The City Boundaries and the Bordering Outside
Bhaktapur, like the other Newar royal cities, was, as we have noted in chapter 3, once more or less surrounded by a wall that was pierced by gates. The wall had a defensive use, as descriptions of Bhaktapur's resistance to the siege of the Gorkhalis in 1769 vividly attested. However, the defensive uses of city walls, Paul Wheatley has argued, "in both Nuclear America and Asia [he is writing of early traditional cities] . . . were often much less important than in the West European city. In fact, not infrequently those constructions which the modern mind is predisposed to interpret as fortifications, and which may indeed have been pressed into service as such during emergencies, were in reality symbolic representations of the bounds of the cosmos" (1971, 372). Bhaktapur's wall (whatever other functions it had) and the boundaries it once marked were of enormous "symbolic" importance, as those
boundaries still are. Those boundaries may not represent the boundaries of the cosmos, for there is some sort of world beyond them, but they represent the boundaries of its central order, the order that is congenial to human beings and to what we will call (chap. 8) the "ordinary deities."
The various spatial features of importance of the city's symbolic organization, which we will be concerned with in the remainder of this chapter, are anchored in real city space by physical features—particular stones, shrines, temples, roads, and pathways. In the course of the "symbolic enactments" that take place in relation to these markers, significant points, boundaries, axes, and areas are clearly designated. In most cases these significant spatial features can be precisely mapped. When the city walls and their gates were still intact, the boundary of the city as a whole was, of course, clear. At that time it was, in fact, the only one of the spatial boundaries we are concerned with that was entirely represented in a physical, material form. Now in Bhaktapur the wall has disappeared except for a few gateways placed at the old ceremonial entrances into the city, and the problem for the people of Bhaktapur in knowing exactly where the city's boundaries are at all points is greater, often considerably greater, than it is for locating the boundaries of smaller units. Kathmandu still has a processional route annually followed by members of families bereaved during the previous year that follows and thus traces and retains in civic memory the ancient and now leveled walls of that city (Slusser 1982, vol. 1, 93). Bhaktapur does not have any such ceremonial tracing of its boundaries (although there is something like it in orderly sequential visits to the shrines of the boundary-making goddesses during the autumnal harvest festival, Mohani; see chap. 15), but rather marks and infers the boundary by the contrast of certain events and conditions held to take place properly outside of it but not inside. The city boundary is a dimensionless line producing an instant transformation between the inside of the city and the outside. The symbolic emphasis is on the outside of this line, what happens to citizens at home in Bhaktapur when they cross this line, and what kind of a contrasting world they find there. The inside and the outside help define each other. Not only is the emphasis on the outside of the line in its contrasts to the inside (and not on the line itself), but the emphasis is for the most part on a special aspect of the outside, the immediate outside, the bordering outside. The distant outside—where in Malla days one would eventually reach the other Newar cities, and beyond them Lhasa and India—is something else.
We will note some of the things and events that exist or take place just beyond the boundaries. This, like much of this chapter, will serve to introduce subjects dealt with in more detail and in different contexts later in the book.
City Boundaries: The Boundary-Protecting Goddesses
As we noted in the discussion of the drawing (map 1) of Bhaktapur as an ideal mandala[*] or yantra , there are the shrines of eight goddesses placed at the eight points of the compass at the boundary, and a ninth at the center.[3] The nine goddesses as a set are related to the internal division of the city's space into nine "mandalic[*] areas," and we will discuss this division below. The eight external goddesses preside each over her own area of the city, but together they protect the boundary itself. As a group of eight, they are the Astamatrkas[*] , the "Eight Mothers," whose positions, marked by open, aniconic shrines called pitha s, are conceived to be (although as we have noted, one of them is, "in fact," not) not only exactly at the eight points of the compass (which again they are not "in fact") but just outside the boundary of the city (see map 2). The Astamatrkas[*] are important members of a special class of deities, the "dangerous" deities, and represent a major component of that class, the manifestations of the "dangerous goddess," "the Goddess," Devi. We will return to Devi as a deity in chapter 8, in relation to the specific worship of the dangerous deities and Tantra (chap. 9), and again in that portion of the annual calendrical cycle devoted to her (chap. 15). The group of dangerous deities (who are ritually specified in that they—in contrast to the "benign deities"—receive blood sacrifices and offerings of alcoholic spirits) represent dangerous and at the same time vital forces that lie beyond the city's inner moral organization and also represent the defenses against those dangerous forces through a transformation in which those forces have been tenuously captured and controlled and placed at the service of the city. These particular goddesses ring the entire city and protect it from specific kinds of danger, such as earthquake, disease, and invasion. It is proper for them to be placed to the exterior of a boundary because they are the kinds of deities who are, as we will see, "semantically" proper for their particular job. Their position at the city's boundaries is not only a defense but a reminder of the kind of a world to be encountered there and of the contrast of that world with the interior where—within small protective perimeters of
various kinds also defended by the dangerous deities—a quieter moral order can proceed under the tutelage of other kinds of deities.
As is the case with most of the significant symbolic markers of Bhaktapur's mesocosm, an encounter with the Eight Mothers and the boundary they represent, protect, and characterize is ineluctably brought about in the course of certain necessary symbolic enactments. The protective goddess of a person's particular residential area of the city must be worshiped during the course of certain major rites of passage by the male members of the extended patrilineal family unit, the phuki . Almost all of Bhaktapur's people also visit the boundary shrines (and their central focus), over the course of nine days of the major autumnal harvest festival, Mohani (chap. 15). People visit each one on its particular designated day, proceeding in the course of the nine days in the auspicious clockwise direction from one shrine to the next, finally, in effect, circumambulating the city's borders.[4]
City Boundaries: The External Seat of the Lineage God, The Digu God
The people of Bhaktapur must cross to the outside of the city's boundaries (see map 3) to worship their phuki 's lineage deity, represented usually by a "natural" stone and worshiped through the rituals proper to dangerous deities (chaps. 8 and 9). This god is the Digu God (or sometimes and popularly, the Dugu God), the lineage deity of a phuki . The Digu God worship is for the highest thar s, (Pa[n]cthariya and above)—that is, those who have upper-class Tantric practices—only one of two major components of lineage god worship (chap. 9), but for the middle-level and lower-level thar s it is the only form. The location of shrines for the worship of lineage gods on the outside of a settlement or village is also the practice of Nepalese Chetri communities (K. B. Bista 1972, 66) and has been described in other Newar communities (e.g., Toffin 1977, 31). Informants in Bhaktapur cannot explain why the shrines of the Digu God are outside of the city; explanatory stories are vague, and it is unclear to what possible historical reality they might refer. One story is that in the days of the Malla kings all families of Newars went to the same town (Hadigaon)[5] for their lineage god worship, with each lineage presumably having its own shrine there. But, the story goes, as this was too far away the shrines were moved to the outskirts of each of the Valley cities. Some others say that the place
Map 3.
The symbolic boundaries of the city. The external placement of the Digu lineage gods. The physical city is represented as a
bounded shaded area. Each peripheral dot represents the placement of the external lineage deity of a particular phuki or of a group of
split phukis. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
where the shrines are located is the place where the original founders of each family lineage entered the city. This comment on the exterior position of the Digu God shrines suggests an actual or fantasized connection of their locations in the past to the historical origins of the city's ancient patrilineages.[6] If this connection (if it ever really existed) is now mostly lost, the Digu Gods must nevertheless be worshiped just to the outside of the city's boundaries, and it is the kind of worship and they are the kinds of gods that point outward beyond the organized interior life of the city.
City Boundaries: Cremation, Dying, And Purification
The river is considered to he outside of the city's boundaries to the south, as are the ghat[*] s (Bhaktapur Newari, ga :) or steps leading down to the river on its city side. At the river clothes are washed and people bathe as a phase of major purification procedures (chap. 11). People approaching death are sometimes brought to the river ghat[*] s so that their feet and legs may be immersed in the river at the actual moment of death (app. 6). The city's three cremation grounds (Newari dip , from Sanskrit dipa , burning, blazing) are also outside the city, as they are in all South Asian Hindu communities. Two of the major cremation grounds are beyond the river and, as they should be ideally, to the south of the city. These two cremation grounds (Khware Dip and Mu ["main"] Dip) are each associated with one of the ghat[*] s on the city side of the river, and are connected to them by bridges spanning the river. There is a third major dip , Bramhayani (Sanskrit Brahmani),[7] to the east of the city, named after the protective boundary goddess of the eastern pole of the city.
Although we are concerned here with city boundaries and inside/ outside contrasts and relations, it is convenient at this point to introduce some other aspects of the cremation grounds in their relation to city space and to its status system. The three dip s are for the "clean" thar s, the "unclean" ones use various fields outside the city (although on the city side of the river) away from the three main dip s. Various Newar chronicles suggest that the cremation areas of most of the significant macrostatus groups were, or at least were held ideally to be, separated. Thus, according to Hasrat's chronicle, Jayasthiti Malla "distinguished and classified thirty-six tribes according to their trades and professions . . . [and] constituted for each of the thirty-six a separate masan [cremation ground] or place for burning their dead" (Hasrat
1970, 55ff.). There are now traditional places within the grounds for some thar s, but as a whole the cremation grounds are related to areas of the city, rather than to social status. People who have been brought to die at Hanuman ga : are cremated at the Khware Dip. Those who had been brought to die at Cupi(n) ga : are cremated at the Mu Dip. It is a matter of family custom and choice which ga : they are brought to. Most people die at home, within the city, and these people are usually cremated at Brahmani Dip if they live in the upper half of the city, and Mu Dip if they live in the lower hall
Gutschow and Kölver (1975) called attention to the fact that funeral processions to the dip s were determined by residence in a particular twa: (a village-like division of the city; see below). "Now there are exact prescriptions regulating not only who has to use which [cremation ground], but also the way a corpse has to be borne to his proper place of burning. The decisive feature in this is geographical. The body of a man who belonged to a particular ward [twa: ] has to be carried along the way prescribed to all the members of his ward" (Gutschow and Kölver 1975, 27). These differentiated routes, based on twa: residency, recall Oldfieid's statement, previously quoted, that the number of gateways in the old city walls exactly corresponded to the number of toles (twa: s) in the city, and that the maintenance of the gates was the responsibility of the local twa: authorities (Oldfield [1880] 1974, vol. I, p. 95f.). Because of the mixed collection of thar s in many twa: s, this arrangement, as Gutschow and Kölver point out, tends to neutralize the distinctions of caste (1975, 27).
This "communitas, " represented by a collapse of status distinctions in funeral procession and place of cremation, is typical of many activities that are outside and beyond the ordinary civic structuring of Bhaktapur; for example carnival and Tantric rituals. In all of these, however, there is always a residue that is excluded from the egalitarian community, in this case the lowest thar s, who are refused even the common cremation grounds.[8]
City Boundaries: The Untouchables' Proper Place
In all traditional South Asian cities the lowest segment of the social hierarchy had to live outside the city, and was thus designated as being in opposition to the pure inhabitants of the inside of the city.[9] The ancient classical Indian treatise on applied politics, the Arthasastra of Kautila[*] , states that "heretics and candalas shall live beyond the burial
grounds" (quoted in Dutt [1925, p. 151]), which themselves were to be outside the city.
Various chronicles or vamsavali presenting Jayasthiti Malla's formalization of Bhaktapur's religious, social, and economic organization, note that Poriya (Bh. Po[n] or Pore), had to live outside the city (see map 4), and could not enter the city after sundown (Hodgson manuscripts, n.d, vol. 11, p. 114; Basnet [1878] 1981). Oldfield, in the sequel to some remarks that we have already quoted, wrote of the Newar old "capital cities" (in which he included the large secondary town of Kirtipur) that, "The limits of each city are . . . still strictly marked along the line where the ancient walls stood, and no Hindus but those of good caste are allowed to dwell within its precincts. This rule does not apply to Mussalmen, several of whom reside within the city of Kathmandu, but it is strictly enforced against Hindu outcasts, such as sweepers, butchers, executioners, etc., all of whom are obliged to live in the suburbs of the city" ([1880] 1974, vol. I, p. 95).
The sweepers and executioners are the Po(n)s, whose symbolic functions are, as we will see, of great persisting importance in Bhaktapur. The inclusion in this quotation of "butchers," the Nae, introduces a problem, and almost surely an error into the literature on thar residence patterns.[10] Nae at present live within the boundaries of the city, although they are located at its periphery, at the farthest from its high-status center (map 9, below). There are other low thar s, some of which are even lower and more impure than the Nae who live within the city, and to all evidence always have, for example, the Jugi (map 10, below).
The question of the position of the Nae in relation to Bhaktapur's boundaries is connected with another question, one concerning the position of the city's main city-wide processional route, the pradaksinapatha[*] . In ideal ancient Indian tradition the pradaksinapatha[*] surrounded the village or city (Dutt 1925, 33), and Mary Slusser has argued that this was the case in Kathmandu (1982, vol. 1, p. 93). The Bhaktapur pradaksinapatha[*] (map 12, below) moves within the city as a flattened meandering oval, roughly paralleling the city's boundary, running through and thus tying together all except one outlying twa: (below) as well as the upper and lower cities. Bhaktapur's internal pradaksinapatha[*] position within the city also is found in the Newar town of Panauti. Barré et al. argue that in the town of Panauti the processional route acts as a "boundary of purity," as the butchers and sweepers live in its exterior (1981, 40f.). Such a tempting distinction does not work for the distribution of thar s in Bhaktapur (and even in
Map 4.
Space, status, and the symbolic boundaries of the city. The settlement of the Po(n) untouchables at the southern edge of the
city. The settlement is considered to be lust beyond the symbolic boundaries of the city. Map courtesy of Niels Gutschow.
the cited account of Panauti there are admitted exceptions, like the dwellings of the very low Jugis within the central area). As we have noted, the interior position of the pradaksinapatha[*] in Bhaktapur, and the fact that both the sweepers and the butchers live peripheral to it, led Gutschow and Kö1ver (1975, p. 21) to speculate that it follows the external boundary of some earlier city of Bhaktapur, but there is no apparent collaboration for this in other historical, archaeological, or persisting social forms.
It is unequivocally the Po(n)s, the sweepers, however, who have the special symbolic function of being intimately joined to the city to represent its most salient and necessary outsiders—they are the ones who must live just beyond the boundaries, and who in their conditions of life and in their powerful embedded meanings represent the transforming significance of that boundary to those privileged to live within it.
On Boundaries
The city walls and most of its gateways are long gone, but everyone in Bhaktapur knows that they exist, that the city is a clearly bounded entity, surrounded by an outside of contrasting nature, and they know approximately where the boundaries must be. They cannot ignore the boundary as they must cross it to the outside for worship of lineage gods, for worship of the "Eight Mothers," often to die and always to cremate others and be cremated themselves, and they must be sure that the untouchables, with whom they are deeply concerned, are fixed in their right place. The outside with which they are necessarily engaged is not everything outside of Bhaktapur, but a highly symbolized zone of encirclement. The far outside, which may be contrasted with this encircling, bordering near outside, includes areas of very mixed meaning—other Newar cities, pilgrimage sites, non-Hindu countries, and so on. But the near outside represents the anticity. The relation of bordering outside to inside characterizes not only the city as a whole but also the relations of many of its nested units to their particular outsides, and is reflected in many ways, in kinds of gods, kinds of worship, and the interplay between power and morality, kings and Brahmans. We will be concerned with these relations throughout the following chapters.
The relations of outside and inside are not a simple opposition. The outside has its special values—it has something to do with fertility and useful power as well as danger. As the kinds of deities who character the two realms suggest (chap. 8), outside and inside have different logics,
different relations to moral order. But all this is complementary. The major supernatural creatures at the outside are gods themselves, not antigods like Satan. The ordinary deities, like the ordinary people, need those outside gods, even if they are not comfortable with them.
In the symbolic representation and symbolic enactments concerning the city boundaries, it is the bordering outside and its nature that is emphasized. That outside is of such a nature that after a brief, lively, and instructive encounter with it, people are moved to reenter ordinary civic space with some relief. From the point of view of its impact on citizens for the purposes of social order the smbolization of the outside tends to push people back within the civic boundary.[11]
When the public space of the city as a whole is the focus of attention, as it is generally in this book, the external outside beyond the encircling borders is only one way out of the public city. Insofar as the behavior of an individual, a family, or whatever unit is out of the general public sight and of the direct influence of the city system, they are, from the point of view of that system also "outside," and thus households, thar s, guthi s, and so on, as well as the private "inside" part of a person's thoughts are outside the public moral world of the urban mesocosm. The inside of the city as a public moral civic space can be escaped in various directions, and the outside beyond the civic boundaries often joins in meaning with the small private realms hidden within the city.