Bhaktapur and the Newars

Traditional Nepal, an ancient Asian society with a literate high culture, was confined largely to the Kathmandu Valley. The people of this valley came in time to call their territory Nepal, themselves Newars, and their language Newari. Archaeology has not yet fully clarified their prehistory, but it seems that at an early period (perhaps the eighth or seventh century B.C. ) a predominantly Mongoloid, Tibeto-Burman speaking people settled in the valley where they may have encountered an aboriginal population speaking an Austro-Asiatic language. From perhaps the first or second century A.D. a political organization emerged that was to characterize the Kathmandu Valley until the late eighteenth century. A ruling class, a king and his court of North Indian origin, speaking and writing Sanskrit for sacramental and literary purposes and a Sanskritic North Indian language (a Prakrit) for everyday purposes, was progressively woven into an underlying society and culture with Hima-

layan and Central Asian features. Gradually a language (Newari) and culture (Newar) arose that synthesized these elements. Although the Sanskrit culture of the priests and court persisted, it became more narrowly traditional and ceremonial. Progressively more of the larger religious, political, and literary life was expressed in Newari and Newar forms.

There were dynastic disputes and confusion, but the Newars flourished. The valley soil is exceedingly rich, the bed of an ancient lake. A complex system of irrigation works for the collection and distribution of rainwater from the slopes of the surrounding hills was inaugurated sometime prior to the establishment of the first North Indian dynasty, and the rich soil and irrigation permitted highly productive farming. The Valley in time found itself on the major trade routes between India and Lhasa, in Tibet, and trade, tolls, and services became the basis, along with the rich agriculture, for considerable wealth. This made possible (and was, in turn, developed through) a great sociocultural efflorescence.

Stimulated by Indian ideas and images throughout a very long period of time, the Newars began, perhaps from the fourth century onward, the progressive elaboration and centralization of their society and culture in urban centers. Of these, three—Bhaktapur, Patan, and Kathmandu—became variously principal or secondary royal centers. They became concentrated, bounded (walled during certain times), highly organized units, surrounded by a hinterland of farmland and villages. Finally the three cities became politically divided. The hinterlands became territories, and three small states developed, each with its own central royal city, its king, its particular customs, its dialect.

During these centuries the Newars created architecture; sculpture in wood, stone, and metal; music; drama; a multitude of beautiful crafts; and domestic goods—and above all they created a complex public religious and social drama, for which the cities became the great stages. In these Kathmandu Valley cities there was an elaboration of a particular kind of society, culture, and person. This had much to do with Hinduism (in its widest sense as a set of peculiarly South Asian understandings, images, and actions) and much to do with the structural necessities and implications of a certain kind of organized life, which I shall call here the "archaic city."

In the late eighteenth century the Newar kingdoms, divided and inward-looking, fell to the attacks of the armies of the chief of the small Indianized mountain state of Gorkha in the western Himalayas. The Gorkhali alliances and conquests defined the greatly enlarged territory

and state of modern Nepal. The Newars were no longer the people of Nepal. They were only one of some seventy linguistic and "ethnic groups," and a conquered one at that. The Gorkha alliance put its capital at Kathmandu, and the long autonomous political history of the Newars was over.

Yet, Bhaktapur, only eight often muddy miles away from Kathmandu (a long enough distance for those who walked or were carried in palanquins) was left more or less alone. It lost its Newar king (although he continued and continues to be powerfully present symbolically) but it remained relatively isolated by Gorkhali political policy for dealing with what was in effect a conquered state. That policy, variously motivated, was to isolate Nepal from the "outside," and to isolate Newars from power within the new state. The Gorkhalis encouraged Newar traditional life, as had the previous North Indian founders of Newar dynasties. However, these latter-day rulers did not become integrated as their predecessors had into a Newar state. The conquerors' language, Gorkhali, became "Nepali," the official language of the newly expanded country, and the Newars found themselves no longer a small nation, but in the eyes of other Nepalis (although not in their own) just one "ethnic group" among others.

Bhaktapur ran on in very much the old way, like a clockwork mechanism assembled long ago that no one had bothered to disassemble. The first serious shocks of modernity began only in the early 1950s, when, following a political revolution, Nepal opened itself to the West. Development—education; agriculture; health programs; increasing travel in and out of the country; burgeoning communications of all kinds, books, movies, radio; and internal transportation—began to alter this conservative, isolated Himalayan country.

Altered in what way? Bhaktapur had always been m history, but it had tried for hundreds of years to turn the flow of history into what might seem a timeless eternal civic order. In 1973, when this study began, the city, or most of it, was still trying. The signs of a deep transformation to another way of being in time and in history were evident and were illuminating for both what had been and what might be about to happen. This book is concerned with the struggle to order Bhaktapur, its particular way of carving out a space and time and common reality in the face of history. It describes at length things that are important in that they are aspects of that order. As the order changes, as it "modernizes," such things will be of interest for other reasons—as problems for modernization and as potsherds left over from old broken pots, clues for antiquarian enterprises.