1. "Sixty percent of all Bhaktapur households lived in multi-unit structures, thirty-six percent occupied single-family houses, three percent lived in commercial buildings and a smaller number were in temporary quarters" (Nepal Rastra^{[ *]} Bank 1974 a ). [BACK]

2. This distribution is very similar to that found in the other valley cities, Kathmandu and Patan, studied in the same survey. There Is a somewhat larger percentage of the largest-sized households in Bhaktapur. [BACK]

3. See Mandlebaum (1970, vol. l, part II) for a summary of studies on family, family roles, and the family cycle in Indian societies. [BACK]

4. The male/female sex ratio for Bhaktapur is 102.6 males per 100 females in 1971. The figures for Nepal as a whole--with its mix of Himalayan and Indo-Nepalese communities--were about the same. [BACK]

5. The relationship is symbolized in an annual Newar ceremony, the Kija Puja (chap. 13), a variant of a widespread Hindu ceremony in which sisters worship their brothers. [BACK]

6. In the lower thar s, whether the wife returns to her natal home and the length of the stay is limited by the need for the woman to return to help in household and other economic tasks. Among the Jugi, for example, the wife returns to her parents' house only if there are other women in her conjugal household to help with household tasks, and among the Po(n) sweeper families the wife does not return to her natal home at all. [BACK]

7. The nakhatyas generally take place after the main day or days of the festival or rite of passage. On the main days there may be feasts for the patrilineal kin, the phuki . [BACK]

8. A similar system of precedence characterizes the hierarchical sharing of the head of a sacrificial animal among wider male kin groups (chap. 9). [BACK]

9. In some farming families in Bhaktapur, a father will stop accepting a daughter's cipa once she has been married out of the family, a practice that has been reported elsewhere in South Asia. Thus, in the central provinces of India, "some castes will not take food from their own daughters once these daughters are married, even to men of their own caste (Hutton 1961, 73; citing Russell and Lal [1916] 1975, vol. 1, p. 179). [BACK]

10. The great majority of thar s marry within Bhaktapur. [BACK]

11. Newar girls are kept out of the sun during their menarche ceremonies (app. 6). [BACK]

12. In contrast to its reported use elsewhere in South Asia, menstrual blood is not reportedly used in esoteric Tantric rituals in Bhaktapur. [BACK]

13. See the discussion of menarche rites in appendix 6. [BACK]

14. During the course of a wedding, at the end of the first phase representing the separation of the bride from her parental household, it is not her brother but her own maternal uncle, her paju , who plays a key transitional role. He physically carries her out of her natal house and hands her over to the groom's representatives. [BACK]

15. It may also be referred to in relation to the child, simply, as grandfather's or grandmother's house while those kin are alive, but it will always be the paju 's house. [BACK]

16. A young husband wishing to give his wife a present, say, cloth for a sari , without it appearing that the money was withheld from the common household pool, may sometimes claim that the sari is a gift to his wife from his paju , with some assurance that the lie is plausible and, furthermore, that the paju will back him up. [BACK]

17. As there has been some liberalization of marriage rules in recent decades, particularly a prohibition of child marriage, among all Nepalis, the Newars now are not as different from other Nepali Hindus as they formerly were in these particular aspects of marriage. [BACK]

18. Among the Newar Brahmans after the marriage of a girl of perhaps nine or ten to a Brahman boy of perhaps twelve to fifteen (or sometimes older), the girl would go to her husband's household for important household ceremonies. She was also brought to her husband's household in anticipation of her first menstruation and its associated rite of passage which should take place there, but she would then return to her natal home and not return to live at her husband's house until sometime after menarche--In some cases not, in fact, until she was seventeen or eighteen. [BACK]

19. A younger wife may also, it is said, be flighty and may run off, either back to her home or to another man. [BACK]

20. There are some rough statistics on actual ages of first marriage for other Newar communities at a period some fifteen years before this study. In 1957 and 1958 Gopal Singh Nepali surveyed 206 Newar families in Kathmandu and fifty-one in the village of Panga. He reported that about 35 percent of the women in his Kathmandu sample married at less than fifteen (the majority were thirteen or fourteen years of age). About 41 percent of the women roamed when they were between fifteen and eighteen years of age, and another 15 percent married between nineteen and twenty years of age. The remaining 9 percent married at more than twenty years of age. For the men, some 12 percent married below the age of fifteen years, 39 percent between fifteen and eighteen years, 30 percent between nineteen and twenty-four, and the rest, about 19 percent, above age twenty-four. Most girls, he concluded, married between thirteen and twenty years of age and most boys between fifteen and twenty-four. The village statistics showed slightly earlier ages for the marriage of girls m Panga. He attributed this to the high value of labor among the farmers of Panga but commented that in contrast to some agricultural villages in India none of the Panga girls were below ten at the age of marrigae (Nepali 1965, 201ff.). [BACK]

21. G. S. Nepali found that because, he was told, of a comparative scarcity of brides, people had "started marrying a woman from the third or fourth generation, if the relationship is traced through the female links only" (1965, 205). This is probably true now for many of the thar s of Bhaktapur who are faced with similar scarcities. Nepali and others have written that the patrilineal restriction is limited to seven generations. For many, perhaps the majority of Bhaktapur's thar s, however, it applies as long as common membership in a kul is recognized, whatever the number of generations. [BACK]

22. There are a few groups, such as the Brahmans, who consider all Bhaktapur Rajopadhyaya to belong to the same kul , who must marry outside the city. In recent years there seems to have been a tendency for some of the wealthier, more educated people involved m business or trade to take wives from a larger area. [BACK]

23. Although it is possible to object to a particular arranged marriage, it is greatly harder for either to reject marriage altogether . Girls, for example, are told, "All right, you do not have to marry this man, but remember you are going to have to marry someone." [BACK]

24. Hilabula marriages are not uncommon among Brahman families because of the restriction of available brides to a relatively few families. [BACK]

25. That the girl is married to the Bel fruit is a frequently repeated error. See appendix 6 under discussion of the Ihi ceremony. [BACK]

26. G. S. Nepali (1965, 239) quotes the 1911 Census of India in a reference to the Newar custom of placing betel nuts on the bed to signify divorce. Nepali writes that it still persisted at the time of his study, but was confined to the "Udas [Urae] and Manandhar castes." I [R. L.] did not hear of its use in Bhaktapur, although it may be practiced by some thar s. Nepali also quotes the 1911 Census of India to the effect that a Newar woman "could undo her marriage bond by placing two betel-nuts on the chest of a dying husband." He found cases of this practice among some women who were young and without children. This removed from the young widow obligations for a prolonged mourning period, and for the deceased husband's family it removed the widow's claims to a share of his property. [BACK]

27. These statistics are derived from Nepali's tables I and II, not from his discussion, which seems to be in error in regard to the extent of divorce and separation among his own sample. [BACK]

28. Failure to produce children would be an important contributing reason, but this, as we will see, may lead to a multiple marriage (or, very rarely, adoption) rather than separation if the wife's relation to the household is otherwise satisfactory. [BACK]

29. According to Brahmans, a woman who left a previous marriage with a divorce could by customary law have a full marriage ceremony, but it is not done because of "social ( samajik ) custom." On the other hand, they say that a woman who leaves her husband without a divorce is not entitled to a major marriage ceremony, which requires the participation of Brahmans. Nevertheless, a minor ceremony-- gwe ( n ) kaegu --which does not require the participation of a Brahman, gives the new wife full ritual as well as social membership in the family, and she may subsequently participate in the other Brahman-led rituals of her new conjugal family. [BACK]

30. "Misa," the Newari term for "woman," is used for ''wife" in Bhaktapur. " Kala '' is used in other Newar towns for "wife," and as an elegant usage in Bhaktapur. [BACK]

31. In this case the second marriage, in fact, permits the first wife to be kept m the husband's home. Otherwise, there would be a necessary separation. [BACK]

32. Having more than two wives m a multiple marriage is reportedly extremely unusual m Bhaktapur, Nepali's discussion suggests that each of the eight cases in his sample involved only one additional wife. [BACK]

33. For a theoretical interpretation of Newar isogamy, and a review of often conflicting statements about Newar marriage patterns in relation to status, see Quigley (1986). [BACK]

34. See also Gray (1980) on Chetri hypergamy. Among Chetris, status differences "are created during, and do not exist prior to, the marriage ceremony. As a result of the performance of a Vedic wedding, the affinal rule becomes relevant to and structures the relationships between the members of the households newly linked by marriage [with the] . . . superiority of the wife-taking household and the inferiority of the wife-giving household. . . . Through kinship contagion, these status attributes emergent in marriage become part of the substance of all members of the giving and taking households" (Gray 1980, 27). [BACK]

35. The Newar avoidance of adoption IS in marked contrast to the situation in Polynesian and Micronesian societies where adoption is extremely frequent (Carroll 1970), and is an index of structural differences affecting, among much else, the experience and education of children. [BACK]

36. For the neighboring Indo-Nepalese Brahmans and Chetri an important maximal indicator of lineage is the gotra , which relates individuals to one of the seven mythical Vedic Rsis^{[ *]} or "seers." Among them a concept of gotra exogamy creates an exogamous group much larger than the patrilineal kinship involved in kul exogamy. See Bennett (1977, 38ff.) and K. B. Bista (n.d.). Bista claims (p. 39) that notions of endogamy and exogamy among the Chetri are fundamentally based on gotra exogamy. Only upper-level Newars know their gotras , which they must specify in the course of certain rituals. All Rajopadhyaya Brahmans may use the alternative thar name Subedi, which indicates, they say, that they belong to the Bharadvaja gotra . Most Chathariya are said to belong to the Kasyapa gotra . For the Newars the gotra has no special ceremonial entailment, aside from identifying oneself ritually, and has no exogamous entailment at all, even the Brahmans intermarrying within the same gotra . [BACK]

37. As has been noted above, nonpatrilineal marriage restrictions that apply to tha:thiti become annulled after several generations. [BACK]

38. Toffin (1978) found these "clans" in the Newar town of Pyangon. The unit there was named gwoha ( n ), a designation apparently not used among Newars elsewhere. As in Bhaktapur the phuki in Pyangon was a subunit of the "clan." [BACK]

39. For decisions affecting a larger section of the thar or the entire thar , for example, the Brahmans' decision as a group to abandon child marriage, a matter of litigation over a thar 's proper status, or a decision about ostracizing a member from a thar , the heads of various phuki s may meet in a council. The council may or may not represent one kul , depending on the constitution of the thar . [BACK]

40. Steven Parish found an average of 4.5 familes per phuki among Bhaktapur's Jyapu Suwal thar (1987, 86). [BACK]

41. " Thakaki ," "elder," " naya :," ''leader," and " naki ( n ),'' "eldest or leading woman," are used as fides in various kinds of groups. Thus, there is both a household naki ( n ) and a phuki naki ( n ). [BACK]

42. For a sketch of phuki organization in the Sa:mi (Kathmandu Newari Saemi) thar , see Fürer-Haimendorf (1956). [BACK]

43. This term may derive from tha :, "one's own," and " thiti, " from the Sanskrit sthiti , "rule, regulation, decree," thus meaning related through ritual arrangement (e.g., marriage) in contrast to descent. [BACK]

44. The daughter of the phuki who marries out is in herself not a member of an individual's tha:thiti , although her husband, children, and husband's own phuki members and their spouses are. She has, as we will see in connection with lineage rituals and rites of passage, ritual and social connections with both her kul and her husband's kul , as she has continuing social relations with her natal and affinal households. [BACK]

45. " Bhata " is a term used by a woman to refer to members of her husband's family (e.g., kija bhata , a husband's younger brother). It was not clear to Bhaktapur informants why this term is used, but it might conceivably derive from the context in which girls traditionally form twae relationships, which is while both girls are part of a group of girls being given in mock-marriage to the god Narayana^{[ *]} . Each would be to the other a twae from her divine husband's family. It is also possible that historically cowives in real marriages at times formed these ritual relations. [BACK]

46. Most people only have one twae . A businessman or trader with connections in several communities may have several twaes representing his interests or major connections in various communities. [BACK]

47. For an extensive discussion of guthi land tenure, see Mahesh C. Regmi (1971, 1976, 1978). [BACK]

48. Most of the important temples and larger festivals (chaps. 12 to 15) are now funded from a centralized bureau of the Nepalese government that controls major guthi funds. There are still, however, many smaller temples and festivals supported by local guthis . [BACK]

49. When the guthi has a professional membership, it seems to echo the traditional South Asian professional guild, the sreni . [BACK]

50. For an extensive discussion of Newar guthis, see Toffin (1975 b ). [BACK]