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.