Introduction

Frank Kermode wrote of the London portrayed by Joseph Conrad in the Secret Agent that it "is the raw, dark, dirty middle of the world, where there is not structure in space or m time that enables men to know one another, or even to familiarize themselves with inanimate objects" (1983, 48). Bhaktapur is also at the middle of the world, but a polar world to Conrad's structureless turn-of-the-century London. In Bhaktapur space is created and made use of to enable the city's inhabitants to know one another and to know—in fact, to animate—objects.

In the 1850s Ambrose Oldfield ([1880] 1974, vol. I, p. 98) found some confusion in the spatial arrangements of Newar cities:

The streets through the different cities are mostly narrow, crooked and dirty. . .. The streets do not appear to have been laid out on any particular system. Two or three of the principal streets radiate from some of the gateways on the circumference of the city towards the darbar [the royal palace], which is usually situated near its center, and m their course they pass through some of the small squares (or toles ) with which each capital abounds. Other smaller streets connect the different squares and leading thoroughfares together, and these again are intersected by numerous narrow lanes, which ramify about the city in all directions.

But there was also order, (ibid., vol. l, p. 95f. [original parentheses]):

During the time of the Niwar [sic] Rajas each city was surrounded by a high wall, in different parts of which were large gateways, which gener-

ally remained open, but in times of danger or disturbance could be closed and defended. Since the Gorkha conquest of the valley the walls have been allowed to decay. . .. The limits of each city are, however, still strictly marked along the line where the ancient walls stood, and no Hindu but those of good caste are allowed to dwell within its precincts. . .. The number of gateways corresponded exactly with the number of squares (toles ) within the city, each gateway being associated with a particular square, and placed under the municipal control of the same local authorities, who were as much responsible for the repairs and defense of the gateway as they were for the general management of the square. In each city the largest and most important building is the royal palace. . .. It is situated in a central part of the city, and opposite to its principal front there is an open irregular square . . . round which temples of various kinds are clustered together

Oldfield was glimpsing something of the spatial order of the later Malla cities after seventy years of decay. The construction of villages, towns, and cities as symbolic structures is ancient and ubiquitous in South Asia, and Bhaktapur, like the other Malla centers, had borrowed and developed for purposes of such an order a widespread and ancient areal vocabulary of significant spatial forms.

In this chapter we will present what we consider to be the most significant aspects of the organization of space for the organization of the life of Bhaktapur—"significant," that is, for the creation of order through the organization of symbolic form. Obviously, much of the city's urban order is significant in other ways, but such matters as the urban location of various kinds of craftsmen, the channels of transportation and communication in the city, and the spatial residues of (and potential clues for) earlier urban arrangements are of secondary interest for this study.^[1]

One of our first approaches to the study of Bhaktapur was a mapping of various aspects of city life—residence areas of thar s, location of temples and shrines, and festival routes—onto maps derived from aerial photographs of the city. During the course of the field research we learned that the urbanologist Niels Gutschow had been doing similar mapping. Gutschow has freely shared with us his maps of Bhaktapur's "ordered space" as he has called it (Gutschow and Kölver 1975), and we have made use of his maps and published writings as a major supplement and extension to our own mappings.

We start, then, with those spatial divisions—areas, lines, and points, that are sources and receptacles for meaning in themselves, that provide meaningful locations for the placement of other symbolic forms and

that set out the stage for what once seemed to be the city's endlessly repeated civic dance.