Spheres, Structures, and Oppositions

If it seems unproblematic to characterize Bhaktapur's strange order as mostly "religious," the symmetrical characterization of its ordinary, everyday order as "secular" is problematic. Louis Dumont approached this asymmetry by characterizing for Hindu societies one particular component of our strange order as a religious sphere within a larger religious universe , a universe that also encompasses a "secular" sphere.

Dumont was specifically trying to distinguish the functions of the king and the Brahman. He thus proposed (1970, 68) that Hindu religious universes were characterized by a royal, secular, political sphere of the king, a sphere characterized by power or force, opposed to a religious sphere of the Brahman, a realm of "values and norms." We argued in chapter 10 that this particular phrasing was problematic and even misleading for Bhaktapur.

We have in the course of this book encountered many contrasting terms, emphasizing some and touching on others. Among them are dangerous deities and benign deities; Tantric religion and ordinary religion; "secular" and "religious"; conventional and ritual; king (and court, merchants, farmers, craftsmen) and Brahman (and other kinds of priests, and polluting thars ); worldly power and other-worldly force; unclean (epitomized by the Po[n]) and clean (epitomized by the Brahman); orders where purity is irrelevant and orders where purity is central; amoral realms and moral realms; the bordering outside of the city (and of each of its component units) and the inside of the city (and of each of its component units); life stages for males prior to the Kaeta Puja ceremony and subsequent life stages. Among these heterogeneous oppositions, for any particular contrast the right hand term is that of the ordinary dharma and/or of one of the functions of the Rajopadhyaya Brahman as highlighted by the contrast. The collection of contrasts and oppositions to "Brahman" are not as a whole unified, at least not in their surface characteristics. Taken together, however, they help anatomize Bhaktapur's larger traditional ordering of meaning.

That order is more complex than a secular royalty versus a sphere of Brahmanical religiosity expressing the dharmic world of values and norms. Let us review some of the aspects of that order which are in some ways peculiar to Bhaktapur and South Asian places that are or were like it.

1. As we have noted in chapters 8 and 9, in many Hindu communities in South Asia the religion of the dangerous deities is thought by the upper-status Hindus in those communities (and by many modern Indians) as an inferior, illegitimate, superstitious folk religion, alien to true Hinduism and its Aryan roots. The legitimate religion of such communities is held by these elites to be the moral Brahmanical religion concerned with benign deities, representatives of an ideal patriarchal social order. In Bhaktapur, in contrast, the dangerous deities are fully legitimate, and not only legitimate but at the focus of aristocratic and royal Tantrism. Bhaktapur thus has two equally legitimate religious spheres within its religious universe, a religion of moral order (ordinary Brahmanical religion) and a religion of power (the cult of the dangerous deities both as Tantrism and as the practices of noninitiates). The religion of power variously supports, evades, and transcends the moral order.

We have repeatdly characterized the dangerous deities and their religion as representing the environing forces that both threaten and sustain the moral religion of the city. So viewed, the dangerous deities are at a systematically "higher" level than the benign ones in the sense that they provide the context for the moral religion, respond to problems that the moral system cannot deal with, and in so doing protect the moral realm. The polytheistic separation and discrimination of deities makes such a two-tiered representation possible, this being one aspect of the complex ordering of the city's pantheon into a fundamentally useful system of signs (chap. 8).^[3]

2. Bhaktapur's splitting of religious spheres within the religious universe makes untenable a simple opposition of a religious sphere concerned with values and a secular, political sphere, that of the king, concerned with power. For there is a special religious precinct concerned with power and those who use it within the "secular" sphere. That secular power in Bhaktapur's world view includes much more than the political power of the king and ksatriya^[*] ; it includes all direct operations

on the world that are not fully produced by the assent to the system of dharmic values. The religion of power is the proper religion of kings, ksatriyas^[*] , merchants, farmers, and craftsmen—not as individuals who must follow the dharma , must worry about rebirths, and whose priest, serving them as generalized individuals is the Brahman as purohita —but in their particular functions as specialists in the "direct" manipulation of the world, through what Dumont calls "force" and places in opposition to the ordering of "values and norms."

3. The use of force in this sense thus characterizes not only the king's activities but also the activities of a large segment of the city's hierarchy cutting through from its top almost to its bottom. This vertical segment of Bhaktapur's social system is defined against a large group of what we have called (in chap. 10) "priests," "auxiliary priests," and "covert priests," who are united most saliently as manipulators of purity. The manipulation of purity characterizes this latter segment of Bhaktapur's organization, as the manipulation of force characterizes the former.

Tantric priests and Brahmans in their particular functions as Tantric priests (and, for different reasons, the Josi astrologers) do not belong with the group of purity manipulators and thus to the religion of "values and norms," but to the sphere of the manipulators of power. They deal with power in the universe through attempts at understanding, alliance, avoidance, and forceful coercion in close metaphorical alliance with the city's other technicians of power.

It is the Brahman as Brahman and the various sorts of purity manipulators who derive from him and support him who deal with that segment of Bhaktapur's life which is constituted through definitions of what persons and systems of persons are and should be. They manipulate that particular system of symbols that is effective because it shapes and helps constitute the arena of definition and value. They are primarily technicians of those symbolic forms that constitute actors and community in Bhaktapur.

The contrasting segment of Bhaktapur also makes use of symbols to represent and support their functions. But their primary functions, no matter how important their symbolic component, work directly on the world in a different way—through direct manipulation of materials and physical forces and of those psychological forces that make political threats and promises effective. They are thus allied with the priests of Tantrism who in local conception use power and who, viewed from

outside the phrasings of Hinduism, make use of mental forces beyond the self and the social person constituted with the aid of the religion of the benign gods to serve, sustain, control, or dissolve that person.

4. The symbolic forms and enactments of both the religion of power and the religion of norms and values are within the realm of the extraordinary. The roots of each in the ordinary are different. The moral religion augments, resonates with, and puts to social use images of ideal and tolerable social behavior; the religion of the dangerous deities augments, resonates with, and transforms for social purposes forms that are suppressed in ordinary awareness, that are unnamed and unspoken in ordinary discourse with others and within the self, that are relegated to and express the non-social aspects of the mind, alien to the person and to the proper logic and categories of everyday life.

This suppressed realm is represented with suitable transformations within the realm of dangerous religion, where its forces are tentatively captured for the purposes of social order itself. The original nature and dangers of these forces and their capturing and social transformation into tentatively domesticated forms are vividly portrayed in Bhaktapur's myths and, most concretely, in its legends,^[4] as well as in the city's symbolic enactments.

Legends bring together dangerous deities and heroic figures in a realm of the marvelous. They suggest that even the secularized sphere of power has, in fact, a certain uncanny quality, for it represents—as does the associated order of the dangerous deities—a violation and transcendence of the central dharmic moral order. Techniques of power, political force, magic, Tantra, wish and dream, dangerous deities, and demonic forces all inhabit—from the viewpoint of the morally organized city life—one metaphorically unified sphere. That sphere is not exactly what the modern world wishes to mean by the secular.

Yet, in Bhaktapur's world of shifting viewpoints the Brahman's religious sphere, at least as exemplified by the Brahman himself, is not always seen as an unproblematic heightening of the banal and ordinary. From some viewpoints the entanglement in the manipulation of the system of purity and impurity of the Brahman and his allies has something suspect about it, something encumbering and unpleasant, something that is not represented in contrast but, rather, directly by the state of the untouchable. The sphere of the Brahman's operations has in such perspectives, where the "secular" is privileged, a displacement from the

banal quite different from the displacement, from another viewpoint, of the realm of power.

5. It is not only the "sphere of power" that uses force. The realm of norms and values and its religion has, of course, characteristic "forces" at its disposal. These are the familiar forces that sustain the unity of any moral community—a great miscellaneous variety of agreements on what is real and what is sane, of definitions, identifications, values, goals, concerns for face and reputation and being loved or admired, and the wish to avoid guilt and shame and ostracism.

These forces are internal to the community. They help constitute it and keep it going from moment to moment. They are made, to a considerable degree, to seem ordinary and naturalized forces. This naturalization, generating the force of the taken for granted, is, as we have asserted in chapter 2, much more difficult to achieve in Bhaktapur than in some other simpler communities, and people often become potentially subversive skeptics who must be kept in line by the emergence of the superordinate forces of the marked realm.

6. Bhaktapur places most of its marked symbols in the religious sphere, which is the realm of the gods, a bounded domain of a still larger Hindu religious universe, a great mind in which gods along with all living, sentient things participate, out of which they are generated, whose immutable moral laws they are subject to, and whose ultimate nature they can come to glimpse. Other complex civilizations whose citizens shared the "symbol hunger" (chap. 2) of Bhaktapur's citizens have elaborated realms of marked symbols, but came to place them elsewhere. Thus, in the West, secular drama, literature and art, are marked as extraordinary—by setting, cadence, presentation, and other devices—but have come to represent a class of communication that is in some sense "imaginary," "only symbolic," not to be taken literally. Until its contemporary transformations most of Bhaktapur's extraordinary statements have not called themselves imaginary, but as belonging to another sort of reality, the reality of the gods' divine sphere. In a different bounding than the Western one, both Bhaktapur's everyday reality and the reality of the gods can be seen as imaginary, as maya , when grasped by the highest intuitions of religious awareness. But, for the most part, gods and Bhaktapurians are content to remain in their divine illusions and by putting the imagination of the extra-

ordinary in a religious subsphere to give it and its representations the strongest possible position in the life of the community and its citizen's minds.^[5]

7. The ordinary masquerades as simple reality. Bhaktapur sometimes attempts to make problematic things natural by forcefully anchoring them in the sensually perceived world. The lives of the Po(n)s, in a vivid example, are manipulated so that their connection with real feces and the taking of life and their degraded living conditions become the perceptually based evidence for the reality of the system of pollution and purity and of the effects of bad (and thus, in contrast, good) karma . It is the problematic aspects of karmic and pollution theory, debatable and rethinkable in the terms of the other doctrines and viewpoints common in Bhaktapur, that makes such anchoring in the apparently objective useful.

8. Bhaktapur's sphere of the religious and of the ordinary have boundaries, boundaries of a peculiar permeability (see fig. 35). We have commented on the crossing of boundaries—the movements of the gods in their processions out of their temples into a carefully designated city space, and of the Nine Durgas in their somewhat more chaotic forays into the city's neighborhoods. These moves cross the boundaries of sacred enclosures and allow the usually isolated marked realm to spill, within some limits, over into the ordinary. The closeness to the ordinary of Bhaktapur's religious sphere—in contrast to the self-banishment of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic transcendent deity—as well as the air of autonomy and reality of those deities in their on-the-ground manifestations in comparison with the "imaginary" and "conventional" status of latter-day Western art and literature, give the boundaries between the ordinary and the strange realms a special and problematic permeability and make urgent the problem of defining places for the gods, keeping them in those places if possible, and dealing with them if they leave them. For Hindu deities, at least in Bhaktapur, do not need the force of a Western miracle to enter the secular realm.

9. Not only do symbolic constructions occasionally cross boundaries to invade the realm of the ordinary but, in another direction, the "real" may be thought of as occasionally crossing what in the West is often taken as an inviolable boundary into the symbolic. Westerners, as represented by Freud, expect the "overt" content of a symbol of emo-

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Figure 35.
Problems on the boundary between the ordinary and the extraordi-
nary. The living goddess Kumari has her running nose wiped by her attendant.

tional importance ideally to be a disguised transformation of some powerfully disruptive complex of ideas and emotions that is its latent meaning or reference. A censor holds the two kinds of meaning apart and helps accomplish the bowdlerization of the overt form. If the symbolic form seems to stand for itself, especially if it is as fearsome and unpalatable as the raw unconscious form is thought to be, then Westerners sense a problem, something has collapsed, some reference has disappeared.^[6] Bhaktapur uses many "symbolic forms" that are directly in themselves powerfully meaningful, representing exactly the sorts of things that are—or were—presumably relegated to Western unconsciousness. In one dramatic example, human sacrifice, Bhaktapur once used the actual murder/sacrifice of its citizens to "represent" murder/ sacrifice. It has had to give up this resource and the actual sexual intercourse of nonspouses in Tantrism, but it still uses direct and powerful images of sexual arousal (e.g., Tantric images of Bhairava with an erect penis, a wild look and a flaming halo [see fig. 17, above]), of sexual intercourse (for example in temple images and in the banging together of the chariots in Biska:), of cannibalistic women, of women who change from images of sexual desire to images of death, of murder and dismemberment of human bodies. It uses these images not so much to represent or symbolize something, as to do something.

Bhaktapur's symbols of this sort do not take their power from their references and latent meanings, they are directly meaningful in themselves. Their disguise is not in a transformation of form—sword or umbrella for penis—so much as in an isolation of such powerful forms from their experiential bases, above all their bases in the life of the family,^[7] and a new placement in the religious sphere.

10. As we noted in chapter 16, some matters of what might seem to be of great potential interest in Bhaktapur are ignored in the city's symbolic enactments. We have commented in previous chapters on the privileged status of certain solidarities—the family, the phuki , the internal membership of the twa :, and the hierarchically ranked thar s—whose members are not represented as antagonists in the year's many representations of conflict and antagonism. In this light, conflict and antagonism within these essential units is "not thought about" in the annual enactments, and is displaced to safer realms. Intrafamilial conflict is illustrated in some of the pyakha(n) s of Saparu, typically where two men represent a farmer and his wife fighting, and is amply and presumably safely represented in tales about unfaithful and dangerous

wives, wicked stepmothers, and weak kings usually set in a magical, fairy tale mode.^[8] These relatively permissive realms are more playful, less real, than the religious spheres of the city. They are only stories; in them fantasy may be taken to be just fantasy.