Bhaktapur's Beginnings

By the end of the Licchavi period most of the ingredients were present that were eventually to lead to the climax community of the royal Malla city-states, a community in which various preexisting elements developed fully, flourished, and became, for a time, related to each other in a closely interdependent and stable system.

The Licchavi dynasty fell in the ninth century, and there followed a period of historic and historiographic confusion out of which emerged the Malla dynasty. In this period Newar society and culture were to develop and flourish in its urban centers—Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur—and their dependent hinterlands. The Malla dynasty lasted in one form or another until the late eighteenth-century conquest by the Gorkhalis, which tranformed Nepal and the Newars into something different.

We must now begin to bring Bhaktapur toward the center of the scene, and consider the Malla period from its perspective. From the beginning of the thirteenth century there were a number of contesting ruling families bearing the name "Malla," interspersed with rulers who did not use this name. Eventually one man, Jayasthiti Malla, who married into the royal family of Bhaktapur and who began his reign in 1382, established an order and a dynasty that was to be remembered by the Newars as the Mallas, the Newar kings, their kings. His direct descendants ruled as Malla kings for more than four hundred years until the Gorkhali conquest of the Valley.

Bhaktapur seems to have been founded as a royal city by Ananda Deva,^[15] who is believed to have reigned from 1147 to 1156 A.D. According to two early chronicles (D. R. Regmi 1965-1966, part 1, p. 180), Ananda Deva built a temple and royal palace in Bhaktapur.

According to the Padmagiri Chronicle, which substitutes Ananda Malla for Ananda Deva (Hasrat 1970, 49):^[16]

Having left his throne in charge of his elder brother he [Ananda Malla] went to the western direction where he founded a new city which he called Bhaktapur, in which he erected 12,000 houses of all descriptions. When the city was built, Ananda Malla sent for [the goddess] Annapurna^[*] Devi from Benares and had the goddess settled there in an auspicious hour. . . . Afterward he built a palace in Bhaktapur . . . where he beheld the Nine Durgas whose images he placed in a temple.

The chronicle published by Daniel Wright, known as "Wright's Chronicle,"^[17] adds some details. Ananda Malla "founded a city of 12,000 houses, which he named Bhaktapur and included sixty small villages and seven towns in his territory. He established his court at Bhaktapur, where he built a Durbar; and having one night seen and received instructions from the Navadurga [Nine Durgas],^[18] he set up their images in proper places, to ensure the security and protection of the town both internally and externally" (Wright [1877] 1972, 163).

The chronicles assert that the city was founded and developed as a royal center. There was something there before, however, and the attempts to construct a symbolically rationalized space that were to follow had to account for and work with preexisting structures. The most extensive work on the incorporation of previous structures into the "ordered space" of Bhaktapur is that of Niels Gutschow and his associates (Auer and Gutschow 1974; Gutschow and Kölver 1975; Gutschow 1975, Kö1ver 1980). They believe that the founding of Royal Bhaktapur involved a unification of a number of small villages that had developed in the area from perhaps the third century, following the development of irrigation in the Kathmandu Valley.^[19]

Bhaktapur and the settlement that preceded its official Royal founding, has been referred to by a variety of names. Its early names were all Tibeto-Burman. According to the linguist Kamal Malla, its modern Newari name Khopa is derived from the earlier form khoprn , derived in turn from the Tibeto-Burman terms kho (river) and prn (field). The chronicles and inscriptions also refer to Bhaktapur as Khrpun, Makhoprn, and Khuprimbruma. The first usage of an Indic name, Bhaktagrama, dates from A.D. 1134 (Malla, personal communication). Its modern Nepali names are Bhaktapur, Bhadgaon, or Bhatgaon. Bhaktapur is taken to mean "city of devotees," the other names are said to mean "city of rice."

Bhaktapur, situated on the Hanumante river and bordered by rich farmland, was surrounded by a hinterland traversed by routes to the mountain passes to Tibet. Trade with Tibet became important for the Bhaktapur economy, and was to be of particular advantage during the periods when the Valley was divided into three semiindependent states.^[20]

Bhaktapur eventually became the "metropolis of the Malla dynasty and the nerve-center of its culture and civilization" (Hasrat 1970, xxxix). The steps by which this happened can be only dimly glimpsed in records and monuments. Some historians believed that there was an early period of joint rule by the three Valley cities^[21] which was some-

times peaceful, sometimes contested. But although earlier historians (e.g., D. R. Regmi 1965-1966, part I, p. 256) believed that the eventual hegemony of Bhaktapur in the Valley was not established until the later fourteenth century, later studies suggest that "since [its establishment in] the mid-twelfth century, Bhaktapur had been the capital city, de facto and de jure, and the Kings who titled themselves Malla continued to rule from it" (Slusser 1982, 54).

The fourteenth century marked the expansion of the empire of the Turkish Tughluq dynasty in northern India to and beyond the borders of Nepal. For the Newars the most important consequence was the dispersal of threatened Indian Buddhists and Hindus in the path of the Turks. Many of them came to the Nepal Valley where they greatly reinforced the Tantrism that was beginning to dominate and transform the earlier introduced forms of South Asian religion. The chronicles personify this movement in Harisimhadeva^[*] , a king of Mithila, who was said to have been driven into exile in the Valley, where he became king of Bhaktapur, installing his kul deveta , or lineage goddess, Taleju, in the royal palace (Hasrat 1970, 52f.; Wright 1972, 175-177). Harisimhadeva's^[*] conquest of Bhaktapur is legendary, although it is generally believed in by Bhaktapur literati, and we will hear much of him, but the introduction of the Maithili deity Taleju as the Newar king's royal lineage goddess (chap. 8) along with her associated Tantric cult seems to have clearly been due to the effects of Turkish movements in northern India during this general period.^[22]

Another chronicle, the Gopalarajavamsavali, only recently made generally available, is a unique witness to what seems to have been the actual relation of Harisimhadeva^[*] to Bhaktapur. As its editors note (Vajracharya and Malla 1985, xvi):

Unlike the later chronicles which almost unrecognizably distort the truth by presenting Harisimha^[*] as a conqueror of Nepal and his descendants as legitimate rulers, the Gopalarajavamsavali notes that he was a political fugitive who died on his way to the valley, and his wife and son sought political asylum in Bhaktapur. Although they ultimately managed to rise to power by manipulating the local politics, the Queen and the Prince of Mithila had entered Bhaktapur as refugees.

The Maitili queen and her son, the prince, became involved, apparently, in struggles for power. Eventually a protege of hers, Jayasthiti Malla, whose marriage had been arranged to the queen's granddaughter, was to become ruler of Bhaktapur and the remembered architect of its present order.

Nepal itself suffered an invasion in the mid-fourteenth century when

Shams ud-Din Ilyas raided the Valley from Bengal in 1349.^[23] "The Muslim invasion shook the foundations of the kingdom, the invader having destroyed the city of Patan, laid waste the whole Valley of Nepal. He indulged in an orgy of mass destruction and incendiarism, plundered the towns and sacrileged the temples of Pasupati and Svayambhunath" (Hasrat 1970, p. xli). According to another chronicle, the Gopala Vamsavli (folio 52 [a ], pp. 4-5), in Nepal Samvat 470 on the ninth day of the dark half of the month of Marga (January 1349), Sultan Shams ud-Din burned the city of Bhaktapur during seven continuous days. Petech (1958, 118-119) believed that this invasion was responsible for the disappearance of "all the monuments of ancient Nepalese architecture."^[24]

Bhaktapur was now on the eve of its experiment in the construction of an ideal urban order. The partial destruction of the haphazard forms of a more ancient Nepal must have greatly facilitated and stimulated the undertaking.