A Note on Hill and River

Bhaktapur, like very many cities, makes use of a hill—on which it is built—and a bordering river (see fig. 6), but characteristically elaborates and adds to their elementary "practical" significance—the hill as potential citadel, or as a residential center for the exploitation of the surrounding arable farmland, the river as a source of water (but not, in the Kathmandu Valley, for navigation). The hill, with its higher-status temples, palaces, and residential areas located toward its crest, adds to the more significant orientation of central-peripheral (discussed below) an additional dimension of higher-lower. Bhaktapur is situated in accordance with the traditional ideals of South Asian town planning on the right bank of its river (Dut [1925] 1977, 24), the Hanumante. As is the case for all Newar royal cities and for those secondary Newar towns situated on rivers, the direction of the flow of the river is one basis for the discrimination of an important division of the city or town into two halves, an upper half (upstream), and a lower half (downstream). The river, a locus for dying, cremation, and purification, is outside the traditional boundaries of the city and takes much of its meaning (which it shares with the ideal symbolic Indian river, the Ganges) from its transitional position at a boundary to another world and its flow toward still another, whose orders are other than that of the city.