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.