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Chapter Seven The Symbolic Organization of Space

1. Niels Gutschow and his associates, and Mary Slusser (in the works cited in this and other chapters) have been particularly concerned with persisting material forms, including aspects of urban space, as evidence for the history of the Newar cities and of the Kathmandu Valley. We will cite such materials and their work insofar as they have a persisting active reflection in Bhaktapur's ongoing life. [BACK]

2. For another representation of Bhaktapur as a yantra or mandala[ *] ; see Köer (1976) and Auer and Gutschow (1973). [BACK]

3. These shrines are pitha or "hypaethral shrines," which we will discuss m chapter 8. Each of the nine goddesses is also associated with a tirtha , a sacred area in a body of water, usually the river but m some cases a pond. [BACK]

4. The names of the individual goddesses and their order at the circumference of the city will be given below m the section on Bhaktapur as a mandala[ *] . The mythological sources of that particular order is discussed in chapters 8 and 15. [BACK]

5. Hadigaon (or Harigaon) was a major settlement in the Licchavi period and afterward and was the site of a Licchavi royal palace (Vajracarya 1985, 9). This provides an intriguing possible connection with the folk tale that the original site of the Digu God worship was once Hadigaon. [BACK]

6. Fustel de Coulanges quotes "ancient authors" on the founding of Rome to the effect that at the founding of that city Romulus dug a small circular trench and then he, followed by each of the settlers, threw a clod of earth from their previous home city into it. "A man could not quit his dwelling-place without taking with him his soil and his ancestors. This rite had to be accomplished, so that he might say, pointing out the new place which he had adopted, 'This is still the land of my fathers . . . for here are the manes of my family . . . . These souls, reunited there, required a perpetual worship, and kept guard over their descendants'" (1956, 136). [BACK]

7. Throughout the book we will generally use the Sanskrit rather than the Newari form of the names of major Hindu deities when the Newari variation is closely related to the Sanskrit form. [BACK]

8. In the classical Hindu period there were funerary prescriptions separating the four varnas[ *] into at least two divisions. The corpses of "twice-born" men, the three highest varnas[ *] , were to be carried out of the western, northern, or eastern gates of a town, while the corpses of Sudras, the lowest, were to be carried through the southern gate ( Manu , Book V, 92 Bühler 1969, p. 184). The division here simply separates a lower segment from the amalgamated upper one. [BACK]

9. Fustel de Coulange believed that this division was pervasive m the ancient Indo-European world: "We find this class [plebeians] around almost all the ancient cities, but separated by a line of demarcation. Originally a Greek city was double; there was the city, properly so called-- polis , which was built ordinarily on the summit of some hill; it had been built with the religious rites, and enclosed the sanctuary of the national gods. At the foot of the hill was found an agglomeration of houses, which were built without any religious ceremony, and without a sacred enclosure. These were the dwellings of the plebeians, who could not live in the sacred city" (1956, 231). He goes on to describe a similar arrangement in ancient Rome. [BACK]

10. Mary Slusser stated that the butchers as well as the sweepers, traditionally lived outside of the city boundaries. She cites Oldfield and Sylvain Lévi (1905, vol. I, p. 56) on this. As Lévi wrote (vol. 1, p. 238 n.), however, as he did not have time during his visit to Nepal to do his own research on castes, he followed Hamilton and Oldfield, and in doubtful cases Oldfield, who was "more recent and more complete." Gutschow and Kölver accepting the Oldfield statement about the butchers, or Nae, proposed that Bhaktapur's pradaksinapatha[ *] , the major city-wide processional route, on whose outer perimeter the Nae and many other city groups live, was the actual ritual boundary of the city at one time (1975, 21). If the butchers ever lived outside the Newar city's walls it was already no longer the regulation at the time of Jayasthiti Malla's fourteenth-century codification of Bhaktapur's tradition, and we may take the Oldfield-Lévi remark as, perhaps, at the most some reflection of some very ancient arrangement. [BACK]

11. See the analysis of the neighborhood dance performances of the Nine Durgas troupe in chapter 15 for a detailed description of this usage of the symbolism of the outside. [BACK]

12. The names of these deities are given here in their Sanskrit form, not in their local Newari pronunciation. We will discuss their relevant characteristics and their relations to other divinities in the next chapter. [BACK]

13. As we will see in chapter 8, Taleju has her own pitha , that of the goddess Dumaju. [BACK]

14. Untouchables living outside the city's borders belong neither to the upper or lower city, nor do they belong to a mandalic[ *] segment. [BACK]

15. Kautilya[ *] and other writers quoted in Dutt use the eight compass directions as the basis for the ideal placement of occupations and castes, an arrangement that, although possibly having some echoes in Bhaktapur in, say, the untouchables' southern location, is not an organizing principle there. [BACK]

16. According to Lewis (1984, 560), the royal Taleju temple in Kathmandu is at that city's highest point. [BACK]

17. Dutt emphasizes the classical "technical" use of the term " grama " for an urban component. "It should be noted here that this grama is not a modern village. It is a technical term for a locality with certain definite measurements and corresponds to the insulae of an ancient Greek town as well as to the municipal wards of a modern city" (ibid., 188). This does not take account of the functional analogy of the ward to the village. [BACK]

18. D. Vajracarya (1985, 13) also identifies twa: and grama . D. R. Regmi suggests another village/ twa: analogy for Malla Nepal in which, "the village must have been the lowest unit of administration m the rural [areas] as was the tol[ *] in urban centers" (1965-1966, part I, p. 514). [BACK]

19. A legend ascribing the establishment of the city's twenty-four twa: s to the fourteenth-century king Ananda Malla is given in chapter 14 in connection with the Chuma(n) Ganedya: Jatra. [BACK]

20. Slusser believes that the Licchavi grama in Nepal must have been considerably smaller than the Indian grama (1982, vol. 1, p. 85). [BACK]

21. For descriptions of the construction, structure, and symbolism of Newar houses, see Auer and Gutschow (n.d.), Toffin (1977), Barré, Berger, Feveile, and Toffin (1981), Korn (1976), and Vogt (1977). [BACK]

22. Gutschow notes that the brick walls, not wooden posts, bear all the structural loads of the house. The inner face of the wall may be of unbaked, sun-dried bricks (personal communication). [BACK]

23. This idea is closely reflected m ideas about the protective pollution and danger accumulating functions of the lowest thar s, particularly the Po(n) and the Jugi. [BACK]

24. According to Katherine Blair (1975), cited in Vogt (1977), there are some villages in Nepal where every house is oriented m traditional directions. [BACK]

25. Vogt's informant, Mangal Raj Josi, added some ideal compass placements, which seem to be very often ignored in practice. Thus the household shrine should be to the northeast "because north is the direction of the Himalayas, home of the gods, and east is the direction of the rising sun." The area or room for household "treasures" should be to the north, the home of Laksmi the patron of household wealth; the kitchen area should be to the southeast, the home of Agni, god of fire (1977, 89f.). [BACK]

26. In 1986/87 Gutschow attempted a complete survey of Bhaktapur' chwasas . He found 108 chwasas where clothing of dead people is left to be picked up by Jugis (app. 6). He notes that not all chwasas within the city are at crossroads, and was unable to find why they were located at particular places (personal communication). They may, in fact, represent what were once crossroads in the past, or there may be some other historical or legendary basis for their uncanny significance. [BACK]

27. Most potentially polluting materials are disposed of outside the city boundaries, often in the river, and in the case of dead bodies, by cremation at the cremation grounds. There are some places near the river where polluting materials such as placentas are traditionally disposed of, that are also thought of as chwasas . [BACK]

28. In a work summarizing his studies in several Newar communities of various sizes, Toffin notes the general location of chwasas at crossroads in those communities (1984, 488). [BACK]

29. See, for example, S. Stevenson, (1920, 425). Victor Turner (1968, 580), in a discussion of "tricksters" as "liminal figures," notes as a sign of their liminality that the Yoruba spirit Eshu-Elegba and the Greek god Hermes both inhabited crossroads as well as thresholds of houses and open public places. The Tantric-like Greek goddess Hecate is also a goddess of crossroads (Burkert 1985, 171). [BACK]

30. One of these twa: s in the extreme west of the city is a relatively new addition to the city. [BACK]

31. Veena Das, in a review of studies of Hindu cooking practices, noted that in some aspects, at least, Hindu space was not abstract Western Newtonian space, in which it was once hoped everything else could be fixed. "The most interesting idea that emerges from these descriptions is that one cannot define the characteristics of a space independently of the characteristics of time as a logical category" (1981, 140). Thus "In the context of a marriage, when the time governing the event is described as auspicious, the [sacred, household] cooking space may expand to include many more areas than the kitchen, and ritual injunctions would be applied to all these areas. In contrast, a death in the domestic group . . . results in the shrinking of the cooking area nil it becomes nonexistent" (1981, 140). In contrast, however, the city spaces we have been considering here are quite fixed in their extent, and are used to help anchor other shifting aspects of the city's organization. [BACK]


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