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

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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.