Approaches to Meaning

Biska: is a complex symbolic enactment. A cast of human and divine actors moves through meaningful city space, in endlessly repeated annual performances in concert with the city's symbolically ordered and ordering time, in a context of legends and traditional interpretations. Against this background the actors do certain things; they enact dramas or, if all the events of the period are considered to have some possible overall pattern, they enact a single theatrical performance, albeit one whose dramatic unity is rather Shakespearian. Biska:'s significant contexts include the year's other festival enactments. When considered in relation to the entire group of festivals (chap. 16) or in comparison with particular other ones—say, the other great structural focal festival, Mohani, or the lunar New Year sequence, Swanti—certain of its peculiarities and relations within the larger cycle are highlighted. We can at this point approach the question of its meaning—that is, the meanings bearing on civic integration with which we are concerned—under some general rubrics that can be applied for comparison to still other annual events.

1. Biska: as a solar festival.

One of our questions is whether cyclical events that are "outside" the annual festival cycle affect that cycle. With the exception of the minor event Ghya: Caku Sa(n)lhu [10] and the minor observances of the first days of each solar month, "the events of the solar cycle" (as this chapter is entitled) really means the Biska: cycle. Biska: has, of course, some direct "solar" references. It takes place at the vernal equinox and begin a new year at the moment of the

balance between daylight and dark. The raising and lowering of the yasi(n) to mark the transition to the new year in an east-west direction has, perhaps, some now forgotten connection with the sun's direction. Otherwise, there is no evident direct reference to the sun and the seasons. In Biska:'s contrast with the lunar and agricultural Mohani sequence there is, however, an intriguing, if perhaps fortuitous, contrast, which relates Biska: to the modes of astral religious action, whose presiding figure is the deified sun. Biska:'s central narrative (although not all of its subsidiary legends) reflects the kinds of passive and self-adjustive relations that worshipers have with the astral deities and the transcendent macrocosm, rather than the active and manipulative interactions they have in some other annual events with the realms represented by the dangerous and ordinary civic deities. Thus, in Mohani the king and his Guru-Purohit actively participate in the struggle of the Goddess against forces of disorder, but in Biska: both king and deities are passive, moved by the forces of convention, affected only by a ripple of urban disorder, a thesis of disorder that tends to clarify the subsequent resolution of order. The king and his entourage and the god Bhairava are moved by immemorial ritual order, as the sun moves through the year. Even the tug of war that threatens to disrupt the movement of the chariot and that determines which half of the city it will move to first is in the realm of luck and chance, the neutral non-moral realm of the astral deities.

There are also marked contrasts in the emphases of Swanti, the lunar New Year's sequence, and Biska:. However, to anticipate chapter 16, the contrasts are internal to the entire annual cycle, and not in any obvious way semantically urged by the contrasts of the solar and lunar cycles, except perhaps in a contrast in personal effort in Swanti and passive witness in Biska:. Swanti's emphasis is on the affirmation of the family in the household, Biska:'s is on the integration of the city as a whole and in its relation to annual time.

2. Biska: as a structural focal sequence.

The Biska: sequence, as we have described it, differs sharply from the majority of miscellaneous annual events in ways that lead us to characterize it as of focal importance for Bhaktapur. The first evident difference is quantitative. It has more events and more deities and consumes more time than do the events we presented in the last chapter; the closest being the Saparu events. Biska:'s mass of events is not just a disconnected collection, however; its actions and themes are woven together and related in var-

ious ways. This adds formal complexity to quantity. In contrast to many other events, the entire city is represented, not just an area, and there is a representative range of actors from king to untouchable, not just some one or some few social segments. Furthermore, the themes and actions of the sequence make use of those representative actors and spaces to make general and basic statements about the city in itself , and not about just one element of life in the city, a shared anxiety, for example, about disease. We call such elaborated festivals "focal." While Saparu with its emphasis on death and carnival may be thought of as an antistructural focal festival, Biska:, like Mohani (in its own and different way), emphasizes urban order, and thus is a "structural focal festival."

3. Interactive versus parallel features: bases for solidarity.

The complex pattern of Biska: means that to the "parallel" relations of simpler festivals, where many of the city's units are doing the same sorts of things at the same time,^[58] there is added interactive or "syntagmatic" relations at the city level . In the major focal structural festivals—Biska: and Mohani—there is a central emphasis on interrelated actions on the public civic level, while parallel actions, such as household feasts and neighborhood jatras , are secondary. This is in contrast with, say, an important major festival sequence like Swanti, in which the major civic significance is in the parallel performance of the events within all households (events that may be interactive within the unit itself).

In contrast to parallel events—which have static structural significance—interactive events are dynamic, and can express relations, conflicts, dilemmas, resolutions and their failures; in short, they have the quality of narrative and drama. Actors, space, time, and plot combine to say something—if the proper rhetorical devices can be found to capture and hold the attention of the narrative's audience.

4. Human actors.

In Biska:'s parallel events individuals throughout the city participate as members of households, of mandalic^[*] sections, and (less systematically) as members of twa :s and neighborhoods. At the level of the public urban performance, the city's central interactive narrative, The Adventures of Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] , we have as our cast the Newar king, the chief Brahman, and representatives of the Josi, Acaju, Bha, Jugi, Po(n), Maha(n), Sa:mi, Ka:mi, and various Jyapu groups. Many of these personages are gathered into the Bhairava chariot, which is pulled and tugged at by men of various clean thars —

subdivided, however, at the chariot's two ends into representatives of the upper city and the lower city. The selection of thar s in the interactive public performances effectively samples and represents the city's traditional macrostructural, ritual, and productive structure. The two city halves represent by summation its entire space, but this particular way of representing it (rather than, say, by the sum of the mandalic^[*] sections that represent the space of the city in Mohani) has special implications.

In Biska:'s action the king, priests, and thar representatives do not, in fact, act. They are passively moved. They are moved through the city on fixed routes, at fixed times, at the mercy of the tugs of war that represent the tensions in the city underneath the order that the chariot riders represent. They represent order, but they are not the active agents of that order. In Mohani they act, and the power of the Ksatriya^[*] and of the Brahman as a Tantric practitioner are explored. While in Biska: the passive adventures of king, Brahman, and their company are in the public routes and spaces of the city, in Mohani, their actions are for the most part confined to the sacred and royal enclosure of the Taleju temple.

5. Divine actors.

The central deities in this festival are the powerful dangerous deities Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] . The Mandalic^[*] Goddesses and the remainder of the city's important dangerous deities are foci of important but secondary parallel activities. The Yasi(n) God has no independent existence in Bhaktapur aside from this special festival use and is rather a focal sacralized collection of important images, signs, and ideas, a kind of ad hoc deified object. While other deities contribute meaning because their identities transcend Biska: (although Biska:, in turn, contributes to their meanings), the Yasi(n) God is no more than a component, albeit an important one, in the festival sequence.

As in Mohani and in the Devi cycle the divine actors in Biska: are dangerous, not ordinary, gods. As we have repeatedly argued, they represent—in their contrast to the benign, personal, and familial moral and dharmic deities—forces that threaten the moral order on the one hand, but that can be captured through power and made to protect it on the other. In Biska: the male dangerous deities—Bhairava and the Yasi(n) God)—predominate. In Mohani the female deities are central. In keeping with the balance of male and female deities, which distinguishes the benign from the dangerous deities (chap. 8)—although here unusually represented within the realm of dangerous deities—Biska:'s

deities are portrayed as powerful but limited beings, rather like humans in the social world, in their irritations, ineffectual attempts to escape, and passivity. Instead of the complex rites that will bring the dangerous goddesses of Mohani into some useful relation to the city, Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] and the Yasi(n) God are, like the chariot's representative social microcosm, simply manipulated and moved through space like puppets. The "deities" at issue here, far below the surface and beyond anthropomorphic gods, are order and chaos.

6. Space.

Throughout Biska: city space is carefully made use of to represent the city itself and the narrative movement of the festival sequence. Space, it is important to recall, is only one of the possible ways of representing Bhaktapur—or any community. A community can be represented, for example, by the sum of its citizens, or (as in Swanti) its family units. Furthermore, when spatial units are used in representation, Bhaktapur has various options for demarcating the whole city. In Biska:'s narrative aspect it is the city halves, areas whose antagonistic potentials are traditionally emphasized, which are used to represent the city. The "neutral" points between them (Ta:marhi Square and Ga:hiti Square and Yasi[n] Field), and the neutral axis connecting them is played against an axis of struggle between the upper and lower halves of the city defined by that axis. The neutral points and axis are "liminal," out of ordinary space and time. It is here that the adventures of the nonordinary deities Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] unfold, and here that the Yasi(n) God waits to start the next year.

Independent of the central narrative other spaces are used starting, for the most part, on the fourth day of the sequence. The goddesses of the mandalic^[*] sections are brought beyond the borders of the sectors to their pitha seats, enacting the essential meaning of these goddesses—their relation to the dangerous, amoral outside of the city. And throughout the city the major dangerous deities are, in a unique movement, taken outside of their "houses" and seated in the public city space. The city is represented through the parallel movement of all these deities, although the movements of two neighboring pairs of the goddesses include an echo of Bhairava and Bhadrakali's ambiguous enactment of unity and disunity. In another enactment of unification the city's people move on the eighth day in a jatra along the pradaksinapatha^[*] to worship all the dangerous deities. This movement, like the movements of the chariot, is within the city boundaries in contrast to a similar sequential summating movement to the pithas of the Mandalic^[*]

Goddesses to the bordering outside of the city, during Mohani. In the private realm, households—which can be considered either as social units or spaces—are having their feasts on the same designated days throughout the city's larger space and social hierarchy.

In the legend of the Chuma(n) Ganedya: the legitimate location and extent of the city itself is emphasized and given a divine charter. In keeping with the resolutions of the festival action itself, this legend is a supernatural warrant for civic unity—a warrant that serves to suppress the autonomy and divisive strife of preexisting and/or persisting smaller communities and segments.

In contrast with Mohani, the spatial emphasis is primarily on the internal integration of the spatial components of the city. In Mohani—and in the Devi cycle generally—the emphasis is on the city's defining and unifying contrasts and transactions with its environing outside.

7. Narrative content.

The festival sequence talks about, so to say, social order and disorder. So do all the major festivals, but with significant differences in the aspect of order and disorder at issue, and in the sources of disorder and the means of rectification portrayed.

The central public enactment is the movement of the king, priests, charioteer-warriors, Jyapu and craftsmen, and Bhairava in one chariot and Bhadrakali^[*] and her attendants in another. The two chariots allow for an expression of one opposition. The movements of the first, the largest and most important chariot, makes use of the two halves of the city for another opposition directly representing the city and its divisions. The main actors in the hierarchical macrosocial system—including important representatives of the large middle-level and lower-middle-level groups—are gathered into the main chariot as a static unit and moved passively, in conjunction with Bhairava, in a movement along an interstitial axis from one "central" point to another. In the course of this journey they deviate to "show themselves" to the real space (existing in the everyday civic world, in contrast to the transcendent axis and points) of the two halves. This realization is accompanied by struggles between the halves which threaten disruption and danger. Disorder must be enacted so that the processes and forces that overcome it may, in their turn, be dramatically prepared for and meaningful. It must be remembered that in the chariot are real kings (at least they were in the Newar autonomous past), real chief Taleju Brahmans, and real representative citizens all exposed to real discomforts and dangers, to real risks. In the middle of their journey, that is, in the middle

of the festival sequence itself, they—in unison with the Bhadrakali^[*] chariot—are brought into contact with the other main symbolic cluster of the sequence, the Yasi(n) God, at the moment when cooperative efforts raise, again with some risk, and then, at the interstitial moment between two years, lower it to mark the beginning once again of a new solar year and the recommencement of annual time.

Biska: in its central public enactment represents the order that is automatically and ineluctably imposed on the possibility of civic disorder in the ritually ordered movement of traditional forms through time. The chariot does not move through any activity of the king and priests. Mild disorder and reestablishment of order, with the latter emphasized, happen to those witnesses.

The achievement of unity is pervasively represented in Biska: through sexual intercourse, with its reminder of the division that the two sexes represent. This action, in the case of Bhadrakali^[*] and Bhairava, reflects underlying anxieties, for it is not sure whether the encounter is in sexual union or in battle.

Although the male deity Bhairava takes precedence in the action of the festival, with Bhadrakali^[*] a faint presence in his shadow, the legends associated with Biska: make her the dominant figure. She is responsible for the site of the city, and Biska: is in some accounts her festival. She must capture Bhairava—or the part of him that was unable to escape—to keep him in the city. In contrast to the major dramatic enactments of the Devi cycle where the dominant female dangerous deities are on center stage, Biska: relegates the Goddess to the legends describing the state of things prior to the establishment of the ordered city. She is here a potentially ominous shadow at the edges of social order as the king and Bhairava survey their socially ordered city, a reminder that Bhaktapur's social order is only a precarious clearing in a larger, different space.

The stories gathered around the Yasi(n) God explore the danger to men and the society they are taken centrally to constitute of women—both as sexual beings and as inadequately controlled wives. The domestication of the princess^[59] is accomplished by a man, a prince, but through the absolutely necessary aid of Bhadrakali^[*] , who in the ambivalent use of dangerous deities both represents the same sorts of dangers as does the princess and can—and must—be used to bring them under control. But the transformation of the princess into an ordinary wife is—the fatal problems caused to the Tantric expert Sesar^[*] Acaju by his wife remind Bhaktapurians—a problem that will never be fully solved, no more than the unity of the city will be. But in the moments of resolu-

tion in the Biska: sequence, at the achievement of the lowering of the Yasi(n) God and the final momentary reconciliation of Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] , the problems somehow seem to be resolved. It will all need to be repeated yet again in each revolving year.

The emphasis in the stories that inform Biska: is on the legendary realm where the supernatural once made contact with Bhaktapur—at a particular moment of real historical time and at a point of earthly space—for the purposes of locating or ordering that city. The events of the legends happened only once, although they must be repeatedly memorialized. In Mohani the explanatory stories of the central narrative take place within a thoroughly transcendent and timeless mythic realm—with no relation to terrestrial time and space—where a battle is taking place in which the city must actively and magically participate each year, over and over again. The presence and force of the "supernatural" is quite different in the two structural focal festivals.

8. Rhetoric.

We are concerned everywhere in this study with those aspects of symbolic form in Bhaktapur that are presumably significant to its citizens. It is not enough for such forms to be meaningful, they must also be engaging . For this a sort of rhetoric of symbolic form is necessary. We have noted some miscellaneous engaging devices: the advertised mystery of the Jaki Gwa and the whereabouts of the "true" Bhairava jatra image, the ambiguity and psychic resonances stirred by the princess whose nose (or vagina) hides snakes, the hesitation between sex and aggression in the ambiguous banging together of Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] , and the fascination of watching the major figures in the hierarchical order symbolized by themselves. To jeopardize the symbol of a king is one thing; to jeopardize the king himself is something more.

One of the sources of the fascination of Biska: for the participants and, often the onlookers, is that it involves real risk. In its symbolization of conflict a movement can always occur, a breakdown, into real physical and social danger. Here marked symbolism is m danger of collapsing into real life.

9. The message.

It is possible to tease out of the drama or dramas of the city's various complex symbolic enactments, a task simplified somewhat when they are compared with each other, something like a central import or message, a message that is simple and redundantly presented. For Biska: this seems to be something like this: admire and

celebrate the civic order. That order may momentarily and frighteningly sway and lurch, but when the city works together—or refrains, really, from not working together, for the task is not difficult—and accepts the traditional directives of the mesocosmic order, it will all hold together; the space and personnel of the city will remain unified both in itself and in relation to the pulse of annual cyclical time. The main danger to civic order, in Biska:'s main narrative, and in contrast to other narratives, is civic strife, the danger of something going awry in the balance of those human forces that constitute the city.

Other aspects of disorder, those beyond the moral sphere of the city, are alluded to in Biska:'s legends. But Biska: in itself is not centrally concerned with them. That is the concern of the Devi cycle.