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.