Collapsed Structure Inside the City: Crossroads

The space beyond Bhaktapur's boundaries with its associated deities and symbolic enactments takes much of its meaning from its contrast with the moral and logical orders that are represented in the differentiated internal space of the public city. The outside represents a radically different kind of order. Some of this inside/outside contrast is, as we have noted, also found as part of the representation of the cellular com-

ponents of city life in their contrast with their immediate outside environments, which are in weaker form something like the relation of the city as a whole to its outside. There are other kinds of locations where differentiated order is collapsed and transformed and that are loci for symbolic representations and actions with connection to the symbolic aspects of the encircling outside of the city. The city's central points—the royal center and the Taleju temple, the Tripurasundari pitha , the central point between the two city halves, the point at which a pole, the Yasi(n), is erected to signify the start of the solar New Year (chap. 14)—all take some of their meanings from the transcendence of ordinary differentiated order. Another important example is the major crossroads in each twa: . At such crossings paths and roads radiate off to distant parts of the city. Each twa: has at least one of these crossings and more than one if it is a large twa: and divided into major neighborhoods. The major crossroads are the loci for uncarved stones (usually buried partly in the ground). The stone and the crossing point and the divinity thought to be located there are called the chwasa .^[26] (The general term for crossroad is dwaka .) The chwasa is sometimes considered as a divinity in itself, sometimes among the more erudite as the seat of the Tantric goddess, Matangi^[*] .

The chwasa is one of the places where polluting materials are deposited so that they will no longer be dangerous or problematic. It is there that the clothes a person has been wearing at the time of death are brought to be gathered up by a Jugi as part of his thar duty. Certain remains of formal feasts—particularly the portions of the head of a sacrificial animal that are distributed in a particular order to reflect the hierarchy of the leading men at the feast (chap. 9)—must be discarded there. The chwasa not only can absorb the polluted materials placed on it, materials that would be strongly contaminating if placed in any ordinary space within the city,^[27] but is also said to protect the area around it. The main chwasa s are said to protect the entire twa: . This combination of the power to absorb problematic ("polluting") material and to "protect" through power is generally characteristic of a class of deities, the "dangerous" deities, of which the chwasa (and Matangi^[*] ) is a member (chap. 8).

In his study of a Newar village, Pyangaon, Toffin notes that it has only one chwasa , which is at the northwest entrance to the village rather than inside it (1977, 33). That chwasa lies at a crossroad (personal communication)^[28] and is thought to be a gathering place for potentially

harmful spirits. It is also the place where people discard cloths soiled by menstruation, the umbilical cords of newborn infants, clothes of the dead, and food as offerings to potentially harmful spirits.

The association of crossroads with the unpropitious, the uncanny, and the "liminal" is widespread in South Asia and elsewhere in the world.^[29] Elsewhere in South Asia the inauspicious crossroads are sometimes associated with some form of the Tantric goddess. According to D. D. Kosambi, crossroads were "from the stone age, places where the Mothers were normally worshiped by savages whose nomad tracks met there" (1960, 144). He also quotes the classical writer Varahamihira that crossroads bring evil repute upon any house near their junction, and are to be included among inauspicious places (1960, 18).

Asked why the seat of the chwasa within the city is always a crossroads, a Newar Brahman said that perhaps it was because these crossroads are places where all sorts of people meet—clean and unclean, kings and humble people. The chwasa reminds people, he continued, that they are approaching a crossroad and they should proceed carefully. His speculation suggests the significance of these crossroads as deriving from the collapse of ordinary spatial order.

Not all crossroads are chwasa nor have uncanny significance. It is not clear which factors determine that a crossroads should become the seat of a chwasa . They must represent the tying together of important out-reaching routes for one thing. In an interesting variation of this theme, royal palaces are often in close approximation to major crossroads. In the town of Panauti, "The palace is placed so that all the routes coming from the exterior and all the main arteries of the city converge on it" (Barré, Berger, Feveile, and Toffin 1981, 43 [our translation]). Similarly, in both Kathmandu and Patan the Malla Palace was placed at major crossroads defining the axes of the old city. Mary Slusser, commenting on those cities, remarks that "given the traditional attitude in Hindu culture toward the inauspiciousness of crossroads, it seems surprising that such a site would have been conceived proper for the palace" (1982, 200). But the chwasa has the power to protect the twa: , and the dangerous goddess it represents has the power to protect the city, and, indeed, the cosmos. The alliance of royalty and Tantric deities and ideas in a common concern with power and with the transcendence of the ordinary civic categories and restraints—here suggested by this double use of crossroads—is, as we will see, widely represented in Bhaktapur's symbolism and symbolic action.