of the twelfth century, monastic life began the transformation that characterizes contemporary Newar Buddhism; the

monks began to marry (various reasons for the transition have been offered) and, following the Brahmanic pattern, established hereditary lineages of priests.^[31] As many observers have noted, the priestly Buddhism that developed among the Newars is much closer to Newar Hinduism in its social, philosophical, and ritual forms than it is to classical Indian Buddhism. As Oldfield wrote in his nineteenth-century report on Nepal, "Buddhism ought to be considered as it is in Nepal as a branch of Hinduism and not as a distinct faith" ([1802] 1974, vol. II, p. 286).^[32]

The descendants of the married monks are called "Bare" in Bhaktapur (in Kathmandu Newari, "Bare"), and are divided into two segments, a higher group who continued to act as temple and family priests, the Gubaju or Vajracarya, and a lower segment that does not take the special initiation required to become a priest, the Sakyas. While only the Vajracarya work as priests, both groups now work as gold and silversmiths, which previously, reportedly, was the thar profession only of the Sakyas (Locke 1976, 12). The two sections intermarry.

Traditionally associated with the Bare, whose priests they were, were various thar s of traders and craftsmen, collectively known elsewhere in the Kathmandu Valley as "Urae," a term not used for a social category in Bhaktapur.^[33] It is difficult to know exactly which of the present thar s in Bhaktapur might have been designated as Urae. Different authors (e.g., Lévi 1905; Rosser 1966, 86, Chattopadhyay 1923, 521) have given different lists of associated thar s.^[34] Their residue is found in some groups of merchants and craftsmen situated at the Jyapu level, who use Vajracarya either exclusively, or in conjunction with Brahmans as family priests.

Fürer-Haimendorf, in an influential article on Newar social structure (1956), suggested that those "castes" whose members employed Brahmans as hereditary family priests for domestic rituals be considered Hindus, while those who employed Newar Buddhist priests be considered Buddhist. But, as Colin Rosser subsequently pointed out "on grounds of religious belief and practice . . . it is incredibly difficult if not impossible to identify the vast bulk of the Newar population as being either Hindu or Buddhist" (1966, 78). Once we go beyond the Bare themselves and the one Urae thar —the Tuladhar—which persists in Bhaktapur as an exclusive patron of the Bare, the basis for any distinction becomes problematic. The Vajracarya priests also perform priestly services in different ways for various thar s, who are not, therefore, necessarily to be considered "Buddhists." There are some thar s who use

both Vajracaryas and Brahmans as priests, usually with the Vajracarya officiating at rites of passage and the Brahman at household puja s (worship) (app. 4). There are some thar s of marginally clean status—Sa:mi, Chipa, and some sections of Pu(n)—who exclusively use Vajracaryas. For such marginally unclean thar s the Buddhist priests compete with other non-Brahman priests in an "opportunistic" offering of priestly services to groups that the Brahmans will not serve (chap. 10).

The 1971 census asked people in Bhaktapur to identify themselves and their family members as "Buddhist" or "Hindu." As we have noted, about 3,000 of Bhaktapur's total population were so identified as Buddhist. As the average household size in Bhaktapur is six members, this would represent approximately 500 households. There are about 260 households of Bare (see table 1 [below, next section]). This would suggest that there are approximately 240 additional households among Bhaktapur's total of 6,484 households in 1971 that both use Vajracarya for some or all of their rituals and that identified themselves as Buddhists on the census. Which particular households these are within those various thar s which do use Vajracaryas in one way or another would require further studies.

The Newar "Buddhists," whatever the nature of their Buddhism might be, as Sylvain Lévi put it "extend Hindu society beyond the 'Brahmanic church'" (1905, vol. I, p. 244f.). For Bhaktapur they are, with the exception of the Bare (and perhaps the Tuladhars), an integral part of Bhaktapur's Hindu core system.

Non-Newars: Brahmans

There are two groups of Brahmans who have been in the Kathmandu Valley since Malla times, and who will be discussed in chapter 10. These are the Bhatta^[*] Brahmans and the Misra or Jha Brahmans. They say they are not Newars, and they are not considered Newars by others. They serve in Bhaktapur as temple priests and as family priests within their own groups. The Bhattas^[*] serve some families in one upper-status Newar thar as receivers of gifts in illness, and thus as surrogates for Newar Brahmans in a pollution-transferring service (chap. 10).

Non-Newars: Matha^[*] Priests

There are three groups whose principal hereditary function in Bhaktapur is as priests of the imposing matha^[*] s, centers for the reception of

Shaivite ascetics, usually wandering Indian renouncers, which were built by the Malla kings as acts of piety. They are still pilgrimage centers and hostels for renouncers and Shaivite pilgrims, still mostly from India. They have no connection with the internal symbolic ritual organization of Bhaktapur.

There are thirteen matha^[*] s in Bhaktapur (Korn 1976). Their priests belong to three groups of families, settled in Bhaktapur since the Malla period, which are derived from medieval Indian sects traditionally associated with such matha^[*] s. These are the Ja(n)gam of the Lingayat sect, and the Giri and Puri of the Gosain sect.

Non-Newars: Others

There is, in addition to these long-established groups, a miscellaneous residual of non-Newar Nepalis living and working in Bhaktapur:

1. Some families of officials and functionaries of the national government temporarily assigned to Bhaktapur.

2. A few Muslim households. These families have lived in Bhaktapur for generations and have a small mosque and burying ground within the city. They are shopkeepers specializing in bracelets, ornamental cords used for decorating women's hair, and plastic shoes. They also are knife sharpeners.^[35]

3. Gaine. A few members of a non-Mongoloid "tribal" group who are traditionally performing musicians.^[36] They perform for tourists in Bhaktapur.

4. Sarki. A low-status Indo-Nepalese "caste" of shoemakers. (There is no traditional Newar shoemaker thar .)

5. Dhobi, washers of clothes. For most (but not all) present informants they are non-Newars. They were included among Newar "castes" by the Muluki Ain of 1854 (Höfer 1979, 45) and by Lévi (1905, 235). They are not included among Newar "castes" by Rosser (1966, 86).

6. Tamang. These are members of a Tibeto-Burman-speaking hill tribe from the hills surrounding Bhaktapur. The few Tamang living in Bhaktapur are mostly painters of Tibetan-type Thang-ka s for the curio trade for tourists.

Thar, Macrostatus, and the Organization of Occupational and Ritual Roles

The organization of thar s into macrolevels sorts out their members into the hierarchical system, and in so doing organizes by level (and by larger groupings of macrolevels) much of their members' economic activity and standard of living. The levels they belong to determine whether they can be served by Brahmans, or by other priests, or—if they are sufficiently low—only by ad hoc priests in their own thar s. It is the levels that entail the organizing implications of the Hindu hierarchical system—purity; patterns of association, commensality, and marriage; and relative public esteem—to which we will return later in this chapter and in chapter 11. The relationship between status level and occupation is obscured by those status levels that include only one thar . When there is more than one thar in a status level, it is evident that levels join together occupational type s, not specific occupations. They sort such categories as court officials, shopkeepers, farmers, craftsmen, and providers of essential symbolic-ritual services that are demeaning to those who do them. Individual thar s may specify narrowly defined professions within these larger groupings. In those cases where there is only one thar at a particular level, this is simply a special case where occupation and status level coalesce so that the classical definition of a "caste" is approximated, but it is a special case of considerable interest. In some cases such as Tini and Tama: this exclusive convergence seems to be an historical residue of some problem in categorization. However, most of the examples of such "castes" are thar s that are essential not only for their specific vocation but also for the very definition, constitution, and maintenance of the symbolic component of the hierarchical system; Brahman, Nae, Jugi, and Po(n) are evident examples. It is also of interest that the isolation of thar s into discrete status levels as "castes" is represented at the top of the system with the Brahmans only (the king is traditionally included with various Ksatriya^[*]thar s) but pervasively throughout the "unclean" thar s from level XIV down, each of whom is ranked at its own discrete level. This is one of many suggestions that Brahmans and the unclean thar s are joined closely in the same enterprise.

In contrast to the effects of all thar s on occupation because of their placement in a particular status level, and the resulting assignment of its

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Figure 3.
A member of the Kumha: (potter) thar making pots on his wheel.

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Figure 4.
Awa:s (masons) and Ka:mis (carpenters) building a house.

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Figure 5.
Young wives chatting while collecting water at a communal tap.

members to some general class of activities (e.g., farming or shopkeeping), there are about forty-five thar s whose membership at present specifies for its members either a particular and exclusive hereditary trade and/or some hereditary "ritual" function, that is, a function in the marked symbolic realm of the city. There are various combinations of occupational and ritual functions. Some thar s have ritual functions that reflect their occupational functions (e.g., potters and carpenters). There are some groups whose hereditary occupational functions have disappeared but who may still have ritual responsibilities deriving from and faintly echoing those functions. There are groups with occupational specialties (e.g., Ayurvedic physicians) and no ritual functions. There are groups whose occupation is a ritual occupation, that is, entirely within the realm of marked symbolism (e.g., priests). Among these various groups there are some thar s whose ritual or occupational function accounts for most of the livelihood of most of the adult male members of the group (e.g., Brahmans, sweepers). In contrast, there are other thar s for whom the ascribed occupational or ritual function, while it is limited to the thar and tends to explain or justify its status in the overall system, may actually be performed by only a few of its members, selected in some way by the thar , and sometimes involving only a small segment of the selected member's time and economic activity. Such variety, which, furthermore, has shifted during the course of Bhaktapur's history, makes the question as to how thar membership determines differentiated ritual and occupational behaviors of its members very complex.

For the purposes of the city's organization, we may emphasize again that it is the output of the thar that is essential, not its internal affairs and organization—as long as those internal features guarantee that output. The important thing for the city as a whole is that sufficient numbers of the members perform their essential functions within the traditional system, and that their other economic functions and social behaviors do not appear dissonant with the status of the thar . The city is, in fact, differentially exigent and severe in its pressures on different thar s to maintain their traditional functions. This is for both material and "symbolic" motives. The city can now do without local drum makers if necessary, but for many reasons it cannot do without the economic and/or symbolic functions of, say, Brahmans, potters, and sweepers. The symbolic practitioners, in fact, must be locally in place. One can import pots from another town, but such actors as Brahmans and sweepers are essential constituting components of

the city system, and must be in place for the traditional system of city action to work at all.

In order to sketch the relation of thar s to differentiated urban roles, we will use an ad hoc sorting that, however, reflects some important contrasts in the implications of thar -assigned roles. In listing these specialized thar s we will briefly gloss their special functions that have been given already above, many of which will be discussed elsewhere in the book. The roman numerals following the thar names indicate the status level. Recall that occasionally the same thar name may occur at more than one status level.

1. Priests, auxiliary priests and "para-priests" (see chap. 10). Rajopadhyaya Brahmans (level I), Lakhe Brahmans (level I, lower section) (priests), Josi (level II) (astrologers), Acaju (level III) (auxiliary priests, with Tantric specialties), Josi (level III) (astrologers), Tini (level IV) (priests), and Acaju (level IV) (auxiliary priests, with Tantric specialties).

2. Thar s who are allied to group 1, the priests, in that their traditional roles, services, products, and behaviors are expressive of and constituent of a special component of the city's symbolic order, which is associated with purity and impurity, "ordinary" deities, and "priestly morality." We will delineate this component in later chapters, and contrast it with other aspects of symbolic order and of power. In contrast to the priests, the functions of these thar s are overtly stigmatizing or at least associated with a depressed status:^[37] Cyo (level XI) (purifying services during the cremation phase of the death ritual cycle of upper-level thar s), Gatha (level XIII) (flower growers, deity-possessed performers as the "Nine Durgas"), Kata (level XIII) (cut umbilical cords and remove and dispose of placentas), Nau (level XIII) (barbers, purifyers), Pu(n) (level XIII) (painters of religious images and mask makers), Bha (level XIII) (death ritual services for upper-status thar s); Cala(n) (level XIII) (services in funeral processions of upper-status people), Khusa (level XIII) (esoteric services for one of the Tantric deities during the Mohani festival cycle), Sa:mi (level XIII) (oil pressers, special functions in the Biska: festival cycle), Nae (level XIV) (butchers, kill animals in some sacrifices in major temples), Jugi (level XVI) (tailors; performers on drums, trumpets, and shawms; important roles in the cycle of death ceremonies and other pollution-accumulating tasks), and Po(n)

(level XVIII) (sweepers, fishermen, basket makers; various important pollution representing and pollution accumulating functions).

3. Stigmatizing, occupational specialties with no marked symbolic functions. These are craftsmen whose craft has a traditional status-depressing implication, but who, in contrast to the other thar s listed in group 2, do not have (in the present at least) corresponding additional symbolic functions: Kau (level XIII) (blacksmiths, workers in iron), Chipa (level XIII) (dyers of cloth), and Do(n) (level XVI) (players of trumpets).

4. Nonstigmatizing occupational specialties: Baidhya (level II) (Ayurvedic physicians), Baidhya (level III) (Ayurvedic physicians), Tama: (level VI) (caster of metal pots, plates, and icons), Kumha: (level VII) (potters), Awa: (level VII) (house builders), Kami (level VIII) (wood carvers, carpenters), and Loha(n) kami (level VIII) (stone carvers). (In this group some families of Tama: and Kumha: have some ritual functions in some rites of passage.)

5. Thar s including members who have ritual or ceremonial functions in Bhaktapur's focal festivals (chaps. 12 to 16) and/or in association with the Taleju temple. This represents the "symbolic reconstruction" of the old society centering on the Malla court and the temple of its tutelary deity Taleju: from level II (above), Malla, Pradhana(n)ga, Hada, Bhau, Tacabhari, Muna(n)karmi, Bhari, and Go(n)ga; from level III, Madikami and Bhari; from level V, Suwal; from level VIII, Kalu, Caguthi, Muguthi, Haleyojosi, and Jatadhari; and from level XII, Dwi(n). (Among thar s included in other lists, those with additional special Taleju ritual and/or ceremonial functions include Josi [II], Acaju [III], Tama:, Kumha:, Gatha, Khusa, Pu(n), Jugi, Nae, and Po[n].)

6. We can add to this list those groups outside the Newar Hindu core group who have essential occupational or ritual functions. We noted previously some of the occupational specialities of these groups (shoemakers, knife sharpeners, washermen, etc.). Only two groups outside of the core group have ritual-symbolic functions for the core system. The Bhatta^[*] Brahmans have a very limited (but theoretically interesting) function for one upper-status thar (chap. 10). The Bare Buddhist thar provides the children who become the "living goddess" Kumari and her attendant gods and goddesses during the major ceremonial cycle, Mohani (chap. 1.5).

There are, thus, some forty-five thar s in the core system, about 13

percent of the city's approximately 340 thar s, whose membership in itself (rather than through its status level) entails ritual and/or occupational specialties. For the city as a whole, seventeen of these thar s, particularly the upper-status ones, whose ritual activities are confined to the Taleju temple, are of minor differentiated importance. So it is, finally, some twenty-eight thar s, about 8 percent of the whole, whose members have major specializations—against the more diffuse background of farmers and merchants and craftsmen and specialists in being impure, which is organized by the larger macrostatus system. In addition to the total number of specialized thar s we need to consider their relative size and the number of households and individuals that they contain. Their combined size is, as we shall see, a larger percentage of the city's population than their numbers alone would indicate.

Thar And Macrostatus Demography

In an attempt to get some rough idea of the numbers of families and individuals in the various thar s and status units, we asked various informants for estimations of numbers of households in various thar s. Subsequently Gutschow and Kölver (1975), using an early version of our macrostatus and thar lists, gathered survey data on the numbers of households in many of the units.^[38] The total number of households located by Gutschow and Kölver was 5,216. Assuming that the 1971 census report of 6,484 households is accurate, this sample is incomplete, but not biased in any evident way. Certain thar s are clumped in their report—for instance, some groups of Chathariya and the large groups of Jyapus. Their materials (with four additions from our informants' estimations), however, give a basis for estimating rather closely the number of households incorporated in various segments of the system. The previous section listed the number of thar s that had various kinds of differential significance. As some thar s contain only two or three households while others may contain hundreds, however, a composite listing of thar s and the number of thar s at each level gives us limited demographic information. The number of discrete specialized thar s is of a different kind of significance for the structure and organization of the city than the quantitative extent of their various memberships.^[39]

Table 1, modified from Gutschow and Kölver (1975), gives what is probably a close approximation of thar and status level demography.

Table 1 shows that out of a total of 6,450^[40] households all but some

eighty are "Newar." Of the Newars, approximately 6,110 households are in the Hindu core system, while 260 households are Buddhist Bare households, which are not directly involved in the core system. For the broader hierarchical and functional divisions of the core system, 32 households are Brahman; 924 households are at the "sahu" levels; 4,389 households are in the several Jyapu farming groups; and 765 households are engaged in services, crafts, and professions that are considered in some way to be polluting. Of these polluting households 435 have a borderline status, and 330 are unequivocally polluting.

By adding other available information on the number of households in particular thar s within the status levels amalgamated in Table 1, we can suggest the number of households within those thar s that have differentiated functions. Arranged in the grouping we used in the previous section, the number of households are as follows:

1. Priests, auxiliary priests, and para-priests. Total of 333 households: Rajopadhyaya Brahmans (32), Josi level II (44), Acaju level Ill (85), Josi level III (120), Tini (2), Acaju level IV (50).

2. Thar s engaging in stigmatized ritual-symbolic activities. Total of 649 households: Gatha (56), Katha (2), Nau (46), Pu(n) (25), Bha (19), Cala(n) (16), Khusa (1), Sa:mi (160), Nae (177), Jugi (57), Po(n) (90).

3. Stigmatizing, nonritual occupational specialties. Total of 113 households: Kau (27), Chipa (82), Do(n) (4).

4. Nonstigmatizing occupational specialities. Total of 844 households: Baidya level II (3), Baidya level III (8), Tama: (18), Kumha: (508), Awa: (99), Kami (194), Loha(n)kami (14).

5. Thar s, some of whose members have ritual or ceremonial functions in Bhaktapur's focal festivals and/or in association with the Taleju temple. The total number of households in the seventeen thar s with such functions is about 650.

The number of households in the forty-five specialized thar s, is on the average far more than those in the nonspecialized thar s. When we listed all the thar s in the city with a specialized function, they represented about 13 percent of all the city's thar s, among which twenty-eight, or 8 percent of all the city's thar s, had major differentiating importance. In terms of the number of households, however, there are some 2,589, or 40 percent of the city's households that are in thar s having some differentiated importance to the city, and about 29.5 percent of the households in thar s having major specializations.^[41]

The numbers of households in a thar that follow its traditional speciality,^[42] and the number of individuals in a household who do, vary greatly from thar to thar . Sometimes women are involved in the thar specialization (e.g., farmers, barbers, as purifiers); sometimes they are concerned with subsidiary aspects of the speciality (Brahman's wives for some rituals), or perhaps exclusively with the general running of the household and with other nonspecialized or subsidiary economic activities. Moreover, we do not know from such enumerations how those who do not participate in a thar's traditional activities, activities that define the thar , are affected by their membership.

These internal questions are not our present concern, however. It is the Kumha: as potter, not as farmer or bank clerk, who concerns us here, that is his defining and constituting role in the hierarchical urban system that becomes interwoven with deities, symbolic space, and symbolic performances in the mesocosmic segment of the city's order. For such purposes these demographic notes give a rough idea of the available numbers of role players in that mesocosmic system, numbers distorted by social change and by the loss of some of the controls that may once have more closely regulated the supply of labor in such immobile societies.

Entailments and Markers of the Macrostatus Levels

Membership in a thar in itself may determine many features of an individual's life—occupation, aspects of marriage, residence, details of religious practices, and the various effects of the thar 's special culture and internal organization. Much of this may derive from the special history and distant origins of the thar itself and much from the effects of the thar 's incorporation, its way of being fitted into the macrostatus system. The thars are, in a way, the given raw materials thrown up by history on which the city-wide hierarchical system, the system of macrostatus levels, opportunistically builds. The macrostatus system is a means of ordering and making sense of its multitude of component units by ordering them into much simpler systematized groupings. That system is a typical Hindu "caste system," sharing the ideologies, the central metaphors of purity and impurity, the entailments of rank, and the rules for interactions among ranks that are found throughout South Asia. Such systems have been described frequently and at length, and we will simply sketch some of the entailments of Bhaktapur's twenty macro-

status levels here to indicate what Bhaktapur has maintained and emphasized in its Hindu orthodoxy.

Our sketch is concerned with the central rules of status ordering and their insisted-upon, publicly controlled, and sanctioned expressions. Deviations are internally controlled by family and thar councils, motivated by fear of loss of public respect and of economic and physical sanctions, and externally by people at superior levels who, if necessary, apply such sanctions. The rules concern—characteristically of Hindu status systems—mostly physical contact in relation to eating, drinking, and touching, and regulation of proper marriage. They also include for the lowest thar s rules regarding place of residence, and, until recently, clothing, decoration, and house type. In addition to these centrally important and carefully regulated behaviors there are many other important signs of status level—such as proper language and other behaviors indicating deference, respect, and adherence—and a host of more or less secondary or covert implications of status level, such as economic and educational opportunities, nutrition, differential vulnerability to disease, and many aspects of standards of living.

The centrally controlled behaviors are questions of traditional proper behavior, aspects of the dharma . The implications are often otherwise explained—as misfortune or the results of bad karma . The central system of regulations is highly conscious, involves clear rules and regulations, is based on pervasive and deeply felt ways of viewing the world, and is continuously symbolized and reinforced in ritual and symbolic forms. To anticipate later discussions, we may note here that the separation and ranking of the macrostatus system is considered a positive, dynamic, and activity-requiring process, the result of constant effort. People talk of "sending people to, and keeping them at" their particular level. Separation and ranking is in tension with other ideologies and experiences of blending and equality, and is not based on any theory of fixed, essential, "biological" differences justifying the hierarchy. It must be actively and constantly maintained.

The violation of central regulations is sanctioned, ultimately by the threat of expulsion of an individual, a family, or an entire thar from its status level. These regulations are central in that they constitute the hierarchical system, as the rules for the moves of chess pieces constitute the game of chess. The primary formula, which in itself implies all the separations and hierarchical rankings that make up the hierarchy is, as everywhere in South Asia, that boiled rice and certain boiled legumes (or "pulses") can be eaten only if prepared by a member of one's own

level or of a higher level. This rule is associated with ideas of impurity, which we will consider in chapter 11, and blends with other ideas about the status-derived purity of the provider of food, who must also be pure in other regards, not contaminated, for example, by contact with death or menstruation. From the point of view of any individual in the system there are two groups. There is an upper group including one's own level, from which one will accept boiled rice.^[43] Below any individual and distinct from and in opposition to the upper segment in which he or she and his or her peers are included are those groups who will accept boiled rice from the members of that segment, but from whom they will not accept boiled rice. Boiled rice is the basic domestic staple grain of the Newars, and the regulation involves an unavoidable, salient issue. In relation to the acceptance of food, of "being fed," the group to which an individual belongs, except for Brahmans, is always at the bottom of an upper segment.

The process of being excluded by those above and excluding those below effectively slices the hierarchy into its levels.^[44] The asymmetry has other implications, however. In the acceptance of rice, one is open to all above and to those at one's own level, and closed to all below. Thus, in terms of the acceptance of rice (which in the ideology of purity [chap. 11], implies the sharing of bodily substance), every individual is in the same "body" as all above (but always significantly at the lowest, most dependent position) and in opposition to all those below in rank. The refusal to take rice from those lower in status is one's own active (and conflicted) responsibility, supported by powerful ideas and feelings, many of which are related to dirt and disgust. But it is, in contrast, by the stigmatizing decision and action of others at superior levels, that our rice is rejected. Any given level gets carved out between its own strongly motivated restrictions toward those below it, on the bottom side, and something quite different, the rejecting behavior of other higher levels toward it on the top side. The solidarity of belonging to "one body" signaled to any individual by the downward flow of boiled rice is countered by an opposition, a radical breach in solidarity signaled by rejection of its upward flow. Looking down the system, one sees people who belong to, derive from, and depend on one, but whom one places on the other side of a barrier of disgust and pollution. Such complex asymmetries encourage in those given to reflection the kinds of intellectual complexity, the "sophistication," which, we have suggested in chapter 2, is an important distinguishing feature of Bhaktapur's people and the uses they make of its marked symbols.

While the differential acceptances and rejection of boiled rice carves out each successive step in the macrostatus system (as do the marriage regulations to which we will return), there are various other designations of differential purity that are arranged hierarchically and refer to particular status levels or groups of status levels, but which are not a regularly increasing and differentiating quality of each successive level. These mark hierarchy in a grosser way, and we may for convenience call them "classes of purity."

While (again typical of Hindu communities) a given group will not accept boiled rice from people in the levels below it, it will accept most other foods until a certain level is reached; at that level its members are considered so impure that no food, not even water, may be accepted from them. This group of people are called "Na^[*] calae ma ju phu(n), " people from whom water may not be "moved," or "Tiye nae ma tya phu(n), " people who should not be touched while you or they are eating. In the first phrasing, it is understood that as water is not acceptable, then no other food and drink is acceptable.^[45]

The first division, "water-unacceptability," produces a first large distinction among the levels in classes of purity. In the class of levels below the "water line" a second division is made to create a distinct lowest category, the "Tiye ma tya phu(n), " people who must not be touched—whether one is eating or not.^[46]

In previous sections we noted which levels are considered in each of these categories. There is some variation in the placement of the level of water-unacceptability, depending on the status of the higher, "purer" person. This is reflected in our "borderline" level, level XIII. Middle and lower levels differ in their conceptions of water-unacceptability even in relation to thar s below level XIII, but every thar agrees on the position of at least two thar s—the Jugi as water-unacceptable and the Po(n) as untouchable, and these two thar s are the present-day inheritors and foci of these positions.

The Brahmans and the upper-status Chathar families who model themselves on them add another distinction. They further divide the group from which they will accept food and drink. Within this group there is an upper strata, those groups from which they will accept all foods except boiled rice and pulses, the groups—as they are sometimes categorized—from which they will accept "salt." These are the Pa(n)cthar and above. Below this group is a second strata, people from whom they will accept all foods that are neither boiled (and therefore, of course, not boiled rice or pulses) nor salted. This group, named by con-

trast with the segment below it, is often called the "people from whom one accepts water." These are for the most part the farmers and "clean" craftsmen.

There were in the past many associated markers of sequential status relationships and classes of purity. One of the most enduring of these has been respect levels in language. In ordinary usage, there are three respect levels indicated in pronouns and in a very few nonpronominal lexical items (most saliently verbs for coming and going and for eating and drinking). People use a formal language in addressing or referring to others who are of higher status than themselves or in addressing or talking about equals in formal situations and a familiar language for people of lower status or for equals with whom they have intimate relations. The third level is a high-respect language used for addressing royalty, Brahmans (and, usually, Buddhist priests), and deities. There are also customs for proper greeting, for respect gestures, terms of respectful address, and more subtle behaviors of deference and authority, which respond to and mark relative hierarchy.

In the past a variety of associated regulations brought some, at least, other aspects of life into accord with purity rankings. Much of this was directed to the lowest most impure classes and facilitated their identification and separation. Thus, according to some of the chronicles, in Malla times members of the butcher thar had to wear sleeveless jackets; sweepers, butchers, and drum makers were not allowed to wear caps, shoes, or gold ornaments; and the sweepers had to live out of the city, and were not allowed to have the roofs of their houses tiled (D. R. Regmi, 1965, part I, p. 647). Many of these restrictions lasted through the Rana period and are remembered by older people but are not enforced now. But some such regulations, although not supported (and, in fact, illegal) under modern Nepalese law, persist. Thus Po(n) untouchables must, in fact, still live beyond the city's boundaries and in simple houses. Another very salient spatial marking of the major polluting thar s also has persisted. This is how far into the space of a house a person of a given polluting class can penetrate. Untouchables can enter only the cheli , the ground floor, which is conceptually considered outside of the house (chap. 7). Higher levels of unclean thar s can go further into the house, at least as far as the first floor above the ground level, the degree depending on the claims to purity of the individual household or its thar .

Foods eaten at different levels are frequently used to indicate status differences. Among the most salient are the foods that the Brahmans

refrain from eating—certain vegetables and the meat of certain animals (water buffalo and [previously] fowl),^[47] which are for others common Newar foods. At the other end of the scale is pork, which is eaten only by the lower segments of the unclean thar s, Po(n), Nae, Jugi, and the unclean Indo-Nepalese groups. It may be noted that pigs, like dogs, which are not eaten, are scavenging animals in Bhaktapur, eating, among other things, refuse of all kinds, including remnants of food in human feces. The low Newar groups further distinguish themselves from the Indo-Nepalese shoemaker and leatherworker group (Sarki), whom they claim eat the carcasses of animals that have died of natural causes, which the low Newar groups consider to be much more polluting than eating butchered pigs.

The separation and hierarchy organized by the macrostatus system entail rules about marriage, which make up part of the regulations for proper marriage (see chap. 6). Macrostatus regulations for a proper marriage depend on whether the marriage is a "primary" marriage—one contracted for perpetuation of the lineage.^[48] Primary marriages should be within the same status level.^[49] In those secondary unions in which the wife may be of a lower level, she cannot legitimately prepare boiled rice for her hushand, and their children will belong to neither the husband's thar nor to his level. They will either take the wife's thar name and level, or in rare cases be given a new thar name and placed at some intermediate level within the system. In these cases the man still is a member in good standing of his thar and can involve himself in its ritual, associational, and economic life—but his descendants no longer belong to it. If he were to marry or form a liaison with someone of an impure thar , however, he would be ostracized from his own thar and level.^[50] All primary marriages and the majority of secondary marriages are endogamous within any given status level. The controls here, somewhat like the controls on boiled rice-taking, are asymmetrical. People at any given level are concerned only that their women should not be given as wives to men at lower levels. Their active control is directed to the lower boundary. They have no ritual or social objection to taking wives from levels above them (and when such marriages do occur, they are vaunted), but those upper levels will not, if they can possibly prevent doing so, provide wives for them. It is through each level's concern with maintenance of its lower boundaries that a segmented system of status-level endogamy is created.

We should note that the actual regulations for accepting wives do not

correspond exactly to the regulation for accepting boiled rice, and does not "map" the macrostatus levels as exactly. In Bhaktapur there are subgroups within some macrostatus levels who consider themselves as a higher subsection, and will accept wives only from the same subsection, even though they will accept boiled rice from all thar s at the same general macrostatus level. Other considerations affecting exogamy may also limit marriage to only one section of the general commensal group, or may force people to seek wives outside the city. Thus, while rice acceptance is always directly related to hierarchical relations of macrostatus units in the city, marriage choice is not. Food and contact regulations are constantly at issue and are enforced and reenacted in every act of eating and food preparation; arranging a proper marriage, in contrast, is hardly a daily issue for any given individual.

Status Ranking of and by Outsiders

People in Bhaktapur's core system rank all outsiders—both in and beyond Bhaktapur—into a hierarchical system of relative purity and impurity and, in turn, are ranked by at least some of those outsiders, most importantly by Nepal's dominant Indo-Nepalese. While the ranking of the internal components of the Bhaktapur core system is repeatedly represented and reinforced in symbols and concepts and in action and is very generally agreed upon, these external rankings are a different matter. The objects of Newar or Newar Hindu ranking may well be ranking the Newars in their turn by a different calculus, and do not accept (or sometimes care or know about) Newar decisions about their position. Some of the northern Mongoloid groups do not even accept the underlying assumptions which support the general notion of Hindu hierarchy.

We will list these external rankings in a summary fashion:

1. Groups within Bhaktapur: Buddhist Bare.

For Rajopadhyaya Brahmans, the Buddhist Bare (including both sections—priests and precious metal craftsmen) were considered water-unacceptable. The justifications given by Brahmans for their low rank are miscellaneous, but not necessarily more post hoc than other such justifications for status. These include their metalworking, their traditional performances on "contaminating" musical instruments, and their short seven-day period of contamination after death—such short periods being characteristic of low-level groups. Furthermore, the Bare do not, in con-

trast to Hindus, maintain a residual queue of hair in the course of the shaving of their heads at the time of (and in purification rituals subsequent to) boys' ritual initiation into their thar . This last, a reminder of their original status as monks (Buddhist monks' shaving of the entire head being a sign of renunciation of ordinary lineage and social ties), probably reflects one of the historical reasons for their ambiguous rank—recalling the ambiguous social ranking of all Hindu renouncers. For other members of upper-level thar s, Chathariya and Pa[n]cthariya, the Bare were considered on the levels of the Jyapus, and thus "water-acceptable."^[51]

2. Groups within Bhaktapur: non-Newar Brahmans and Matha^[*] priests.

Rajopadhyaya Brahmans traditionally considered the Jha and Bhatta^[*] Brahmans and the Matha^[*] priests to be water-acceptable. The Newar Chathariya, and Pa(n)cthariya treated them as they did the highest segments just below themselves; that is, they accepted all food except boiled rice and pulses from them. Middle-level and lower-level Newar groups accept rice from these priests. Conversely, the Jha and Bhatta^[*] Brahmans accepted rice from neither Rajopadhyaya Brahmans nor the levels below them.

3. Relations to other non-Newar Nepalis, both in and out of Bhaktapur.

Newars in general divide non-Newar Nepalis into two groups. Mongoloid peoples, thought generally to have Tibetan connections, are called "Sae(n)." This term is said to derive from an old Newari term for a Tibetan^[52] or, according to some, for Lhasa.

For the non-Mongoloid hill peoples, who are in large part the groups from western Nepal associated with the Gorkhali invaders, the term "partya ," or "hill-dweller" is used in polite reference.^[53] The ordinary term, considered pejorative, is "khae(n), " derived, apparently, from the tribal designation "khas ."^[54] This general term refers in some contexts to the upper-status divisions of the western Khas group, the Brahmans ("Khae[n] Brahmans") and the upper "Ksatriya^[*] " divisions (the latter also referred to distinctively as "Chetri") but in other contexts also may include the very low status (generally untouchable) occupational Khas groups such as blacksmiths, tailors, shoemakers, and leatherworkers.^[55] Furthermore, other non-Mongoloid hill groups who may be of dubious historical Khas connections, such as the Gaine, are included as Khae(n).

For Newar Brahmans, Partya Brahmans and Chetris are only water-acceptable. The Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya, in general, accept all

foods and drink except boiled rice and pulses from the Partya Brahmans and Chetri. Those Khas groups untouchable to the Partya Brahmans and Chetri themselves are also untouchable for the Newars.

The Sae(n) were generally treated as water-unacceptable by Brahmans. The Chathariya and strict Pa(n)cthariya accepted water (but not boiled and salted foods) from them. Most, but not all, Jyapu accepted all food except boiled rice and pulses from them.

The residual group, neither Khae(n) nor Sae(n), are Muslims, and these are generally treated as untouchable by the highest levels, and water-unacceptable by those below them.

4. Partyas' conceptions of Newars.

As Lynn Bennett (1977, p. 30f.) puts it, for the Khas Brahmans and the Chetris,

The higher twice-born Newari castes . . . exist in a kind of "separate but parallel" status with respect to the high caste Parbatiya. The remaining castes. . .all fall under the rubric of matwat or "liquor-drinking." From the Brahman-Chetri point of view this large middle-ranking group includes most Newar and other Tibeto-Burman speaking peoples. . . . Members of this group . . . are touchable and water as well as . . . uncooked food or food cooked with ghee can be accepted by high caste individuals from them.

Newar untouchables and the clearly water-unacceptable groups (such as Nae and Jugi) are also untouchable or water-unacceptable to the upper-ranking Chetris and to Partya Brahmans. These rankings reflect the rankings and ambiguities of the Muluki Ain , the attempt to legislate a Nepalese national status system. Its attempts to integrate the entire Newar status system into a national system was very awkward for all parties, and "often deficient or ambiguous and at variance with the self-assessment of the Newar castes" (Höfer 1979, 140).

Envoi

The order generated and represented by thar and macrostatus level relates to hierarchy and specialization, separation and interrelation, although it hardly sorts matters in the simple manner of Bouglé's definition of a "caste" that we quoted at the start of this chapter. In one way or another, however, thar and status level in various combinations assign and control most of the differentiated production of goods and services necessary for Bhaktapur's traditional and early modern urban life.

This order ensures that the many specialists such as masons and

metalworkers—and above all, masses of farmers, will be replaced and maintained from generation to generation. It guarantees that "Ksatriyas^[*] " will hold on to the places they have been able to capture, at least for the length of a dynasty. It also provides the priests and untouchables the exemplars and technicians of the system of marked symbolism which presently will concern us. The way that the precise roles and the more diffuse qualities that thar and level attribute and assign to the people who are born into them are—or are not—made use of by the symbolic order, and the ways that the symbolic order expresses and reinforces the status system will concern us in the following chapters.

Chapter Six
Inside the Thars

Introduction: The Internal Structure of the Thar

In chapter 5 we considered the thar s and their arrangement into larger levels and groupings as the building blocks of Bhaktapur's urban society. We remarked that as long as they continued to produce the goods, services, and relational behaviors that were essential to urban organization, the internal organization of the thar , like that of many corporate units in Bhaktapur, was carefully and properly hidden from the scrutiny of outside observers. We have said that the internal forms were of no concern to the city. That must be qualified, for the internal forms generate many of the shared and contrasting experiences and meanings that the public urban system must express or work with or counter. These internal arrangements provide a background of private meanings and private problems which the integrative forms of the city must take account of.

We will sketch something of the internal structure of the thar s here. This is not our main concern in this study, and we must be superficial and general, collapsing differences among the thars insofar as they may exist and concerning which we have only limited information. Much is similar throughout the hundreds of units of the macrosystem; other aspects vary according to the local histories and traditions of the thar s, or in accordance with larger social and economic forces that variously affect them. Within the thar s we will consider aspects of the house-

hold, kinship structure, extended-family organization, and aspects of marriage. As we are here for the space of a chapter approaching the intimate lives of individuals we will, in contrast to our general procedure in this volume, make some limited use of transcribed accounts of interviews.

In passing from aspects of the macrosystem and its component units to the internal institutions of the thar s, we are crossing a threshold. On one side are the processes that belong directly to the organization of the city in itself; on the other are the sustaining smaller processes more systematically related to the person and the household, the extended family, and the neighborhood. The content and forms of organization of these two worlds are different.

Household and Household Size

For most economic, organizational, moral, and ritual purposes, the smallest social unit of the that is the household. It is an important economic unit, coordinated usually by the male head of the household, who decides, within the limits imposed by the macrostructure, what activities will be undertaken, and who collects and distributes the family income. The household is the setting for intimacy, for the education of the young, for preliminary (and usually effective) attempts at controlling deviant behavior, and for much family religion. Like the that itself, the family has a clearly bounded corporate and spatial (chap. 7) inside and outside, and tries to protect the inside through privacy and secrecy. There is no specific name for the household in Newari, but its members sometimes refer to each other with the Nepali (and Hindi) term jahan , in this sense "household family," which is distinguished from other, larger family units. Sometimes the group is referred to by terms that refer to the sharing of boiled food, particularly rice, such as chaga jasi , "one rice pot." If a household separates into separate units, it is conventionally phrased as "having stopped sharing a kitchen area," or "having stopped eating boiled rice together." The main metaphor for the household, as is generally true of household units in other parts of the world, is that its members share a common cooking and eating place.

When families separate, usually at a time when there are two or more sons with their own wives and children, they may, if the house is large enough, divide up the space in the house in which they were living, or add to it so that uncles, brothers, cousins, and so on, live in more or less

close contact, but have separate cooking areas or cooking times, separate household heads, and separate household shrines. According to a survey by the Nepal Rastra^[*] Bank (1974a ), a majority of all Bhaktapur households shared larger housing structures with (at least) one other household.^[1]

This same survey showed for Bhaktapur an average figure of six persons per household, the same figure as that given in the National Census of 1973. The survey also has figures on the distribution of size of households for the entire city population: 5.2 percent of the households included only one person; 33.2 percent, two to four persons; 37.2 percent, five to seven persons; 13.4 percent, eight to ten persons; and 10.9 percent, eleven or more persons.^[2] The available surveys do not consider the distribution of household size in relation to the variables of macro-status and thar . Tables on average monthly expenditure in relation to household size, however, show that the larger households are not only correlated, as one would expect, with larger total monthly expenditures but also in a direct and regular correlation with increasingly higher per capita monthly expenditures. For example, households averaging 4.2 members spend fifty-three rupees (Rs. 53) per member per month, households with 7.7 members spend Rs. 67 per member per month, while the largest households averaging 17.5 members spend Rs. 84 per member per month. These larger households are the wealthier households, the houses at the upper levels of the status system. These are also the people with the largest houses, which are more likely to contain two or more closely related households. People living in the upper, say, 25 percent of the Bhaktapur macrostatus and economic system, from well-to-do farmers and up, may sometimes live in large family units of twenty or more people in a house, because of the larger households and the multiple households in a house.

The Nepal Rastra^[*] Bank Survey also gives a rough overall idea of the average number of component "families" or "subfamilies" in a household. They define additional family units as those consisting of a married couple (with or without children) other than the identified head of the household and his spouse, or of a widowed man or woman with children. They found that 30 percent of households had a least one such additional unit, almost 30 percent of the multiunit households having two additional units, and 9 percent having three or four. The sample survey suggests that there are about 2,920 such subfamily units, living in the 6,494 households of Bhaktapur, dependent on or subordinate in

some way to the household head. In accordance with the distribution of numbers of people in households, we may also assume that the larger and more prosperous and generally the higher the household is in the macrostatus system, the more likely it is to have a membership made up of such separate nuclei.

Thus from the upper strata of farmers and above, people are more liable to live in larger houses, in larger households, with more complexly nucleated household structures, and in close contact with closely related households. Most middle farming families and the levels below them tend to separate quickly into smaller and physically separated units as brothers marry. It would seem this has various consequences for other aspects of social organization, and for the differential developmental and family experience of people of both high and low status.

Household Roles

Roles of the family members within households ideally—and under the constraints of the ideal, as far as we can tell, to a considerable degree in fact—exemplify very general South Asian Hindu patterns.^[3] In the Newars' own perspective there is, however, one major difference: the status of Newar wives compared to that of wives in the non-Newar Indo-Nepalese Hindu society, the Brahmans and Chetris, the Newar's most salient comparative model of Hindu family and social structure.

A summary report on family ideals resembles, not surprisingly, the domestic pole of fairy tales, the state that other forces threaten to derange, or that, if already deranged, is the yearned-for absent safe harbor. We can summarize briefly the norms that are shared with other Hindus. The father, most particularly when he is head of the household, is to be offered maximum respect and deference. As household head (a position that he will keep until he reaches old age and is moved off in a series of rites of passage [app. 6] into a semidivine role where he prepares for death and heaven or a good rebirth), he settles internal family problems and ultimately makes decisions for the household that affect the relations between the household and the outside world, particularly economic relations. There is a certain restraint between him and his children (in an emphasized contrast with the mother's brother) because, it is said, he has the difficult responsibility for making sure that his children behave properly in relation to the larger society, and any sentimental affection might weaken his authority and resolve.

Often the father is even cooler toward his daughters than toward his

sons, and often withdraws still further from his daughters after they marry and leave the house. His sons, or some of them—the elder or eldest, at least—tend to stay with the household to help "support the lineage" through their work and their progeny. The respect due to the father is also due from younger sons and daughters to older sons, particularly the first-born, and very often that oldest son acts as the surrogate father, particularly as the father ages and the oldest son may begin to "act in the father's name."

In comparison with an interrelated variety of ways in which the Newar woman is less disadvantaged than the "northern Hindu" and Indo-Nepalese woman (below) a daughter's situation in the household is "high." Michael Allen (1982, 200) has summed this up in an essay on Newar girls' prepuberty rites:

The high status of Newar women, at least as compared with that found in more orthodox Hindu communities elsewhere ,n the Himalayas and north India, is evident not only in the context of marriage and divorce, but in a wide range of other areas of social and religious life. Sons, though perhaps slightly preferred to daughters, especially in the case of the first born child, are not accorded the exaggerated importance found in most Hindu communities. There is no evidence of female infanticide,^[4] either now or ,n the past, and the birth of a daughter is not in any way regretted.

The senior women in the household, particularly the naki (n ) or female leader of the household, has the responsibility of supervising the general housekeeping and, especially in lower-level families, for a great deal of important economic activities—farming, weaving, basket making, and many specialized thar occupations. She is assisted by her daughters, and in particular by the wives of her sons. The naki (n ) of the household has many ritual responsibilities in household worship and in rites of passage for family members. As wife, she is supposed to defer to her husband, treating him with public respect, particularly in upper status families, where she may bow to his feet at the start of the day. As a mother she is ideally, and to a large extent it would seem in actuality, indulgent and affectionate to her children.

The relationship between brothers and sisters is supposed to be intimate and warm.^[5] After the sister marries, her brothers, usually represented by the eldest, will represent her natal household to her new family. The brother becomes her children's maternal uncle, their paju , and his warm relationship with them will complement their own father's relative austerity.

Wives and Households

As the story unfolds, the true drama of the household tale begins with the arrival of a bride. Who is the Witch and who the Princess depends on whether the bride or the groom's parents, particularly his mother, is put at the center of the story.

While elder sons remain in their parental household, and younger sons may remain (and ideally should remain, permanently if possible) at least for a while after marriage as long as circumstances of economy, space, and temperament permit, daughters must marry out into other households. They enter these households as young wives. This sharp transition from daughter in one's "own home" (tha chen [n ]) to wife has both general South Asian features and some special Newar emphases. For it is in relation to a daughter's marriage that traditional Newar culture resisted, as it were, the imposition of Indian forms and conserved some Himalayan patterns. This is most evident in certain of the rites of passage of girls, particularly the Ihi or mock-marriage ceremony and in related modifications of menarche ceremonies (app. 6), in the nature of the close continuing relationship between a wife and her natal home, and in the lack of the hypergamous implications of marriage characteristic of Indo-Nepalese groups, which we will discuss in a later section of this chapter. These differences are significant in the contrast of the Newars to neighboring groups, but from a non-Hindu perspective the married woman's situation is quite characteristically Hindu.

When a young woman becomes a wife, one of the more dramatic discontinuities of situation and role that are so characteristic of Bhaktapur is produced. A Pa(n)cthariya man describes in an interview how his seventeen-year-old bride changed in the early days of their marriage.

Before marriage she was like a bird, natural, but once she got married her behavior changed, because the environment changed. She didn't talk freely any more, she couldn't talk freely and frankly with everyone [in the household] and her face seemed very serious and complicated. And she was shy. Before that she was never shy. But after marriage she became shy with everybody. And her work was difficult. During her girlhood she didn't have to work. Now she has to work. She didn't have any practice before but she has to practice [i.e., learn how to do things] in my house. It was always like an experiment for her, and she was always distressed when she was working. If her cooking [for example] was not good, there would be trouble. She always has doubt in her mind, her life was complicated. And she became nervous.

An unmarried young woman from the Kumha:, potter, thar describes the duties of a young wife in the household:

She gets up early in the morning, sweeps everywhere throughout the house. Then she goes to bring water [from the well or public tap]. After that she bows down to her father-in-law and her mother-in-law, and then she bows m her husband. Then she prepares the meal, whatever it is that is going to be served, and serves the meal to her father-in-law, mother-in-law and husband. Only after that can she eat herself. Then she does whatever work is necessary, like the sewing of clothes, or whatever her mother-in-law gives for her to do. Later in the day she again has to fix the noonday meal and serve it to her father-in-law, husband, and mother-in-law. Then she cuts up the vegetables, cleans them and cooks them. Then she has to get water again for dinner. Then she cleans the kitchen and prepares the rice [the supper meal]. She feeds her mother-in-law, father-in-law and husband and only after that is finished can she eat. Then she cleans the dishes and the cooking pots. After she has finished the kitchen work, she massages her father-in-law, mother-in-law, and husband with oil. Then she goes to sleep.

This is, at least, what a "good" wife does. If she is lazy or ill and doesn't do her work it is hard, the informant says, for the mother-in-law.

As elsewhere in India in such households the young husband and wife are not supposed to show any special interest, let alone affection, for each other. They rarely have a conversation in front of other members of the household. Often, however, in the secrecy of their room the husband may give the bride a small secret present, often some sweets or rich foods that he bought in the bazaar. Some women recall this as their first stirring of love for their husbands, and of the knowledge that he cared about her. This must be hidden from the household. The new wife "belongs to the household"; she is a threat to its closed, self-protective secrecy, and she is potentially divisive. If her husband cares for her more than for the household, she can, through him, stir up trouble between brothers or between parents and the son, and lead to a division of the household. Any obvious affection or concern shown to her in public by her husband would be a sign that he is vulnerable to this threat of a shifting loyalty. And any material present that he gives her privately is a diversion of household income.

The young bride is expected to relate herself primarily to her mother-in-law, whose "support" she is. She acts toward her husband with the same respectful gestures she uses to other senior members of the household. In strict and upper-status houses she will walk behind him, some ten feet or more, on the town streets, when they are going somewhere together. She and her husband call each other by neither their given names nor relational terms of address; circumlocutions must be used. A husband, for example, may be reduced to such devices as calling to his

wife on the floor above, "The person who is upstairs, come down." Jyapus sometimes refer to their wives by the name of the neighborhood they came from. The young wife finds herself treated as a low-status, potentially polluting, and potentially trouble-causing outsider. She is, as we will see, at the bottom of the family's hierarchical food-giving system as the symbolically salient low thar s—Jugi and Po(n)—are in the macrostatus system. Like them, she is polluting.

If there are family disputes, and particularly if there are schisms within the household ending up with one or more of the brothers establishing their own homes, one or more of the new brides is often blamed. People say such things as the separation is caused by a phunga ki , a pillow insect, the wife's talking in bed at night, and that if a man listens to his bride's opinions, "everything will be over." This is often scapegoating; it is easier for the household to put blame on the outsider, but in fact a tactful and skillful young wife can be very helpful in helping the household deal with the problems stirred up by her addition to the family, and some husbands are grateful about this when they later think about the early stages of their marriage.

As elsewhere in South Asia, the shift comes with the birth of the new wife's first child, particularly her first son. Now she becomes, in a phrase that is used repeatedly, the "supporter of the lineage (kul )." She has now a new relationship to the household through the child. She may refer to her conjugal family now as "my child's father's house." She begins to develop, often, and especially in households where the daughters have already married out of the household, warm relationships with her mother-in-law and father-in-law. Now that her relationship to the household is fully legitimate, her sexual and personal relationship to her husband is much less suspect. The father-in-law's relationship to his daughter-in-law is often warmer than that to his own daughter, and apparently in the majority of households warm working and personal relationships develop between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law after the birth of children. Often the birth of a second child augments this relationship, for the mother-in-law would take over much of the care of the first child at this point. The birth of a child binds the young wife to the household in another way. The child "belongs to the household" and for the wife to break up the marriage entails the risk of losing her children. The young wife becomes related to the inner life of the household, that which goes on within the walls of the house. In farming families she helps out with the farmwork and with supplementary crafts such as weaving, and in lower thar s women may be involved with the specialized activities of the thar (although mostly with

supplementary activities). In upper-status families she would not (this is changing in recent years) be involved in the family trade or shop. She does not shop in the bazaar; this is a male activity. Her main duties are the care of the household and its internal maintenance and economy.

For the young wife the main time out of the household in the course of a day is when she goes to the river, well, or public tap to gather water, a time when she can chat with other young wives (fig. 5). She (and the older women) will also leave the household in connection with religious activities—visits to temples, community festivals, and to the households of kin for feasts associated with calendrical festivals, special household events, and rites of passage of the extended patrilineal family. During such events she will meet with the wider circle of her husband's kin.

She will also go to feasts involving the kin of her natal home, and as frequently is the case in South Asia, she often returns to her natal home after the birth of a child, usually one month after, and she and the child may remain there one, two, or even more months.^[6] A wife is also expected to return to her parental house for special feasts, nakhatya , which are associated with many festivals^[7] and all rites of passage, including, importantly, the end of mourning sequences immediately following deaths in her natal household.

And, finally, as her children grow and as her mother-in-law and father-in-law age, the wife's security, prestige, and authority in her husband's household gradually increase and now either in her husband's natal household, or if there has been fission, in her own new household, she becomes in her turn another daughter-in law's mother-in-law.

Much of this is the usual Hindu family pattern. The Newars share it. What is diffierent is the contrast in a wife's relations to her own home, as well as in aspects of the meaning of marriage in general, which contrast with the Hindu social patterns of the Newar's neighbors. Also peculiar to the Newars in this contrast is the nature of the way the family is related to the larger kin group. We will return to this after first saying something about the household hierarchy, in which, in fact, the young wife has a peculiar position.

Household Hierarchy, Authority, and Purity and the Cipa System

We have discussed the city-wide assignment of roles and their arrangements into hierarchical levels in chapter 5, and we will discuss the com-

plex of ideas and actions concerned with purity, impurity, and purification in chapter 11. Hierarchy and purity are also used within the household—and as in the larger system primarily in relation to eating and drinking—to define and order household status. The hierarchy, and some assent to it, is also indicated by the use of respect gestures and language.

The male head of the household is called the "leader," the naya :. On his death, or absence from the household, the succession for the new naya : proceeds among males by age within ranked generations. That is, the title and role would pass from the head of the household through his progressively younger brother living in the household even if that younger brothers in the father's generation were younger than one of the previous naya :'s sons in the succeeding generation. Generation here takes precedence over relative age.^[8] The actual leadership of the household is informally taken by someone else when old age, youth, or incompetence make the nominal leader unable to lead the household. The nominal leader would, if possible, however, maintain the ritual roles of the naya :. The female religious leader of the house, the naki (n ), will ordinarily be the wife of the naya :. She will retain this title and its ritual functions even after the death of her husband, however, so that the wife of the new naya : will not necessarily become the naki (n ) if a senior wife (as ranked by the order of the husbands) is still alive, active, and competent.

Hierarchy in the daily life of the household is indicated in the way orders are given and accepted, and in a rough way in usages of respect language and gestures. Hierarchically arranged relative purity, the central idiom of the macrostatus system, is constantly signaled and enacted in the family in regulations regarding cipa (chap. 11). The term "cipa " designates food or drink that has become polluted because it or the utensil in which it is prepared or served has come in contact directly or more likely through the medium of fingers with a bodily pollutant, particularly saliva. That is, while a woman of the proper status level (and who is not temporarily "ritually" impure) will not pollute food while she is cooking it (as would a man or woman of lower level simply through touch), she would pollute it if she touched it after tasting it or if she put it in a utensil from which she had previously eaten and that had not been properly and traditionally cleaned. Most generally in practice this becomes a question of the sequence in which people are served and eat at each freshly prepared meal.

If someone of higher status in regard to cipa takes cipa from someone of lower status he or she is polluted and must purify himself or herself, albeit in a perfunctory way (chap. 11). In parallel to the pollution ideology of the macrostatus system, it is not polluting for a lower-status household member to eat a higher person's cipa , but on the contrary it is desirable and proper, particularly in the case of wives who should eat some of their husbands' cipa . Less prescriptively, more "naturally" the junior members of the household eat and are fed the cipa of their superiors. This, as such intake generally does (chaps. 5 and 11) indicates the sharing by the inferior person of the superior person's substance and his or her dependence and incorporation in a larger and superior "body."

The family cipa customs have a strong form among the more "orthodox" families (that is, "strict" Brahman families, and families in other thar s who emulate them), primarily among the upper two status levels, and a weaker form among less orthodox families in those levels and among all families at lower levels. The key restraint that persists through the very lowest levels is that a husband will not eat his wife's cipa , but she will eat his. In the more orthodox families the constraints are more extensive. We may summarize the stronger regulations as follows: (1) each "ritually adult" male of the family will accept the cipa of all those of either sex older than he is, but not that of any younger member of either sex; (2) women (and girls) generally in the family will eat anyone's cipa , except (a), some very strict upper-status women will try to avoid eating their sons' or daughters' cipa (but this is rare) and (b) very generally at all levels, all women in the household will not eat the cipa of the wives of their sons or younger brothers; and (3) boys, before receiving their initiation into their thar s, can eat the cipa of still youner boys and girls, and thus such boys—like girls whose younger brothers are unmarried—in fact have no cipa restraints.

In the weaker form of the system the father still will not accept his wife's cipa , but he will accept his children's cipa ,^[9] and all other members of the family will accept cipa among themselves. As noted, however, even in such households when the sons begin to marry and bring brides into the family, now at all levels, older siblings of both sexes as well as members of the older generation will not accept the cipa of the brother's or son's wife.

It is clear that the cipa system insists throughout on marking women who are brought into the patrilineal family from "outside." They become insiders to the system only to their own children, and to their husband's younger siblings to whom they have a quasi-maternal role, as

he has a paternal role. In upper-level families a further hierarchical ordering of family members is added.

When we go beyond the case of the introduced wife, in the weak form there is no further family cipa discrimination. In the strong form, and if we exclude the case of the introduced wives—except for the most strictly "Brahmanical"—there is an internal gender asymmetry. Men and women accept the cipa of elder women who, in turn, accept theirs. Men and women accept the cipa of elder men , who do not accept theirs. There is probably a different significance in these two cases. The acceptance of superior women's cipa in the family reflects the position and meaning of the mother—in part shared by all elder household women—who is due honor, respect, and deference, which takes some of its sentimental meaning from its contrast with paternal, patrilineal, and macrostatus systems of order and deference. It is only the men who do not take inferiors' cipa , and thus follow the conditions that carves out status in the larger urban social system. In this sense it is really only the men, and among them those who have been initiated into thar , whose status is differentially defined by the system in the course of their accepting cipa from both men and women above them and rejecting it from those below. While everyone, like lower thar s in the macrostatus system, must be careful to avoid the moral error of contaminating those above them and compromising their superiors statuses, for the women this is within the family (introduced wives aside) their only status concern. Thus the familial cipa system can now be said to (1) mark outside wives during the long period of slow integration during which they maintain their alien aspects, (2) honor mothers and maternal roles, (3) teach everyone how to conform to status generating behaviors, and (4) teach men how to assume differential status.

The Comparative Freedom of the Newar Woman in the Northern Hindu Context

The Chetri anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista wrote that "the Newar woman in her husband's house has much more authority and freedom than her [Indo-Nepalese] Brahman or Chetri counterpart. She is readily accepted into the extended family group and adapts quickly to her new role in relation to the family and in particular to her husband" (1972, 24). This relative freedom within the Nepalese Hindu context is obscured in the first descriptions of a wife's role, with its implicit comparison to modern Western ideal forms.

The Newar family is in most respects what Karve (1968) has called a North Indian type, and which she takes to be a continuation of ancient Hindu patterns. "The present northern family is a continuation of the family of the ancient times with slight modifications. It is patrilineal, patrilocal and patriarchal. The marriage is generally outside of the kin-group and the local group. It is a joint family in which the brides are all brought from the outside and the girls are all given away. The behavior is strictly regulated according to generations, according to whether one is born in the family or married into the family and finally according to whether one is a man or a woman" (1968, 136). All this holds for the Newars, with the important exception of marriage outside the "local group."

The Newar kinship system, like the Newar family, is essentially, as we shall see (app. 3), a "Northern system." Karve (1968, 251) sets this Northern system in contrast with a Southern "Dravidian" system, in which a man can marry his younger female cross-cousins or a daughter of one of his elder sisters, producing—among other consequences—a freer, more comfortable position for women in their husbands' households:

A man does not bring a stranger as a bride to his home, a woman is not thrown among complete strangers on her marriage. Marriage strengthens existing bonds. The emphasis is on knitting families closer together and narrowing the circle of the kin-group, a policy exactly the opposite of the one followed in the north. The whole tone of the southern society is different. The distinction between the father's house and the father-in-law's house is not as sharp as in the north. The distinction between "daughters" and "brides or wives" is not as deep as in the north. A girl's behavior in her husband's family is much freer. After all, her husband is either her uncle or her cross-cousin and his mother is either her own grandmother or her aunt. Neither is she separated for long periods from her parents' house.

The Newars have within a northern marriage and kinship system, partially subverted it, as it were, with the result of modifying the condition of women into a somewhat less patriarchal and patrilineal Hindu form. The "Northern" characteristics of a wife's separation from her natal home, physically through separation in space,^[10] and socially through the loss of status of the wife's family in relation to the husband's family through "metaphorical hypergamy" (discussed below), are not present. The Newar wife's relationship to her natal home is strong in comparison with the North Indian and the Indo-Nepalese situations.

The continuing strong relation to the wife's natal home is inversely

related to aspects of Newar marriage that weaken (again when compared with the North Indian pattern) the dominance of the husband's household. This, in turn, derives its ritual justification ultimately from a peculiar Newar rite of passage, the Ihi or mock-marriage to the god Visnu/Narayana^[*] (app. 6) and to associated modifications in menarche rites. The legends associated with these rites and the rites themselves reveal certain anti-Brahmanical and antipatrilineal biases. Their legendary origin was in an innovation introduced into the Kathmandu Valley by the goddess Parvati, whose natal home it was, in order to prevent the disabilites of widows, a severe problem in the traditional Hindu social system, through the device of a first ritual marriage to a god. A woman's subsequent marriage to a mortal becomes a secondary marriage, and as her primary, true husband cannot die, she will never become a widow. The mock-marriage also weakens the ideological support for child marriages, that is, that a girl should be married and living in her husband's household prior to the onset of menstruation. Now it is necessary only to marry her to the god Narayana^[*] before menarche.

With its ritual expression in the Ihi rite, the modified Newar marriage contrasts in fact with Chetri and other northern Hindu marriages in relatively easy separation and remarriage under certain circumstances, relatively little stigmatization and disadvantaging of widows, a lack of hypergamic stigma for the wife's family, and a wife's close continuing relations with her natal household.

Newar Menstrual Disabilities in Comparison with the Indo-Nepalese

Differences in comparative disabilities during their monthly menstruation is another way in which the Newar women feel themselves to have a better situation than Indo-Nepalese Chetri and Brahman women. A discussion of menstruation belongs most centrally to an examination of the "private lives" of Newars, but it may be useful to say something about it here in relation to the question of the comparative position of Newar women in relation to other Nepalese Hindus. Lynn Bennett's report on a Kathmandu Valley community of Indo-Nepalese women based on a study made at the same time as this present one suggested the extent of their stigmatization (Bennett 1983, 215):

In Brahman-Chetri culture menstrual blood is a strong source of pollution—particularly to initiated males. During the first three days of every menses, women become polluted and untouchable. As one woman explained, "We

become like female Damai. . . . We become like female dogs." For these three days a woman must not enter the kitchen, touch food or water that others will eat or drink, or even worship the gods or the ancestor spirits. She may not comb her hair or oil it, and she sleeps separately in a downstairs room. Also she may not touch an adult man. . . The segregation of women during their menstrual periods is strictly observed. . . Older informants told me that in the time of their mothers-in-law . . . women were hidden in a dark room away from the sun^[11] . . . and out of the sight of all males for the first three days of their periods.

Bennett also notes that Brahman-Chetri women of Jumla in western Nepal "may not enter the house at all for three days and so they must sleep in a cattle shed or outside with a fire. Linda Stone reports that this rule holds also for the Brahman-Chetri women of Nuwakot" (Bennett 1983, 215).

According to both male and female informants, Newar women's restrictions in Bhaktapur are, in comparison to these examples (insofar as they may be representative of Indo-Nepalese practices now or in the past), considerably less. Menstruating Newar women in Bhaktapur do comb their own hair, and may continue to sleep in their usual place, although they sometimes go to another household woman's sleeping area to sleep. Most upper-status families reportedly do not let women cook during menstruation, although according to Jyapu informants, in most Jyapu and middle-level (and probably lower-level) families, menstruating women can cook everything except rice to be used for ceremonial purposes. In many thar s, including Pa(n)cthariya and Chathariya (but not Newar Brahmans), menstruating women attend ceremonial family feasts. At all levels menstruating women are not supposed to carry water or touch god images, sacred utensils, or priests. They are not supposed to pluck flowers used for religious offerings. In the farming thar s, menstruating women work on the farms, but are not supposed to touch certain plants (e.g., ginger, chili peppers, turmeric), which would be harmed by their touch.

During menstruation Newar women may worship deities in the same way that a polluted man (say, during the course of death pollution) would. If initiated, she will perform the necessary worship of the Tantric lineage god (in upper-status families), but away from the actual shrine, using a dish and uncooked rice (app. 4), and worshiping a mental image of the god. She may also perform daily worship in the same way, imagining the steps of the puja (app. 4). She may also perform what would ordinarily be household shrine worship at the side of the

river. Women are supposed to eat rich foods during menstruation to prevent ill effects (including dizziness) from loss of blood. Cloths are used to absorb the menstrual blood, which are washed by the menstruating woman and kept for repeated use.

The period of contamination is supposed to last four days, following which the woman must purify herself and her sleeping area by bathing and cleansing with specially pure water—(Ga [n ]ga jal [app. 4]). For upper-status women, they may have a more formal purification with services of a woman of the barber thar (chap. 11). After purification women have no further menstruation-related disabilities, with the exception that they are not supposed, at least in upper level thar s, to participate in commemorative worship to deceased ancestors during the six days following purification.

Intercourse is supposed to be discontinued from the onset of menstruation until the fourth day after onset, that is, after the purification. Men believe that if they have intercourse during the wife's menstruation they will become seriously and perhaps chronically ill. They fear contact with the menstrual blood. (Menstrual blood is regarded, apparently, more as a dangerous^[12] and powerful rather than a disgusting substance.^[13] As we will see in chapter 9, chapter 11, and elsewhere, "disgusting" versus "dangerous" is a significant distinction in Bhaktapur's symbolic world.)

All this echoes G. S. Nepali's (1965, 115) earlier report on other Newar communities:

Menstrual impurity other than the first one [i.e., menarche rites] is not observed by the Newars as strictly as by the Gorkhas [the Indo-Nepalese]. During menses, a Gorkha woman byes practically in isolation. On the fourth day after her bath she is considered clean. But still she is not allowed to much water and attend to religious duties until the fifth day. Among the Newars, on the other hand, a woman during her menses can even attend to the domestic duties including kitchen. The only restriction imposed on her is that she should have her bath before attending m her normal duties. At the most she is forbidden to come in physical contact with objects of religious worship.

The details of menstrual practices vary among thar s within this general characterization. It is of great interest that one extreme exception was among the untouchable Po(n)s, among whom women must leave the inside of the house and go to the cheli (the porch or lowest story of the house which is considered outside the house) during their period of contamination, which lasts for six days, two days longer than for most Newar women.

We hope to deal elsewhere with the local doctrines explaining the origins of menstruation. It is not associated by our informants with bad karma or with a woman's own "sin." The widespread Hindu legend that it is one result of a great sin by Indra, his killing of a Brahman, is known but told in a considerably less misogynistic form than the version given by Bennett (1982, 216). It is said that menstruation represents the periodic draining of impurities from a woman's body. The male anxieties represented in interpretations of menstruation are, in short, more subtly and much more mildly expressed in the Newar response than in those of their Hindu neighbors.

A Wife's Natal Household's Relation to Her Children: The Mother's Brother

Not only does a woman frequently return to her natal home, which is most often within Bhaktapur (and if not, often in a relatively nearby Valley community) and thus maintain close ties with it, but some members of her natal family will, after she has children, have important ceremonial, and very often, emotional and educational responsibilities to those children.

The central representative of the mother's natal household is her brother, whose relationship to his sister's conjugal family comes into being when she gives birth to her first child^[14] and he becomes, for that child and for subsequent children, "the mother's brother," the child's paju . All of the mother's biological and classificatory brothers are nominally paju s (app. 3). They decide informally among them who will participate in particular ceremonies for their sister, and often several of them will go as household representatives to those feasts at their brother-in-law's house which include affinal kin. The lack of insistence on a hierarchy based on age among the paju s is, perhaps, a significant exception to the usual emphasis on hierarchy by age within a generation in aspects of family organization involving the male lineage, and is congruent with a cluster of "maternal" meaning and emotion associated with the paju .

The wife's natal house is for her always her "own house," her tha che (n ), but for her children and for her, by extension, when she is talking to or thinking about those children it is "mother's brother's house," paju che (n ).^[15] The birth of the first sister's first child produces a generational change in her natal household. Her brothers now become pajus and representatives of their household in its relations with allied households. For a paju his sister's children whether male or female are his

bhe (n )ca s (bhi [n ]ca in Kathmandu and Patan Newari). As elsewhere in South Asia, a paju has important functions in the rites of passage of his bhe (n )ca (app. 6).

The paju-bhe (n )ca relationship, symbolized and strengthened in formal ceremonial actions, is of great importance for Newars. While the father, as we have noted, often acts toward a child relatively sternly because of his responsibility to assure his children's proper social behavior in the face of the extended family and the larger city, and in his representation of the restrictions of economic and social constraints, the paju is usually warm and relaxed and, perhaps, a bit subversive with them. People tend to talk about their relation to their paju in terms of love, rather than the respect and fear they felt for their father. Many children, particularly boys, spend parts of their childhood in their paju 's household. Boys and girls (the latter probably less commonly) go to their paju s for advice, comfort, and sometimes for financial support.^[16] The paju may act as an intermediary for his sister or her children with the father (and the patrilineal kin) if there is a problem about, for example, marriage, a career choice, or some serious household conflict. The paju represents the moral authority of the wife's household in the protection of her interests. He functions to weaken the patriarchal authority of the patriline over the household and its children and represents "maternal" support for his sister's children in contrast to the strict demands of the patriarchy. He has a comparatively greater force than Hindu mother's brothers elsewhere because of the whole pattern of rituals and marriage forms giving some comparative independence and high status to Newar women, the lack of a hypergamic stigmatization of the wife's family, and again from the fact that spatial patterns of marriage ensure that they are not, usually, too far away. Men are, of course, fathers to their own children and at the same time paju s to their sisters' children, in one of the many complex multiple positions characteristic of the city.

Marriage

Dumont has remarked on the importance for South Asia of separating a "true and complete marriage" from other kinds of "marriage." He makes some terminological distinctions that are useful for a discussion of marriage in Bhaktapur (1980, 114 [original italics]):

The only true and complete marriage whereby one moves from the category of an unmarried person to that of a married person is the first. But the cere-

mony which effects this transition is especially important for the woman, and one must distinguish the case of a male from that of a female. In the case of a woman we shall call the first marriage the primary marriage. Once this marriage has been contracted, either it is indissoluble even by the death of the spouse (superior castes) or else the woman may, after her husband's death or even after divorce, contract another union, legitimate, but infinitely less prestigious, involving much less ritual and expense, which we shall call secondary marriage. Secondary marriage, being of lower status, is freer, sometimes much freer, than primary marriage. In the case of a man his first marriage becomes the principal marriage only if it bears him children, preferably sons. But a man has the option, either in the case of the barrenness of the first marriage, or freely in other castes (royal, etc.) of taking other wives, either with full rite (necessary for the wife if she has not been married before) or with secondary rite (if the wife has already been married). Thus for a man there are supplementary or subsidiary marriages, with a corresponding hierarchy of wives.

Dumont further notes that, "in various groups, in order to secure for women great freedom of [secondary] marriage or of sexual unions in general, primary marriage is, or rather was, reduced to a mere ritual formality. Sometimes women are married in this way to a god, an object, a fruit, or a man who immediately disappears from their lives" (1980, 118). Dumont, in fact, cites the Newar Ihi as one of his examples, although he erroneously believes that the consequences of the mock-marriage is to allow Newar girls "probably to have unions with men of inferior status" (ibid., 119).

The Newar mock-marriage is not, in fact, fully equivalent to a "primary" marriage, for the first "real" or "social" marriage still retains in its ceremonial and social implications most of the implications of primary marriage in contrast to any possible further, fully, and "really" "secondary" marriages. The mock-marriage has at least some of the force of a primary marriage, however, in that it allows the "real" marriage to be a postmenarche one, and in that it is associated with a somewhat greater liberality of divorce and with a considerably less disadvantaged position for women.^[17]

Until the late 1950s the Newar Brahmans followed orthodox Hindu marriage practices rather than the Newar modification. They did not have mock-marriages, and were married to premenarche child brides.^[18] In the later 1950s the Rajopadhyaya Brahmans decided to follow Nepalese law banning child marriage and to ease their restrictions on divorce and remarriage.

For non-Brahman Newars in the past (and for Newar Brahmans now) the great majority of social marriages take place when the girl is

postmenarche. Some few premenarche marriages exist among farmers, where the motivation is said to be economic, for in a small and often poor family the bride will help with the work of her conjugal home. Such marriages are illegal under Nepalese law and are frowned upon even among other Jyapus. It is said by Jyapu informants that the ideal age for a woman's marriage among them should be between sixteen and eighteen. Before sixteen she is too young to work and to be of much help in her husband's house,^[19] and if she marries too much later than eighteen, it is said that her children will be still too young to help their father at the time in his life when he ages and will need help in his farming. The Jyapu husband should be somewhat older, between the ages of, say, twenty and twenty-three, among other reasons because "it will be easier for them to manage a younger wife, who will fear them." The daughters of sahu —Chathariya, Pa(n)cthariya, and those lower thar s who are in business and shopkeeping—are said to marry later, often at twenty-two or twenty-three.^[20]

For his "principal" (to use Dumont's terminology) marriage, that is, for the vast majority of marriages, a man will marry a woman who has not been married before (with the exception of the Ihi ), who is within the proper intermarrying macrostatus level, and who is at the proper exogamous distance. The marriage ceremony will be a "major marriage ceremony," modified somewhat from the orthodox Indian marriage ceremony to take the Ihi into account (app. 6).

People are forbidden to marry within an extended and active patrilineal group, the phuki (below), and more vaguely within larger groups thought to have a significant and close patrilineal connection, to be the same patrilineage or kul . Such larger exogamous units are distinguished within different thar s in different ways. Tracing degree of relationship and permissible and impermissible unions through female lines is more difficult, as it is not revealed in present organization, and has to be based on genealogical information. Ideally, any relationship derived from the out-marriage of any woman of the kul within less than six generations (the seventh generation being permitted) is forbidden. In practice, no objection is made after five generations if there is some "good reason" for that particular marriage.^[21]

Almost all the thar s marry within Bhaktapur by preference, and often within the same part of the city.^[22] Almost all marriages are still arranged. The availability and qualities of potential spouses are first discussed among informal networks of friends and relatives. Ideally, as elsewhere in South Asia, a wife should be modest and shy, respectful to

elders, in good health, and willing and able to work as necessary in the particular thar . She should not have any disfigurements, particularly skin diseases, the facial scars of smallpox having been considered particularly disadvantageous. A prospective son-in-law should be able to support his wife through his own efforts or his household situation. He should be of good moral character, a support to his own family, and not a gambler or a heavy drinker. He should be good-natured, and not irritable and potentially abusive to his wife. The reputation and behavior of the other household members, and the extended-family group, the phuki , are also of great importance. Immorality, crime, insanity, scandal anywhere in this group will affect the desirability of all its members.

After an informal decision has been made, a representative of the man's household, a lami , is chosen from among family or friends, and begins a more formal investigation of the potential bride's nature and situation. Eventually, if she seems acceptable, the lami approaches her family to discuss the prospects, and later the arrangements, for the marriage. A symbolic sequence begins at this point which in a number of phases gives the marriage increasing social reality; we will discuss the sequence in relation to rites of passage (app. 6).

In the past the perspective spouses did not see each other before the marriage ceremony, although they usually had some idea about each other from networks of friends or relatives. They could refuse when the marriage was proposed, but this was reportedly quite rare. Now it is customary for the couple to see each other, often at a mutual friend's house, before the arrangement reaches a formal phase, a meeting that may provoke objections to the marriage.^[23]

There were always "love marriages" in the past, as there are now. These are marriages that were in violation of the parents', or phuki members' wishes, and were motivated by romantic love or, sometimes, by pregnancy. As long as these were within the acceptable macrostatus marrying sections, they usually became acceptable to the couple's families. Only marriages violating these regulations caused a rupture of family and thar relationships. Incestuous marriages within the bounds of kin exogamy would be "a great sin" or crime, maha aparadha , and would result in outcasting and banishment.

The bride's family will provide a dowry and will also bear the expenses of the first portion of the sequence of marriage ceremonies, which take place at her house. The groom's family will have the expenses of the subsequent major marriage ceremonies and feasts. They

also provide presents to the bride, which include (particularly among farmers) substantial quantities of gold jewelry. If a husband divorces a young wife, or forces her to leave him, and if this is not considered to be through her fault, she has the right to take back her dowry and keep the jewelry she has been given. If she leaves the household because of her own dissatisfaction (an attribution that the wife's family may dispute, and that may require arbitration), she forfeits these. Among some Jyapu groups some of the wife's dowry is withheld by her family until after she has borne a child, a guarantee that the marriage will probably be permanent. It is estimated that the total expenses of the bride's side and the groom's side at the time of marriage are about equal, or, in the case of Jyapus, somewhat higher for the groom's family.

While the contribution from the bride's side is overtly said to be a dowry, a payment for taking the daughter, the expenses of the groom's side are interpreted as indicating the ability and commitment of the groom's family to the continuing support of the bride. The groom's side also gives gifts to the bride's family in the course of the ceremonial sequence preceding the marriage. Among some thar s these involve substantial cash gifts. G. S. Nepali, in a discussion of such gifts among the Newars, notes that when cash offerings are given in lieu of "symbolic" offerings of sweets by the groom's family, "though the payment of cash is looked down upon by the society, since it amounts to paying for a wife, it has not diminished at any rate; and it is a favoured practice among the poor. There is no social sanction against it, except the moral disapproval" (1965, 215). The moral disapproval comes from Brahmanical ideology of the wife as a free gift or offering, a kanya dana . In actual practice for all except the most Brahmanical families, there seems to be a balancing of both symbolic and material calculations of the value of the marriage transaction to both the giving and the receiving families. Among the middle and lower levels, where the economic value of the wife is most clear, there is an additional emphasis on the tentativeness of the contribution from the bride's side, as it protects her and will be returned if she is rejected by the groom's family. Dumont (in a comment on a claim of L. S. S. O'Malley for Bengal that "bridegroom price" characterized high hypergamous castes; and "bride price," low castes) remarks that it may be supposed for Bengal, as elsewhere, that "there is an exchange of prestations, in which the tangible prestations dominate in one or the other direction (Dumont 1980, 379). In the Newar case the general emphasis on equality of prestations corresponds to an emphasis on isogamy.

There exists, relatively rarely among upper levels and somewhat more frequently among farming thar s, "barter" marriages, hilabula , between two households, in which a son and daughter from one household respectively marry a daughter and son from another.^[24] Much less wealth needs to be amassed by the participating families in these cases (cf. G. S. Nepali 1963, 215).

A couple will be married in an elaborate set of ceremonies for a principal marriage (app. 6) and a simpler set for subsidiary ones. The vast majority of marriages are monogamous and endure until one of the partners dies, the survivor living on as a widow or widower. However, the marriage may break up in one way or another for other reasons than death or may be altered by the husband taking a second, additional wife.

Hindu societies, while making it relatively easy for the husband or his family to dissolve a marriage, have severely limited or prohibited a wife's right to divorce. The Newar woman's relative freedom to dissolve her marriage compared to other, including neighboring Nepalese, Hindu groups have led, among those accustomed to standard Hindu practices, to exaggerated statements regarding her freedom and her "licentiousness." Kirkpatrick wrote in 1793 (comparing the Newars and the matrilineal Nayars of Kerala, as is still frequently done), that "It is remarkable enough that the Newar women, like those among the Nairs [Nayars], may, in fact, have as many husbands as they please, being at liberty to divorce them continually on the slightest pretenses" ([1811] 1969, 187). Francis Hamilton visited the Kathmandu Valley a few years later during a fourteen-month period in 1802/03. His remarks on the Newar women are also a mixture of realities, misunderstandings, and prejudice. We can identify the probable source of the prejudice in one Ramajai Batacharji, who accompanied Hamilton on his visit. Batacharji was "an intelligent Brahman from Calcutta, whom I employed to obtain information, so far as I prudently could, without alarming a jealous government, or giving offense to the Resident, under whose authority I was acting" (Hamilton [1819] 1971, 1). Newar manners, Hamilton/Batacharji remarks, are "chiefly remarkable for a most extraordinary carelessness about the conduct of their women" (ibid., 29); to wit:

The Newar women are never confined. At eight years of age, they are carried to a temple and married with the ceremonies usual among Hindus to a fruit called Bel.^[25] When a girl arrives at the age of puberty, her parents, with her consent, betroth her to some man of the same caste and give her a dower,

which becomes the property of the husband, or rather paramour. After this, the nuptials are celebrated with feasting and some religious ceremonies. Among the higher casts [castes] it is required that girls should be chaste till they have been thus betrothed; but in the lower casts, a girl, without scandal, may previously indulge any Hindu with her favours, and this licentiousness is considered a thing of no consequence. Whenever a woman pleases, she may leave her husband; and if, during her absence she cohabits only with men of her own cast or of a higher one she may at any time return to her husband's house, and resume the command of the family. The only ceremony or intimation that is necessary before she goes away is her placing two betel nuts on her bed.^[26]

Hamilton ([1819] 1971, 42f.) further writes:

So long as a woman chooses to live with her husband he cannot take another wife until she becomes past child bearing; but a man may take a second wife when his first chooses to leave him or when she grows old, and at all times he may keep as many concubines as he pleases. A widow cannot marry again, but she is not expected to burn herself, and may cohabit with any Hindu as a concubine. The children, by the betrothed wife, have a preference in succession to those by concubines. The latter, however, are entitled to some share. A man can be betrothed to no woman except one of his own cast, but he may keep a concubine of any cast whose water he can drink.

This kind of view of Newar practices, which starts with a perception of relative differences, and then salaciously exaggerates them, still is held by some non-Newar Nepalis about the Newars, and, indeed, mutatis mutandis , suggests the way upper-status Newars regard the morals and nature of women in the lower Newar thar s—and the way all Newars seem to think about what they take to be the free behavior of women among northern hill peoples. We can find some basis for such reports in some persisting present practices. Other aspects may have referred to practices of particular thar s at the time, or may have been based on misunderstandings. What was fundamentally distorted, however, was the romantic picture of liberty or anarchy.

G. S. Nepali (1965, 247ff.) provides some indication of the amount of separation and remarriage among 734 Newar men and women in 1957/58. Among his 353 male informants, 13.3 percent of their marriages had ended in separation. Some 40 percent of those separations were by formal divorce and the remaining 60 percent, by informal separation. Among his women informants 14.4 percent of their marriages were reported as ending in separation. Of these, about 15 percent were reported as ending in formal divorce and 85 percent in informal separation. Among the men some 72 percent of the men whose marriages had ended in separation remarried, as did about 41 percent of the

women.^[27] Nepali's tables do not indicate to what degree divorce or separation was initiated by the husband or the wife, but his discussion implies that many of the nondivorce separations, at least, involve desertion by the wife. Nepali's survey of divorce and separation suggests, in fact, that marriage among the Newars, if not as fluid as reported by Hamilton, is relatively fragile. We do not have statistics on separation and divorce for contemporary Bhaktapur; it is very possibly similar to Nepali's rates, and almost certainly significantly higher than for non-Newar Hindu Nepal.

"Divorce" is usually referred to in phrases using the word "par " or "pa ," which in other phrases signifies the conclusion of a transaction by making a final payment. Simple separation is phrased in various ways, often simply as tota beigu , "to let go of." Until recently neither marriage nor divorce had a clear legal status under Nepalese national law, which followed the varieties of local customary law. Bennett, in a study of the relations of both traditional and national law to the situations of Nepalese women, writes "Under the present [National Civil] Code, the performance of any form of wedding ceremony or simply evidence of sexual relations (even as a single event) can amount to marriage" (1979, 46). A "divorce" implies the consent of both parties and their kin to the separation, initiated by some kind of formal discussion. The one who wishes to dissolve the marriage obtains permission, often in writtern form, from the spouse or the head of the spouse's household or patrilineal extended-family group, the phuki The wife must agree to leave the household; if she objects to this and resists a separation, the husband may use various means to force her out. Previously, and still in some thar s, the simplest way for a man to separate from his wife was to leave her at her natal home when she returned there for a visit; she was not supposed to return to her conjugal home from these visits unless a member of the husband's household came to fetch her. Another device the husband or other members of his household can use to force a separation is to begin to mistreat the wife and provoke quarrels with her, thus attempting to make her decide to return to her natal home. If the wife wishes to initiate the separation, it is simpler: all she has to do is to leave her husband's house.

Separation is complicated for both husband and wife if there are children. They belong to the father's household, and will be raised by the women there. This is general in Hindu Nepal. "Nepalese law considers the right of child custody as well as the duty to maintenance of the child as the right and liability of the father. A mother has no right upon the issue she has given birth to. The law is based on the Hindu

concept of woman as jaya or one who bears children for her husband. The mother simply gives birth to children for her husband" (Shilu Singh, quoted in Bennett [1979, 64]). The comparative special rights of Newar women do not include rights over the possession of their children.

There is less social stigma attached to an agreed-upon separation, a divorce, than to a unilateral separation. A "divorced" woman is free of the insults and interference that might come from her husband's home if she were only separated, and still in some sense belonged to the household. Divorced or separated, all parties can remarry, however, with a simplified ceremony of remarriage, which as the figures cited from G. S. Nepali (above) indicate, is frequently done.

The most frequent reasons given for breakdown of marriages in Bhaktapur are, as everywhere in Hindu families, one or another of the difficulties of fitting a new wife into the husband's household, that is, her relations with various family members other than her husband, particularly her mother-in-law.^[28] Such problems may arise and cause the marriage to break up even if (and sometimes to some degree because) the husband and wife may like each other and are close to each other. Modernization has produced a different kind of marital problem. In the course of higher education or professional careers young Bhaktapur men and (more rarely) women of the upper levels often meet potential lovers or spouses—sometimes from other communities and ethnic groups—who are attractive to them often because they share more modern values and interests. These men and women have often been previously married in an arranged marriage with a spouse who (again, this is the case particularly for the men) has a more limited, traditional, and conservative upbringing and experience. Although the families have approved and arranged such marriages, the spouse becomes a target of the husband's (or wife's) resentment. The wife and her children have close relations with others in the household, but the husband (who may have a "girlfriend" outside the household) will be cooly proper and more than conventionally distant from her. Occasionally such marriages also end in separation.

Remarriage And Multiple Marriage

Following separation, divorce, or the death of his wife, a man may, usually in the case where there are no children (or no surviving children), enter a new principal marriage, that is, a marriage for producing children for the support of the lineage and the household. In this

case there would usually be, as in a first marriage, a major marriage ceremony. It would be a primary marriage for his new wife and the marriage would be as carefully arranged as was the first marriage.

A woman, following separation, divorce, or widowhood, can marry again, but this would be, for her, a (truly) secondary marriage, and she would have a minor marriage ceremony. In this respect it does not matter whether her previous marriage had been terminated formally, in divorce or death, or simply through an informal separation.^[29] We may note again here that widows can remarry, and the younger ones, at least, often do. This is in the context of the relative lack of social or ritual stigma attached to Newar widowhood. It was, as we have noted, specifically to prevent the problems and stigmatization of widowhood characteristic of other Hindu communities that, in local legand, the Ihi ceremony was founded by Parvati, whose natal home was the Himalayan area, and who had been given the Kathmandu Valley by her father for her dowry.

Whatever the form of marriage or of marriage ceremony the woman becomes a misa^[30] or "wife." In the case where there are (at once or in sequence) more than one they are often designated as first wife, ha:thu , and later wife (or wives) lithu . One common explanation for a multiple marriage, that is, where the first wife is kept in the household and a lithu added, is a failure to have children, which is almost always ascribed to barrenness of the first wife and not the sterility of the husband. In most cases when a second wife is taken for this purpose, the first wife (who is otherwise likely to be a satisfactory wife and daughter-in-law) remains in the household.^[31] Multiple marriage for this reason is relatively common in Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya households where the household can afford the expense of marrying and maintaining another wife. Farming households sometimes take second wives even if there are children by the first marriage, if the first wife is, for example, chronically ill and unable to help sufficiently with the household and farmwork. They may also do so sometimes even if the first wife is healthy if there are large farm holdings and a second wife could profitably help in the farmwork. Other additional marriages, which are considered permissible but by many as not really "decent," are those initiated by (and "for the sake of") the husband, not the household, and explained variously as owing to the first wife's lack of sexual attractiveness or the man's excessive sexual lust, or because of some dislike for his first wife in a situation where separation for one reason or another is difficult.

Polygamous marriages are generally considered to be stressful for

everyone concerned, particularly if there are children from both wives. They are confined to wealthier households and compared to non-Newar Hindu Nepalis seem to be relatively rare. Lynn Bennett, in her study of an Indo-Nepalese Hindu community, reports that among eighty-eight married men, seventeen had more than one wife, several had three wives, and one man had five (1977, 327). In contrast, G. S. Nepali (1965, 237) found among 256 married Newar men only eight who had more than one wife.^[32] The relative lack of polygamy among Newars in spite of their comparative wealth is another aspect of the Newar wife's relatively superior status in Hindu context.

The Lack of Hypergamic Implications of Marriage

In marriages that are not "principal marriages" undertaken for purposes of having children "to support the household and lineage," a man may take a wife from a somewhat lower macrostatus level. Newar marriage is for the principal marriage rigidly (and for subsidiary marriages more often than not) isogamous. Lynn Bennett, in her study of Nepali Indo-Nepalese Brahmans and Chetris, notes that although they do not have formal hypergamy (and, in fact, cannot, in that neither the Brahmans nor the Chetri have ranked "clans"), they have a marked informal—what Bennett calls an "ad hoc "—hypergamy. She relates this to Dumont's statement about India that the "hypergamous stylization of wife-takers as superior and wife-givers as inferior pervades the whole culture" (Dumont 1964, 101).^[33] Among the Indo-Nepalese Brahmans and Chetri "marriage itself creates a ritual superiority of the groom's people—and hence a hypergamous situation—where there was formerly equality" (1977, 264). Bennett discusses various ritual and social interactions that indicate the inferiority of a male "vis-à-vis groups to which his father had given a sister or to whom he has given a sister or a daughter. . . . On the other hand, he is superior to the groups from which his mother and his wife and his son's wife have come and they must respect him" (1977, 264).^[34]

This status difference between giving and receiving families is denied in discussion and in action in the Newar system. Among any two fathers-in-law, for example, the eldest is the one given the highest status. There are ways of denying and reducing any possible covert implication of the superiority of the groom's family m the relation of a wife's father to his son-in-law. He may, for example, use his son-in-law

for menial tasks. For example, if the father-in-law is involved in some important family ceremony, he will often ask a son-in-law to supervise the family shop. Among the farmers, when the father-in-law is planning a large family feast, it may be his son-in-law who is expected to travel throughout Bhaktapur giving oral invitations to the prospective guests. In middle-level thar s, after certain of the initiation ceremonies for boys, during which they are purified by having their heads shaved, it is often one of the husbands of a "daughter of the house" who is expected to take the hair cuttings to the river and dispose of them. Such use of a woman's father's sons-in-law and, in contrast to the Indo-Nepalese, the lack of any ritual or social indication of "ad hoc " hypergamy, indicate the absence among Newars of even informal overt hypergamic patterns.

Adoption and Marriage

The major cause for a multiple marriage, and one of the major reasons contributing to divorce or separation, is the wife's failure to produce children for the household and the lineage. When a childless marriage is otherwise satisfactory, the household sometimes considers adopting a son. The adopted son, called a dharma putra or dharma kae , would most likely be taken from the patrilineal extended family, the phuki , but people can also, but less desirably, take a boy related through the out-marrying women of the patriline, a sister's son, or (in the case where a man has daughters, but no surviving son) a married daughter's son. The dharma kae would often but not necessarily, live with and have his economic support from the adopting family. As a phuki member, he would not change his ritual relation to the lineage and lineage gods by being moved to another household—except that he would have a son's special ritual responsibilities in the case of death of his adopting parents. If the son is adopted from a daughter or sister, he will most frequently remain in his natal family, or if he does live in his adoptive home, will return there for important family ceremonies and for his own rites of passage. He belongs to his genitor's, his biological father's lineage, and is involved in the worship of his biological father's (and not his adoptive father's) lineage gods. However, he has the additional ritual function of being centrally involved in the death ceremonies for his adoptive parents. Adoptive sons are taken when very young, perhaps one to three years of age. They are always middle sons, as the eldest son is supposed to do death ceremonies for his father and (among some thar s) the youngest for his mother in their natal families.

Adoption is, in fact, extremely rare, and I could find no cases in the families of my informants. G. S. Nepali did not find any cases among 224 families he studied, nor was he able to identify any cases in a study of the village of Panga (1965, 97). Direct ties of biological descent are strongly emphasized,^[35] and childlessness is dealt with whenever possible by remarriage.

Major Kin Groupings: (I) Kul, Phuki and Their Women

Terminology as well as ritual and social relations distinguish two large groups of kin for each individual. First are those most closely associated with the phuki , a group of men agnatically related through the paternal lineage plus those of their women who are married to them, or fathered by them and (for most purposes) still unmarried. The other group of kin are those who have become related through marriage of women into and out of the patrilineal group, the tha:thiti , discussed in the next section.

The household is embedded in these two groups. Individuals include as their intimate kin not only their nuclear segment of the household and the larger household itself but also another group that has members from both larger kin groupings. These are the "syaphu (n )" or "syasyaphu (n )," the people "one cares most about, to whom one is closest." The word "sya " (phu [n ] means "people") is given various local etymologies and thought to be derived from sya gu , to hurt ("thus people whose pain one feels also") or from sya : (bone marrow, "as close to one as marrow to bone"). People, when asked to list syaphu (n ), characteristically begin with nuclear family members, then add others in the household, and then mother's brother (paju ) and his household, father's sister (nini ) and her household, their own married sisters and their children, and last (and in the case of men not always included) their own spouses. Special ties of affection or circumstance may enlarge, this list in various ways.

The largest patrilineal unit^[36] is all those people who are thought to descend from a common male ancestor, whose men (and unmarried women) share the same surname, and who are forbidden to marry each other.^[37] Such a unit has been called a patrilineal exogamous "clan" (e.g., Fürer-Haimendorf 1956). As we have remarked, this unit is not equivalent to a thar . A thar may be a "clan," in that its members believe they have the same name and constitute a social and occupational unit because they have descended from one man (this is most often the case

among the Chathariya and Pa(n)cthariya), but in many thar s the shared name and group membership is believed by thar members to derive from a common origin in some profession or historical group. These latter thar s will often have within them intermarrying sections. There is no unambiguous local term for a "clan," but it is often referred to as a kul (from the Sanskrit kula , meaning group, family, lineage).^[38] "Kul " refers to either a patrilineage throughout time, or in other contexts, to the living members of that lineage, usually to the male members of that lineage, although, as is the usage with "phuki " (see below), it may include certain female members. Usually "kul " is used in a limited sense to refer to one segment of patrilineally related kin, the phuki , but in certain contexts refers to the maximal unit, a cluster of phuki s that had split into separate phuki units in the past, but whose historical connections are remembered and given some ritual representation in the worship of common lineage gods. The kul as a "clan" has the characteristics that have been noted for such units elsewhere in Hindu South Asia. "It is a grouping rather than a group, a taxonomic category rather than the basis for joint action. . . . [It] is mainly used to classify jati fellows into eligible and ineligible spouses" (Mandlebaum 1970, 135).

G. S. Nepali (1965, 253) wrote that:

The Newar joint family [the household unit] has specific characteristics which make it distinct from the normal Hindu joint family. Despite residential and property separation, several joint families act as a single unit among them for purposes of social and ceremonial functions, be it domestic or communal.

This unit is the phuki , for almost all purposes except exogamy the broadest patrilineal unit of social importance.^[39] Each phuki is made up of groups of households, often living in close proximity, who are brothers and/or the male descendants of brothers who had split off from a single ancestral paternal household in a relatively recent period. Although, like all members of the same kul , they share kul marriage prohibitions, what characterizes them as a group is that they, or rather the leaders representing each household, meet to consider the affairs of their constituent households, particularly marriage, divorce, and economic or legal difficulties. They act together as a major moral and ritual unit. They worship the same lineage gods on the same day of the year in the same place (chaps. 8 and 9). They unite for the performance of major rites of passage for phuki members (and for the feasts associated with them) and share major pollution entailed by the death (and to a more limited degree by birth) of any of their members. The sharing of

ritual duties, particularly the prolonged death pollution, is one of the limits to the number of households that can conveniently constitute a phuki If it were too large, everyone would be continuously occupied in the rites of passage of members, and often in major, socially disabling pollutions. When a phuki is sensed to be too large, members begin to look for a confirming sign from the lineage gods or from the deified ancestors of the kul that it is a proper time to split the phuki .

In the upper level thar s, at least, phuki s seem to split when they have more than twenty member families. People estimate the typical upper-level phuki group to consist of fifteen to twenty families. Lower level thars may have many less families in a phuki .^[40] The split segments are called baphukis , or "split phuki s." They will use the same shrine for their annual lineage god worship, but will worship on different days now, and they will no longer be affected by pollution caused by birth and death in the other baphuki . And now each will confine itself to discussion and regulation of the affairs only of its own member families.

The term "phuki " is used in some contexts to mean only the men (and in its most limited usage only those men who have had their initiation into their thar or lineage), and in this usage people speak of the women associated with the phuki as the (1) "daughters of the phuki " (the still unmarried women) and (2) the "women who have come into the phuki " (the wives of members). Sometimes, however, the word "phuki " is used to include these women. Daughters and sisters who marry "out" into other phuki s are no longer members of the phuki in strict definition, and as they are also not members of the other large category "feminal kin" are in an in-between category.

There is a decision-making phuki council made up of the male heads of the component households. Its members are ranked by the same principle that ranks male members of a household by age within successive generations. The senior member of the phuki council, the phuki thakali or naya :, and his wife, the phuki naki (n ),^[41] have ceremonial roles in all rites of passage, and other ceremonies involving phuki members. The organization and functions of the phuki council vary by thar , as does its integration into still larger organizations representing the thar .^[42]

Major Kin Groupings: (II) Feminal Kin, Tha:Thiti

Those people who are related to an individual through all links of marriage with that person's phuki members form a large group with

amorphous outer limits called the tha:thiti .^[43] This is a heterogeneous group. At the center of it are the members of the mother's natal household and the husbands and children of one's own household's out-marrying daughters.^[44] For a man, all tha:thiti are related through a woman at the proximal link, and this is also the case for a woman, with the important exception that she becomes related to her husband's tha:thiti through her marriage to him. In this case, however, it is a woman's movement out of her natal home that creates the link. All these links involve the medium of a woman who has married either into or out of the patrilineage. Mandlebaum (1970, 148) suggests the useful term "feminal kin" for this kind of cluster.

Each married individual has a unique constellation of tha:thiti , and the potential ramifications are enormous but are, in fact, generally limited to at least moderately close connections whose extent varies with the particular reason for using or gathering these kin. Newars say that the close contact with a large circle of tha:thiti for whom they feel familial "love " (maya ) is an important way in which they differ from the Chetris.

"Tba:thiti " is sometimes used as the only available term of reference for an affinal relative who has no other specific kin term of reference, or whose "proper" classificatory name is unclear to a particular individual. The central core members of the tha:thiti have ritual functions in rites of passage of household members; some segment of the wider group is invited to certain of the household feasts, nakhatya , those that are centrally characterized by the return of married-out daughters to their natal homes.

Phuki and Thar

The phuki is for almost all purposes the largest kin organization significant for the ceremonial and social organization of individual households. On some occasions, as we have noted, representatives of two or more phuki s will join to discuss some problem affecting a kul as a whole. For those thar s that consist of groups of kuls , it would be only an extremely unusual circumstance relating to some problem for the entire thar that would bring all phuki (or kul ) leaders together. Most of those affairs within a thar that traditionally do require the cooperation of groups larger than phuki are the business of cooperative organizations called guthi , discussed later.

Each that differs in size, internal composition, and organization. The

study of the political organization and function of phuki s in relation to thar organization remains to be done.

Ritual Friendship and Fictive Kinship

As elsewhere in South Asia, the patrilineal kin group can be extended through a ritual in which a man's close male friend becomes his "ritual brother," and, in a special Newar emphasis, a girl's female friend may become her "ritual sister." In becoming ritual siblings, they become subject to the same marriage restrictions, at least in relation to close kin, as a biological or classificatory "brother" or "sister." This ritual friend or fictive sibling is called a twae . A man refers to or respectfully calls his twae "twae ju " (ju is a term of respect), while a woman calls hers "twae bhata ."^[45] Women conventionally and usually form these relationships at the time of their mock-marriages, whereas men form them at any time during their lives. The formation of ritual friendship was very common for both sexes in the past, but it is now less common for men. It allowed men to further cement a friendship (friendships, in their contrast to the heavy moral pressures and emphases on correct behavior in kin relations, are of particular importance for people in Bhaktapur), or, for men in business, to put a business relationship on a kin-like basis.^[46]Twae ju and twae bhata are invited to major phuki feasts, and may optionally be included in smaller phuki feasts or non-Tantric ceremonies.

Twae relations have one interesting peculiarity. They do not have to be at the same macrostatus level and are often, in fact, outside of the level within which one can marry or share boiled rice and pulses—although they would not be made between clean and unclean levels. This means that like friendship itself and like the mock-marriage, they are part of a larger segment of Bhaktapur life and symbolism that is organized in contrast and sometimes in opposition to its otherwise orthodox Brahmanical hierarchical structure.

Kinship Terminology

We have placed an extended presentation of Bhaktapur's kinship terminology and a discussion of its relation to other North Indian kinship terminologies in appendix 3, where it may be used for reference. We will restrict ourselves here to some remarks on the relation of that terminology to the categories of kin we have taken note of in the preceding sections.

Many of the terms in the Newar kinship system designate very large classes of kin; a whole generation of consanguineous and affinal male kin may be designated as "brothers," "grandfathers," "grandchildren," and so on. However, much smaller segments of these classes are usually at issue in the discussions and actions of ordinary life. The segment involved is, as always in such classificatory systems, indicated by the context in which the term is used, and/or by various verbal devices. Thus, by adding terms designating "one's own," (tha: ) or "true/real" (khas or sakhai , terms derived from Nepali or Sanskrit), one can designate a "biological" nuclear mother, father, or sibling within the larger class and can designate a biological mother's biological brother or biological father's biological sister in the same way. For siblings these terms specify that the siblings share the same father. If it is necessary to distinguish a common mother of two siblings, terms indicating birth from the same maternal "abdomen," such as chaga pwa , are used. Such terms and various contexts of use discriminates "ego's" (the person in relation to whom a set of kinship terms have their meanings) core family.

The next larger grouping that is commonly distinguished is that segment of the various generations of kin who belong to ego's patriline, his kul and phuki . If the context leaves any room for ambiguity, the term "phuki " can be added. Thus those males of the same generation as "ego" (daju-kija ) who belong to the patriline can be designated as phuki daju-kija . In most speech it is clear whether the kin reference is to (1) the core family group, (2) members of the phuki (including one of the women attached to it), or (3) the residual of classificatory kin related through affinal and feminal links. Members of this residual group can be further distinguished and grouped by additional terms if necessary. For descending generations beyond the first it is possible through the addition of mhyae (daughter) as a preface to the generational term for a descendant of a given generation, to indicate that the descendant is being traced through a daughter at some point and does not, therefore, belong to the phuki , as would be implied by the use of the term in most contexts. As appendix 3 indicates, kin acquired through ego's own marriage are clearly discriminated as a group, although in a different fashion for men and for women.

The subclasses of the larger classificatory kinship terminological system, which are significant and must be understood and signaled in one way or another are, of course, the important social structural components of the kin-group. These are, in sum, the nuclear family, phuki , mother's brothers and their families and extensions, the group of

tha:thiti , and ego's affines. The very large terminological classes of "brothers" and "sisters," "mothers" and "fathers," "grandchildren," and so forth are easily placed in the proper smaller category

Guthis, Organizations for Special Purposes

Newar society has from very early times included miscellaneous associations of people formed for various special purposes called guthi s. The word is derived from the Sanskrit term gosthi^[*] , "assembly, company, fellowship." D. R. Regmi cites inscriptions from Licchavi times suggesting some of the early functions of these gosthi^[*] , as the inscriptions then still called them. Some were for the purpose of providing drinking water to travelers, some for the maintenance of water conduits, and others were concerned with various aspects of the maintenance of temples and palaces. The early inscriptions also refer to donation of agricultural land by the state for material support through a portion of the land's yield for the purposes of the guthi (D. R. Regmi 1969, 299). Such land is called "guthi land," and is one of the fundamental kinds of land tenure in Nepal.^[47]

A large variety of guthi groups persisted into the recent past. Older informants at the time of this study could list twenty or thirty named guthi s, but the list seems to be quickly diminishing as the central government takes over some of their functions, and others disappear with modernization. In addition to guthi s using the income from specially designated lands for the maintenance and repair of temples, shrines, mathas^[*] (chap. 8), and palaces and for the support of public ceremonies of various types,^[48] there were (and are) groups dedicated to one or another god, or who came together for some special purpose during one or another calendrical festival, or who worshiped in some particular way (with torchlight processions or with one or another of the traditional forms of music, or who sacrificed unusual forms of sacrificial animals such as sheep, etc.). There were some groups representing a particular thar or profession,^[49] such as palanquin carriers or Ayurvedic physicians, and others whose members included different thar s. Guthi s choose one of their members as a leader, have a tutelary god, meet for periodic feasts, and raise money in various ways, often from a tax on members—and by fines for violation of guthi rules.

In recent years various new kinds of organizations—scouts, women's organizations, and literary societies—which represent larger social

units than Bhaktapur society (or, indeed, Newar society) are arising and are locally understood to be replacing or competing for people's commitment to some of the traditional guthi s. The most numerous enduring guthi s are "death guthi s" (those assisting with funerals; see app. 6) and those dealing with phuki and thar affairs.^[50]

The Inside of the Thars in Relation to the City's Mesocosm

This chapter has been a miscellaneous tour of some of the forms that are located within the thar s and their component units. Much of it is not directly relevant to our main questions in this volume, and the chapter is a sort of an appendix that has broken loose and drifted forward into the book. As we have remarked, however, these smaller structures are those that most intimately affect the learning and experience of individuals. These are the successively smaller and successively more private cells in which people have their intimate relations, and where they are most closely observed, punished, and rewarded. They provide forms that the public symbolic order expresses or uses or must struggle with. They are in the background for the concerns of the rest of this book, but will be of greater importance, along with those aspects of family and private religion and of rites of passage and the like which we have managed to keep in the appendixes at the back of the book when we elsewhere bring individual experience to the center of our concerns.