From Jayasthiti Malla to the Fall of the Newar Polity

Jayasthiti Malla died in 1395. There followed almost 400 years of complex and shifting relations between the three major Valley cities and their hinterland "states." "His weak and inefficient successors discovered the formulae of collegial rule and remained joint sovereigns without the division of the kingdom until 1428 A.D. But the adoption of this extraordinary mode of rule by common consent proved a dismal failure; it tended to create administrative chaos, irresponsibility and encouraged intrigue and partisanship in the councils of the government" (Hasrat 1970, xliii). The period of joint rule and, apparently, decentralization and the beginning of fragmentation, lasted some twenty years, until the rule of Yaksa Malla, the grandson of Jayasthiti Malla. Reigning from Bhaktapur he reunified the Valley and continued the special development of Bhaktapur. It was he, according to the Wright Chronicle, who began to build a moated wall around the city.^[29] The inscription placed on one of its gates was said to have asserted "Yaksa Malla . . . made this fortification and ditch and a high citadel, in which to keep troops and ammunition. In building this fortification the people of the four castes willingly bore loads of bricks and earth." In part, this was for defense, but it also effected a further bounding and containment of the city at whose boundaries Ananda Malla had long before placed protective goddesses.

At this stage Bhaktapur was the central seat of a larger Valley government; Yaksa Malla was also paramount ruler of the other major Valley cities. But when in the time of his sons the three city-states became divided, Bhaktapur, like the other Newar cities, would become in the face of growing Valley conflict even more concentrated and isolated within its boundaries.

Yaksa Malla ruled for fifty-three years. His reign, as D. R. Regmi (1965-1966, vol. 1, p. 446f.) has it, constituted a glorious chapter in the history of Nepal:

[He was] a builder, a devotee leading a pious life, a patron of art and learning and a ruler who had given peace and stability to the hitherto strife ridden country. In his time the Rama Vardhana feudatories were liquidated, and though certain others within the confines of the Valley were yet m a position to challenge the authority of the kingdom, he was able to curb them by persuading them to accept his plan of peace. Yaksa Malla built by himself many temples and shrines. His records are the most numerous for any monarch of Nepal for the age. These extend over the entire Valley of Nepal, and commemorating as they do inauguration of the completion of many water conduits, tanks and canals they bear testimony to his efforts to make Nepal happy and prosperous. During Yaksa Malla's time Nepal witnessed [the] flourishing of art and literature. In the list of original works written in Sanskrit and Newari we find that a majority of them belong to this period.

On Yaksa Malla's death the kingdom, after a period of joint rule among his sons, eventually became divided into three small kingdoms, Bhaktapur, Kathmandu, and Patan, each comprising a royal city and its hinterland. Around them in the Valley were other vaguely bounded tiny ministates which were variously related to and incorporated into the three larger units.

Now, as Gewali sums it up, these three "kingdoms of the valley were well-developed city-civilizations. The countryside surrounding them was fertile and large and they had a lucrative trade with Tibet, inherited from the ancient Licchavi rulers of Nepal. The division of the valley into three kingdoms was, therefore, the division of wealth, or [of] the potentiality of earning wealth by trade. This led to mutual jealousies and hostilities among these kingdoms and rendered them an easy prey to the lean and hungry invaders from the western hills" (Gewali 1973, 52). This denoument, looming large in the minds of modern Nepalese historians was not to occur for some 300 years, and Bhaktapur entered on its long period of relative isolation.

The chronicles and inscriptions of those next three centuries give some dim glimpse for Bhaktapur of successions, conflicts, the introduction of new festivals, and the completion of new buildings (D. R. Regmi, 1965-1966, part II, chap. III). We hear of the introduction of a dance cycle, the Nine Durgas (which will later concern us) at the beginning of the sixteenth century, of the introduction of aspects of the festival of the solar New Year in the mid-sixteenth century, of the development of temples, including in the seventeenth century, the building of a large new royal palace and an associated temple of the royal goddess Taleju as well as of a major temple of the Tantric god Bhairava and a complementary one, Natapwa(n)la, to his consort in an adjoining

square. The urban religious geography of Bhaktapur continued to be developed throughout the Malla period.

The additions were variously motivated. "Bhupatindra Malla built a three-storied temple, the length of which ran north and south, and placed in it, facing west,^[30] a Bhairava for the protection of the country, and the removal of sin and distress from the people" (Wright 1972, 194). Omens, dreams, desires for emulation, and desires for personal merit of the rulers, seemed to have played their part. But the additions were woven in one way or another into the ongoing present of the city.

We have one, at least, European view of Bhaktapur under the Mallas, contrasting it to the two other Valley cities in terms that would be reflected by later observers after the Gorkhali conquest. Father Ippolitio Desideri wrote in 1722 "Badgao [Bhatgaon, Bhaktapur] stands on a hill some six or seven miles from Kathmandu. The air is much better, and with its fine houses and well laid out streets it is a much gayer and more beautiful city than the other two; it has several hundred thousand inhabitants who are engaged in trade" (as quoted in D. R. Regmi [1965-1966, part II, p. 1013]).