Chapter One Introduction
1. Many of Bhaktapur's local forms of behavior like its material artifacts) are of great historical and theoretical importance for South Asian studies, and some of those forms will provide bases for possible future changes in the life of the city. They are not immediately relevant for the kind of place Bhaktapur was at the time of the study, however, and are either neglected or treated summarily in this report. [BACK]
2. Nepali belongs to the Pahari group of Indo-Aryan languages; Newari, to the Tibeto-Burman division of the Sino-Tibetan language family. For the conventions used in this text for transcriptions of these languages, as well as Sanskrit, see appendix 1. I was able to use analyses of the Kathmandu dialect of Newari by Austin Hale and his associates of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Sresthacharya, Maskey, and Hale 1971; Hale 1970 a , 1970 b ; Hale and Hale 1970) as a basis for approaching the quite different Bhaktapur dialect. To facilitate my work in Bhaktapur, with the help of Rama Pati Raj Sharma I prepared a dictionary of Bhaktapur Newari, beginning with the Newari translation of Nepali terms in a Nepali-English dictionary, and supplemented by terms derived from the transcription of my tape-recorded interviews in Bhaktapur Newari. This dictionary eventually contained about 5,000 entries. At the end of my fieldwork I obtained a draft manuscript of an extensive and scholarly Kathmandu Newari-English dictionary by Thakurlal Manandhar (1976), which was of great help in my later study of interview transcripts and which I have used extensively in the course of this volume. The first comprehensive grammatical analysis of Newari in English is that by K. P. Malla (1985). [BACK]
3. I am, as the sequel will show, particularly indebted to the work of Gopal Singh Nepali, Sylvain Levi, Colin Rosser, Christoph yon Fürer-Haimendorf, Lynn Bennett, D. R. Regmi, Niels Gutschow and his associates, Gérard Toffin, and Mary Slusser. [BACK]
4. Readers who know Sanskrit will remark that the majority of "Newari" terms used in this study are Sanskrit or of Sanskritic origin. This is because we are dealing most centrally here with religious and philosophical terms that are for the most part Sanskritic. The vocabulary of everyday lanuage is largely of Tibeto-Burman derivation. In the cases where the Bhaktapur Newari form is a modification or "corruption" of Sanskrit, as it is, for example, in the names of many of the city's deities, we use the classical Sanskritic form to facilitate recognition and comparison. [BACK]