Retheorizing Religion in Nepal (Religion Culture Critique)

RETHEORIZING RELIGION IN NEPAL Religion/Culture/Critique Series editor: Elizabeth A. Castelli How Hysterical: Identif...

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RETHEORIZING RELIGION IN NEPAL

Religion/Culture/Critique Series editor: Elizabeth A. Castelli How Hysterical: Identification and Resistance in the Bible and Film By Erin Runions (2003) Connected Places: Region, Pilgrimage, and Geographical Imagination in India By Anne Feldhaus (2003) Representing Religion in World Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culture Making Edited by S. Brent Plate (2003) Derrida’s Bible (Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida) Edited by Yvonne Sherwood (2004) Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives Edited by Kathleen O’Brien Wicker, Althea Spencer Miller, and Musa W. Dube (2005) Women’s Renunciation in South Asia: Nuns, Yoginis, Saints, and Singers Edited by Meena Khandelwal, Sondra L. Hausner, and Ann Grodzins Gold (2006)


GREGORY PRICE GRIEVE


© Gregory Price Grieve, 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7434–1 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7434–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grieve, Gregory P. (Gregory Price), 1964– Retheorizing religion in Nepal / Gregory Price Grieve. p. cm.—(Religion/culture/critique) Based on the author’s thesis (Ph.D.)—University of Chicago, 2002, originally presented under the title; The practice of everyday religion in Bhaktapur, Nepal. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–7434–9 (alk. paper) 1. Bhaktapur (Nepal)—Religious life and customs. 2. Mandala— Nepal—Bhaktapur. 3. Hinduism—Nepal—Bhaktapur. I. Title. II. Series. BL2034.3.B53G75 2006 294.5095496—dc22

2006043196

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Sarah and Grey, my old love and my new

List of Previous Publications

This volume grew out of my dissertation, The Practice of Everyday Religion in Bhaktapur, Nepal (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2002), which was advised by Wendy Doniger, Todd Lewis, and Frank Reynolds. Chapter 1 is based in part on research that has been published as “Signs of Tradition: Compiling a History of Development, Politics, and Tourism in Bhaktapur, Nepal,” Studies in Nepalese History and Society 7 (2003): 281–307, as well as “Histories of Tradition in Bhaktapur, Nepal: Or How to Compile a Contemporary Hindu Medieval City,” in Historicizing Tradition, ed. Steven Engler and Gregory P. Grieve (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter: 2005, 269–282). Chapter 2 is a much revised version of an article originally published as “Cosmological Corrections: Mapping the Ideological Construction of Traditional Places in Bhaktapur, Nepal,” Studies in Nepalese History and Society 9 (2004): 375–406. Chapter 3 is an expanded form of “Symbol, Idol and Murti: Hindu God-Images and the Politics of Mediation,” Culture, Theory and Critique 44 (2003): 57–72. Chapter 6 is an expanded and contextualized version of “Forging a Mandalic Space: Bhaktapur, Nepal’s Cow Procession and the Improvisation of Tradition,” Numen 51 (2005): 1–45.

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Series Editor’s Preface

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Transcriptual Key

xv

Transliteration

xvii

Epigraph

xix

Introduction Preparing the Materials: Prolegomenon for a Study of Prosaic Religion

1

Part I Tradition, Modernity, and the Challenge of Prosaic Hinduism 1 2

Framing the Study: Theorizing the Histories of Tradition in Bhaktapur, Nepal Laying Down the Grid: Cosmology and the Place of Tradition in Bhaktapur, Nepal

Part II

27 49

Prosaic Religion and the Construction of Lived Worlds

3

Sketching the Central Point: Cadastral God-Images and the Politics of Scriptural Mediation 4 Illustrating Samsara: Religious “Recipes” for Making a Prosaic Lived World 5 Performing Prosaic Tantra: Jhinjan Minjan Danigu’s Animating Affect and Social Critique of Religious Experience 6 Bringing a Forged Mandala to Life: The Cow Procession and the Improvisation of Cadastral Generative Matrixes

69 87 103 115

viii

Contents

Conclusion Detailing the Material: A Strategy for Mediating Religion (Dharma) beside the Book

131

Notes

139

Bibliography

149

Index

169

List of Illustrations

Tables I.1 Schematic diagram of the study’s methodological structure 2.1 Cosmological matrix 2.2 Cosmologies and their ideological relation to tradition

9 51 52

Figures I.1 I.2 I.3 1.1 3.1 4.1 6.1

The “mandala map” Artist Madhu Krishna Chitrakar in his workshop Schematic diagram of the making of a mandala The paubha frame Bhairava mask from Bhaktapur’s Navadurga Dance Samsara’s four aspects as depicted in a “Wheel of Life” image Forged goat sacrifice in front of the god-image of Suryavinayak C.1 Sketch illustrating the need for tension in a mandala between center and margin

4 7 8 29 70 89 117 133

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Series Editor’s Preface

RELIGION/CULTURE/CRITIQUE is a series devoted to publishing work that addresses religion’s centrality in a wide range of settings and debates, both contemporary and historical, and that critically engages the category of “religion” itself. This series is conceived as a place where readers will be invited to explore how “religion”—whether embodied in texts, practices, communities, and ideologies—intersects with social and political interests, institutions, and identities. Greg Grieve’s Retheorizing Religion in Nepal provides a broad critique of the “scripturalism” of religious studies in the Western academy and addresses broad theoretical questions about religion and/as mediation. Focusing on quotidian religious practices—“prosaic religion,” in his formulation— encountered through careful fieldwork observation, Grieve explores the complex layers of lived religion in a particular location (Bhaktapur, Nepal) while engaging large, overarching theoretical problematics that continue to haunt the field as a whole. Using his own unsettledness and misunderstanding as an opening for reconsidering the terms with which he had framed and organized his research, Grieve offers students of religion an elegant model for a different mode of working, staging a sustained and dialectical dialogue between theory and the object of one’s study. Refusing to approach the religion of Nepal “by the book,” Grieve instead suggests how one might engage with religion “beside the book”—through embodied practice and performance, artistic activity, and material mediation. Retheorizing Religion in Nepal contributes both to the fieldwork archive of South Asian religion and to the unfolding theoretical discussion of “religion” as it is produced by both practitioners and scholars around the globe. Elizabeth A. Castelli RELIGION/CULTURE/CRITIQUE Series Editor New York City January 2006


Acknowledgments

If this book were a mandala, at its center would be Bhaktapur, Nepal—it is the people of this living city that I owe my ultimate acknowledgement. Just as numerous peaceful and wrathful deities surround the center of a mandala, there are, however, a host of persons and institutions that I also owe my gratitude. Close to the center are the many friends and conversants in Bhaktapur who freely gave of their knowledge and time. Chief among these are Madhu Chitrakar and also the family of Tejeswar Babu Gongah, particularly his son Sanjeev Gongah. A third ring would consist of dialogue with other scholars. While they are too numerous to list I would like to especially thank Wendy Doniger, Mark Liechty, and Daya Shakya for their invaluable assistance. My thanks also goes to the faculty of The University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s Department of Religious Studies, particularly Derek Krueger and Charles D. Orzech. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers who gave detailed and illuminating suggestions on the manuscript. Squaring the circle are the institutions that supported this book. In Nepal I acknowledge the assistance of Bhaktapur’s Municipality, Nepal’s National Museum, Tribhuvan University’s Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS) and Nepal’s National Archives. This book would not have been possible without financial assistance from granting institutions. These include a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research fellowship, a Social Science Research Council Pre-dissertation fellowship, a grant from the Lilly Endowment, as well as a grant from the University of Chicago’s Committee on South Asian Studies. The writing of the book was made possible by a fellowship at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University (Pew Charitable Trusts). This fellowship was supplemented through the generosity of The University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s College of Arts and Sciences. Finally, just as in the paubhg painting, Yantrakara Khwopa Dey, in which Madhu Chitrakar painted my wife and me in the lower left hand corner, this book would not have been possible without Sarah Krive at my side.


Transcriptual Key

The transcriptions presented are not the unmediated voice of my discussants. Their words are as I taped them and as I have transformed them in the act of writing. Whether to have the voices remain anonymous or name the speakers was one of the hardest decisions I had to make. On the one hand, I desired to give full credit to those who contributed so much to this project. On the other hand, I was worried that the information may incriminate people, especially with the change in Nepal’s political climate. My strategy is a mixed one. Bhaktapur is a tightly knit community, and where the people spoken of would be recognized anyway, I have kept the authentic name. I did this because people tended to want credit for their knowledge. In other situations, I have either used appropriate pseudonyms or have not used any name at all. For instance, because of the present political danger in Nepal, when it comes to much of the discussion of politics, I do not use the names of the sources from whom I received the material. Moreover, because of the tantric secret nature of much of the information that was disclosed to me, I was requested not to circulate the knowledge. Rather than divulging information, where possible I have relied on other scholars’ written work. The following symbols bear these meanings when used in transcribed text: (. . .) Material enclosed within parentheses has been placed within the text by the author to clarify meaning. [. . .] Material enclosed within brackets indicates nonverbal signals on tape (e.g., laughing, special tone of voice, etc.). ((. . .)) Material within double parentheses is unclear on tape; the transcription is only approximate. , Commas are usually phonological in value, used to separate breath groups. —Grammatical boundaries most often coincide with breath group, and when they do, only the grammatical boundary is written. Occasionally, a grammatical boundary will occur at a point at which no corresponding phonological boundary occurs; in such cases a long dash is used. . . . An ellipsis within a text indicates that the speaker interrupted his or her utterance to begin a new utterance.

xvi

Transcriptual Key

/ Slash indicates an overlap of different utterances. ALL CAPS text set in small capital letters indicates words uttered with unusual force. # A number sign indicates that the word was in English. When it served no particular purpose to retain them, I have omitted translating repetitions and glossed-over false starts.

Transliteration

Bhaktapur, Nepal, is located in the Kathmandu Valley, a multilingual landscape with the Newar language (Nepal Bhasa), Nepali, English, and a multitude of other tongues intermingling. For instance, the city itself is referred to by three main names: in Nepali, “Bhadgao(n)”; in Newar, “Khwopa”; and in Sanskrit, “Bhaktapur.” As may be obvious by the name(s) of the city itself, the use of language is political. Which language is used, who uses it, and who is allowed to use a language are deeply marbled with power relations. To address these language politics, and at the same time enhance the recognizability of terms amid this linguistic complexity, I have chosen to follow a six-step strategy of translation and transliteration. (1)

(2) (3)

(4) (5)

I translate non-English words when possible. I do this for two reasons. First, because the aim of this study is to articulate Bhaktapur, Nepal’s, prosaic religion, I do not want to exoticize the text through an overuse of nontranslated terms. Second, I want to open this work to a wider readership beyond those whose expertise is in South Asia. In some passages, when my translation veers from the standard gloss, I place the original untranslated term in the brackets that follow its first usage in a chapter (e.g., god-image [murti{m˚rti}]). For proper names, I use a nontransliterated nonitalic form; for instance, I write Nepal for nepgl. In some instances, when a term’s in-context gloss is crucial for the argument, I turn to Nepali. If Nepali does not capture the needed meaning of the term, I turn to Newar—for instance, murti and lohandyah (loha[n]dya:). Words that have already entered the academic lexicon I deliver in their Sanskrit form—for example, mandala and samsara. In pluralizing non-English words when used in the context of an English language sentence, I follow the English pattern by adding an /s/ at the end of the term—for example, mandalas.

xviii (6)

Transliteration As nonspecialists tend to find diacritical marks off-putting (and specialist readers find them unnecessary), I have not employed them except when introducing a word for the first time in each chapter. We—the linguist Daya Shakya, my field assistant Sanjeev Gongah, and I—have based the transliteration of Bhaktapur Newar’s local scribal conventions for recording the dialect in the Devanagari script. These conventions are not always consistent, yet we have attempted to maintain a standard. When possible, Newar phonemes are represented by their approximate Sanskrit equivalents. Spoken Newar lacks the retroflexed consonants of Nepali (ø, øh, π, πh, and “), as well as the spirants represented by ∂ and ¥. The written form, however, often retains these letters in loan words from Sanskrit and words of northern Indian origin. Newar also has a short high midvowel “a”; a long (breathy) high midvowel “a:”; a short low frontal vowel “g”; and a long (breathy) low frontal vowel “g:”. We have used the macron to indicate the position and the colon (e.g., the Devanagari visarga) for length. Following Levy (1990), to avoid having to double diacritics over vowels that are both long and nasalized, we have followed nasalized vowels by “(n).” Bhaktapur has a dorsovelar “n,” which we have represented with “ñ.” Following Malla (1985), sometimes we have transliterated the Devanagari bilabial glide “v” with “w.” We have also relied on Gutschow, Klöver, and Shresthacarya’s Newar Towns and Buildings: An Illustrated Dictionary (1987), and Sundar Krishna Joshi’s dissertation A Descriptive Study of the Bhaktapur Dialect of Newari (1984).

We are all just making small stories that become the mandala. —Madhu Krishna Chitrakar (personal communication, July 29, 1999). It would mean that historians of religion might redirect their attention from their present equally romantic fixation on multivalent and condensed phenomena, such as symbols, which have more often served as eloquent testimony to the exegetical ingenuity of the researcher than of the community that has bound itself to them, and should rather become concerned with prosaic, expository discourse. —Smith, Imagining Religion


Introduction Preparing the Materials: Prolegomenon for a Study of Prosaic Religion

Every human society is an enterprise in world building. Religion occupies a distinctive place in this enterprise. —Berger, Sacred Canopy A man is born into the world he has made. —Shatapatha Brahmana (6.2.2.27)

When I arrived in Bhaktapur, Nepal, in June 1995 to begin fieldwork, one of the first questions I was asked was, “So, just what is (a) god?” It was the early afternoon on June 26. I was drinking a Coke and writing down some scratch field notes in Taumadhi, the city’s central square. A city of approximately 80,000 inhabitants, Bhaktapur lies seven miles east of Kathmandu, Nepal, and is one of the three “royal” centers of the Kathmandu Valley that attained prominence during the Malla dynasty (A.D. 1482–1769) (Grieve 2002). Often called Nepal’s cultural capital, Bhaktapur, known for its imposing medieval sacred architecture, is a “must see” for visitors to the country and, in what at first may seem idiosyncratic, it is also the center for the Nepal Workers and Peasants Party (NWPP), a communist group whose ideology stems form North Korea (Bijukchhe n.d.: Gellner 2001, 276–92; Grieve 2003). My questioner was one of the ubiquitous high school students–cum–predatory guides who had just peeled himself off a large

2

Retheorizing Religion in Nepal

group of tourists. After I declined a tour, he saw me writing, so he sat down next to me and asked what I was doing. I told him I was in Nepal to study religion (dharma).1 He grabbed my pen, looked at me askance, and asked, “If you are studying religion, just what is (a) god?” I could not answer. I was silenced not by a lack of concepts, but rather because as the high school student asked the question, he teasingly pointed across the square to the god-image (m˚rti, loha[n]dya:) of the god “Death/Time” Bhairava (Kala Bhailadyah). As I detail in chapter 3, enthroned on the front of the rectangular three-story major Bhairava temple, this six-inch-tall metal god-image is a “horrifying” form of the god Shiva who takes offerings for Sky Bhairava, who is enthroned behind this façade on the temple’s second floor. The Bhairavnath temple was originally built in the early seventeenth century, but then was rebuilt by King Bhupatindra Malla in 1717. After it was destroyed in the earthquake of 1934, it was rebuilt again, and a third floor was added. Just recently, Bhairavnath has been restored completely by Bhaktapur’s municipality. What at the time was a humiliating or at best frustrating encounter turned out to be serendipitous, because one’s “misunderstandings” may, in fact, help produce scholarly practice itself (Zito 1993). Such a misunderstanding expands scholarship because it is unable to comprehend a phenomenon and thus causes a “breakdown” in academic theory (Dreyfus 1991, 97–99; Heidegger 1996, 143, 323). What interrupted my theory, and thus made an otherwise transparent assumption visible, was the discipline of religious study’s reliance on “scripturalism.” As I argue in chapter 3, scripturalism is a pattern of mediation that forces religious phenomena into the “Protestant bed” of the printed text and then reifies these texts as ahistorical. Whether wielded as critique or apology, the leitmotif of scripturalism runs through the study of religion and often “stretches” or “cuts” religious phenomena either to fit a romanticized quest for salvation and transcendence or to vilify it as false consciousness.2 What Bhaktapur’s Bhairava god-image indicated, however, is that these scripturalist conceptions of religion stem from an elite and often Western understanding.3 This “one-size-fits-all” scriptural approach, which metamorphs phenomena to fit a preconceived ideal, is reinforced by an interplay between the “puritan model” of religion and the logocentric academic fetishization of the book (Butler 1999; Derrida 1974). This is especially apparent for Hinduism where the current notion of Hinduism as a spiritual and transcendent religion was crafted in the interaction between orientalist Western scholars and brahminical pundits (King 1999). What solidified was an “Eternal Religion” (Sanatana Dharma) that was palatable to both “high church” Protestantism and Vedanta philosophy (Waghorne,

Preparing the Materials

3

Cutler, and Narayanan 1985). As such, “Scriptural Hinduism” is a recent hybrid construct that has been adopted and adapted by a diverse range of groups, from Hindu nationalists to a variety of new age movements (Hanegraaff 1996; Jaffrelot 1996). As indicated by Bhairava’s god-image and the 750 people who worship there on a typical day, however, Bhaktapur’s religious practice is a much more prosaic affair. Scholars of religion have tended to be blind to Hinduism’s prosaic side because of scriptualism’s habits that have assumed that Hinduism is shaped by a pious transcendental complex, which lies under the jurisdiction of Brahmin priests and pertains to deities and concepts derived from sacred texts.4 In Bhaktapur, rather than the pursuit of spiritual liberation, salvation, or a more favorable future birth, religion tends to invoke what John Cort calls the “realm of well-being”—the pursuit of “health, wealth and mental peace, emotional contentment, and satisfaction in one’s worldly endeavors” (2001, 7, 187–200). When I asked Dhrubeswori Gongah—the senior woman of the home in which I lived during much of my stay in Bhaktapur—why she engaged in worship, she replied, “for the health and wealth of my family” (personal communication, August 25, 1995).5 As I employ it here, “prosaic religion” indicates a strategy that is not confined to scripture but that consists of a “pragmatic ritual repertoire” (Lewis 2000). That is, it exists as a form of flexible, innovative, body-focused, hybrid praxis. Such prosaic practices include ceremonies, rites of passage, and religious processions to name a few of the most important practices. Such prosaic concerns may be optional or obligatory and may be done for the well-being of the community or for oneself (Gellner 1992; Gupta 1979; Turner 1980). The transcendental and prosaic complexes do not collide or compete, nor are they in mere accidental association. Rather, each is a response to specific needs. They complement each other as they are utilized in what are essentially distinct and complementary contexts of application. While widespread and important, prosaic religion is not Bhaktapur’s exclusive mode. It is just one of the many cultural practices—both religious and nonreligious—that people in Bhaktapur have ready at hand to construct their lived worlds. The difficulty with studying prosaic religion is mediation. All religious study engages in translation. One translates between cultures, classes, and genders as well as geographic and historical locations. A method to lessen the distortions caused by mediation is to concentrate on local worldgenerating matrixes—those prosaic activities by which people construct lived reality. In Bhaktapur, such world-generating activities are clearest when concentrating on the making of mandalas (ma“πalas) (figure I.1).

4


Figure I.1 The “mandala map” (Yantrakara Khwopa Dey) emplots a religiously organized space onto the cityscape of Bhaktapur through a cadastral authoritative lexicon and a religious interpellative apparatus. Image, 25 ⫻ 30 inches; tempera paint on cotton canvas. Painted by Madhu Krishna Chitrakar in 1997 and based on older prototype (cf. Klöver 1976; Levy 1990, 153) (from the author’s collection).

A mandala is a Hindu or Buddhist graphic cosmological image, which in its most basic pattern is usually in the form of a circle divided into four separate sections (Slusser 1982). Although in Sanskrit usage the word mandala simply denotes the quality of being round—as expressed in everything from leprosy spots to the ring of neighbor-states surrounding a kingdom—in contemporary Nepali usage, a mandala is conceptualized as an arrangement of deities conceived of in a set and laid in a tantric “magical” diagram (Blom 1989). Because of scripturalism’s embedded pairing with the book, however, translating between the field of academic scholarship and that of the making of mandalas is also a translation between media themselves. How can scholars of religion mediate such prosaic nonprint media? How can one translate the media practices within which such an image is socially contextualized? Theoretically, the difficulty with illustrating nonprint local practices is that


5

in the very act of writing about them, one transforms them. One shifts their significance from local, visceral, and tacit in situ cultural practices to signs in the discursive, material, and institutional practices that make up this printed book (Derrida 1967; Kittler 1999). My concern is not that some underlying essential reality is being covered over (Baudrillard 1983, 1; Kozybski 1933; Smith 1993). We can never access the “real” (Althusser 1971, 189–219; Lacan 1977, 30–113). To pun off an old “Hindu” metaphor, it is mediation all the way down.6 Rather, my concern is that religious practices are being resignified in another discourse (Briggs 1986). There is nothing inherently wrong with such resignification. The problem arises, however, because in this seemingly neutral translation, the new signification comes not only to dominate, but as these new practices tend to supplant the local usage, they threaten to ultimately erase the nontextual. As Robin Blaser writes in “Image-Nation 5 (erasure),” “the translated men disappear into what they have translated” (1974). This was brought home to me many times in Bhaktapur. In one case, an eager young man intently interrogated me about Hinduism. I thought he was testing my knowledge and so for over an hour sincerely attempted to answer each question. Finally, annoyed, I asked him his motive. Without hesitation he answered, “I want to know the answers in case another researcher comes along.” More to the point, often when I would ask people about a certain religious practice, they would pull scholarly books about Nepal’s religion— especially Robert Levy’s Mesocosm (1990)—down off their shelf and refer me to it. Instead, my concern is that by privileging scriptural accounts based on the printed book, subalternative lived worlds are being lost because they are being resignified to support elite ideologies. These prosaic practices are rescripted to fit both the ideological purposes of the religions of the status quo as well as being commodified for the marketplace. As the conclusion to Retheorizing Religion in Nepal argues, these alternative social formations possess positive political potential because (1) they interrupt the dominant discussions about the study of religion and (2) they can operate as a model for alternative social formations; intentional communities that operate as other than the marketplace of late capitalism and the often militant agendas of fundamentalists (Hardt and Negri 2000; 2004). For example, on Sunday, March 17, 1997, I practiced drumming under the watchful eyes, and even more watchful ears, of my drumming teacher, Hari Govinda Ranjitkar. As I drummed, I thought back to what a local high-caste scholar of culture had said to me: “We [pointing first to himself and then to me] don’t know custom the way the farmers do. Yet, while we don’t have the knowledge, the farmers don’t know how to present it in an orderly fashion.” My gloss in my field notes on his words is that he implied

6


that while “tradition” lies in the masses (the folk), for it to become “knowledge” it must first be filtered through written elite discourses. Drumming, on the other hand, had presented a synesthetic and pretheoretical set of practices, which like the “interruption” caused by the Bhairava god-image, disrupts scholarly discourse’s scriptural habits. This especially hit home when, a moment later, my mind wandering, Mr. Ranjitkar became disgusted with me (I never was a very good student), grasped my arms, and beat out the rhythms on my body. My argument so far has been that to accurately depict many alternative social formations one needs to write about nonwritten religious practices. Because scholars must write books, in the present academic scene, the challenge that arises is how to produce a printed text about nonprint religious practices. One could simply stop writing books (and I have experimented with this through the media of the internet and video). Yet, although the media environment is shifting away from print dominance, the book still plays a central and authoritative position in what constitutes knowledge (Camille 1992). As a working academic, one cannot ignore the mandate to publish or perish. Moreover, the answer is not to try to better “represent” the practices in writing, to mime them in more and more precise ekphrasis— the literary representation of visual art.7 This only ensnares the practices in a tighter and tighter web of graphic resignification. Rather, if media are understood not only to mediate social reality, but also to play a part in its construction, then a study of nonprint social practices needs not only to represent their content, but to capture their generative matrixes by structuring the metadiscourse of the study’s own theoretical apparatus on the nonprint social practices material world-building logics. Accordingly, modeling one’s writing on nonprint media calls for new methods both in the collection of data and their mediation. First, we need to enlarge the scope of legitimate sources for the study of religious knowledge to artifacts other than the book and to practices beyond belief. Such knowledges are not inarticulable, they just happen not to be communicated by the printed book (Sullivan 1990). Similar to mandala painting, such “proof-texts” consist of concrete practices as canoe and pottery making. Attention to other systems of constructing lived worlds allows one to analyze religious phenomena that would otherwise go undetected.8 Second, it is not enough for one’s writing to become highly ekphrastic. By transporting visual art, music, and dance into the medium of print, we refigure their own significance into writing. Rather than offering alternative models, we conscript them into the long history of the book. As a remedy to scripturalist resignification, this study theorizes the prosaic mode of religion as a set of world-building practices that are most


7

Figure I.2 Artist Madhu Krishna Chitrakar in his workshop (photograph: G. Grieve, October 23, 1999).

clearly articulated by tracing the processes by which people make mandalas.9 As a methodological strategy to resist entanglement in writing, this study is concerned with prosaic religion’s world-building practices that are illustrated best in the process of making mandalas in Nepal. For this reason, Retheorizing Religion in Nepal centers on the making of paubha (paubhg) paintings under the tutelage of the Bhaktapur artist Madhu Krishna Chitrakar (figure I.2). Similar to Tibetan thangkas, paubha paintings are crafted by Newars, the largest ethnic group in Bhaktapur, and are usually of mandala designs drawn on a cotton canvas with a tempera-like paint. Traditionally, paubhas have been used in times of sickness or death or in connection with a particular religious rite as a means of overcoming particular obstacles or obtaining certain goals. Today in Nepal, mandala paintings also play an important role in the tourist industry and have become pieces of “art” to be hung on gallery walls. The reason for concentrating on the making of mandalas is that if we merely describe mandalas in writing, we will unwittingly reinscribe them into the scripturalist status quo and thereby lose their value as a means to mediate prosaic religion. Instead, my goal is to theorize the process by which mandalas are made at the level of material production so to intervene in the means by which religious studies produces its own texts

8


(Benjamin 1999b). Only by foregrounding its own means of production can the field learn to model itself on—rather than speak to or speak for— the historically muted practitioners of prosaic religion (Spivak 1985). Accordingly, the goal of Retheorizing Religion in Nepal is neither to list the symbolism of mandalas nor to describe their production—although I will touch upon both of these issues. The book is not a writing about mandalas. Rather, my aim is to utilize the process of painting mandalas as a “metamodel” that structures the writing of the book itself (figure I.3) (table I.1, column 3). However, before we pursue the argument that is produced by the metamodel, we need to locate the social formations from which the metamodel is generated.

Figure I.3 The “meta-model” is a schematic diagram of the making of a mandala. Starting at the upper right-hand side of image, the diagram illustrates the steps by which a mandala is painted. These proceed from the construction of a background grid, through the application of paint (rang tayegu), and finally to the detailing by placing of ornaments (wa:ti[n]) (by G. Grieve, 1999).


9

Table I.1 Schematic diagram of the study’s methodological structure that indicates the relationship between the prosaic religious object and the theory of religion, as well as the steps in the making of a mandala painting

A

Introduction

1

2

3

Prosaic religious object or practice

Theoretical categories

“Meta-models”— steps in making of mandala

Looking at material godimage

Mediation

Preparation of materials

PART I B

Chapter 1

Copybook (hakusaphu)

Tradition

Creating a frame

C

Chapter 2

Maps

Cosmology

Laying out the grid

PART II D

Chapter 3

God-image (Lohndyah)

The divine

Sketching central figure

E

Chapter 4

Worship (puja)

Person

Putting on the colors

F

Chapter 5

Navadurga performance

Religious experience

Opening of eyes

G

Chapter 6

Cow procession (Saya)

Agency

Adding dark red and blue paint

H

Conclusion

Cyasi Mandapa

Detailing a theory of prosaic religion

Putting on ornamentation

The Canvas: Mandalas and the Illustration of Prosaic Lived Worlds On the foggy morning of July 29, 1999, I began to prepare my second mandala painting. It was not until I began taking paubha painting lessons from Mr. Chitrakar that I began to understand the nature of prosaic religious practice. Like Bhairava’s god-image mentioned earlier, modeling knowledge

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on the making of mandalas interrupts the scriptural notion that religion can be “read” over the native’s shoulder (Geertz 1973). Like Mr. Ranjitkar’s synesthetic and pretheoretical set of “helping hands,” Mr. Chitrakar’s tutoring indicates (1) that religious practice is often a complex of embodied material practices that are defined by the interface between people and artifacts and (2) that such prosaic practices play a part in its creation. It soon became evident that Mr. Chitrakar and I had different understandings of what it meant to study painting that stemmed from a radically different understanding of what constituted knowledge. I have extensive and detailed instructions on how to make a mandala’s frame because as I observed each step of the process I shot photographs and made measurements. However, after approximately twenty minutes of these activities, Mr. Chitrakar sighed, “If you are going to do that [pointing to my camera and measuring tape] you will never learn to make an effective (shakti [∂akti]) painting. You need to learn by doing.” He added, “A few anthropologists and one art historian have tried to write it down, and their information is not so much wrong, but just pieces of it . . . just the surface.” As it became clear from Mr. Chitrakar’s words, when making an effective painting, the process is as important as the finished product. To illustrate his point, he indicated the pencil lines that make up the underlying grid, but then are covered over. As he repeatedly stressed, “the different images are still linked underneath” (personal communication, July 29, 1999). Because it is the embedded process that one must understand, ethnography is crucial for theorizing the role of prosaic religion. As Mr. Chitrakar said, “When a person feels by doing it himself, he will understand” (personal communication, July 30, 1999). It was repeated contact with artisans and craftspeople, such as Mr. Chitrakar, that made me realize that rolling up one’s sleeves and participating in the local practices is indispensable for understanding the practical reality of Bhaktapur’s prosaic religious life. Ethnography allows room for Mr. Chitrakar’s having to pause and draw pictures, for the sweeper Basula Dyola’s not knowing or feeling comfortable in learned discourse, and for the master drummer Hari Govinda Ranjitkar’s talking with his hands and punctuating his speech not only with the rhythm of his drums, but also with the rhythms of life—the “bhygk-bhygk” of a broken motorcycle. Ethnography is crucial because it is in such everyday situations that one encounters the prosaic level of religion. In Bhaktapur, the term people use to describe such everyday life is samsara (sa®sgra). In contemporary Newar (Nepal Bhasa), samsara connotes the world of birth, death, and transmigration (Manandhar 1986). In classical Newar, the term simply denotes empirical phenomenological existence: the conditioned and ever-changing phenomenological world, as opposed to the unconditioned, eternal, and transcendent state of nirvana ( Jørgensen 1989). Because samsara is produced by human


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action, I gloss the term as “lived world.” By “world” I am concerned with socially constructed existence (Berger 1961; 1967; 1969). By using the term “lived world” I mean to model the processes by which countless and manyfaceted but coherent and dependent variables contribute to a particular shared world. A lived world is a constantly changing social reality, which emerges from a particular sociohistorical and geographic situation. Retheorizing Religion in Nepal draws upon this complex of samsaric background practices. While comprehending world construction is crucial, however, one ought to be wary of essentializing the notion of “social construction” itself. Ironically, if social construction has taught us anything, it is to question ideal concepts that universalize and naturalize any theoretical category. What the concept of social construction tends to obscure is embodied action—the limitless material and lived methods by which people make lived reality. There is never simply a reified social “production,” but there are always different historical, cultural, and geographic embedded practices for “making” worlds. Samsara—as the phenomenological world and as “rebirth” and “redeath”—is generated through karmic acts. As the French scholar Paul Mus writes, “the Universe is only the series of [karmic] acts” (1998, 319). As I detail in chapter 4, however, karmic acts are not the purely conceptual occurrences that the English “action” implies ( Reichenbach 1990, 24–43). “When one writes the word ‘action’ to translate the concept, one unwittingly introduces into karma the connotations of non-substantiveness and non-materialness which are habitually associated with the abstract noun ‘action’ ” (Daniel 1983; Doniger 1973, 271–73; Marriot 1976). To mediate Bhaktapur’s samsaric background practices, Retheorizing Religion in Nepal models itself on the making of mandalas. Such modeling is necessary because karma’s radical materialism indicates that, while made, Bhatkapur’s lived worlds are not painted onto a tabula rasa. Instead, the materials must be prepared. In fact, when painting mandalas, before one can begin, one needs to prepare the canvas, arrange the palette, and trace out a rough sketch. In a similar fashion, to prepare for the chapters that follow, the introduction bases its arrangement on the organization of the materials required for producing mandala paintings. First, based on a polishing rock and table used for the preparation of the canvas, the following two sections “interrupt” scripturalist studies of Bhaktapur’s religion and then offer the alternative theory of cadastral logic.10 Second, modeled on the preparation of a palette, the following third section crafts a set of research tools by forging three theoretical “remedies”: mediating effect, generative matrix, and dialexis.11 Third, the final section of the introduction, based on a rough sketch of the proposed painting, describes the scope of the study by outlining the book’s following six chapters.

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The Rock: Interrupting the Scripturalist Account of Bhaktapur’s Religion The painting instruction on the morning of July 29, 1999, began with the polishing of the canvas with a river stone: first up and down, then back and forth, and finally round and round. The circular polishing was supported by a small table that created a conducive surface. Mr. Chitrakar said that “polishing the canvas is a very important part of the painting process. It is just like with culture. When you raise a child, when they are small . . . you need to round down rough spots so that problems do not appear later in life.” He took my hand with the stone in it and showed me the correct circular motion for polishing and then went on: “With a painting you have to lay down a good foundation so that problems do not come later in painting.” From the start, it was evident that to theorize prosaic religious practices what needed to be “rubbed down” were the scripturalist approaches to the study of religion. I became interested in studying Bhaktapur’s prosaic religion because as an American I wanted to find a method for studying religion in Nepal that would not reproduce the present “postcolonial” global order.12 I wanted to write about Bhaktapur’s religion without becoming, in the words of Walter Benjamin, a “tool of the dominant class” (1999b).13 In my research I found that religion (dharma) glosses two chief meanings in Bhaktapur.14 On one hand, in the transcendental view that tended to be pontificated by high-caste men, religion means living a certain type of ethically bounded lifestyle. As the high-caste teacher Yogesh Raj stated, “The word dharma in Sanskrit means to do dhgram. In other words, religion is #lifestyle# (original in English)” (personal communication, May 5, 1999). And as the Brahmin priest and businessman Uttam Jha replied to the same question, such lifestyles are concerned with ethics: “Religion teaches moral responsibility and for people who are ethical, they don’t need any religion” (personal communication, August 4, 1999). Damodar Gautam, the head of the National Museum located in Bhaktapur, replied, “People need to have boundaries, principles, rules and regulations. That is religion” (personal communication, June 21, 1999). On the other hand, in the prosaic view that tended to be held by lower-caste men and women, religious practice focuses on the worship of god-images (p˚jg). As the farmer and drum teacher, Hari Govinda Ranjit, said, “religion” means “you have to do good worship of god-images” (personal communication, June 14, 1999). As the souvenir seller, Mangal Laxmi Sahi, said, religion is done with “purified uncooked husked rice, a mixture of foods, including meat and fish, flowers and fruit” (personal communication, July 16, 1999).


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It is the blindness to this material level that allows scripturalist interpretation to distort religion’s in situ usages, and thus reduce them to books. As Mus writes, “Working at a great distance from the object of study, one sometimes risks confusing a library with a country” (1975, 7). Because almost all of the research conducted on Bhaktapur’s religion has been on practices other than the written word, one could argue that I am jousting at windmills (Gutschow 1980; Gutschow and Klöver 1975; Klöver 1976; Levy 1990). Yet, while it would seem that these authors are pushing the physical media of scripture out the front door (and this was the reason I was attracted to Bhaktapur as a research site), they slip it back through the window by ultimately basing their understanding of religion and tradition on an elite scriptural conception of Hinduism. While the scripturalist understanding of Hinduism runs like a motif through most of the scholarship on Bhaktapur, it is epitomized in Levy’s Mesocosm (Gutschow 1980; Gutschow and Klöver 1975; Klöver 1976). For Levy, “Bhaktapur represents a Hindu community in its full development, a ‘climax community’ of Hinduism, and Hinduism so viewed is a symbolic resource that once served, and still anachronistically serves in Bhaktapur” (1990, 2). My difficulty with Levy’s interpretation is not that Hinduism is unimportant to Bhaktapur, although I would not contend, as Levy does, that it is the essence of the city. The difficulty arises, however, because through the rhetoric of scripturalism he reduces Hinduism to an archaic symbol system that perpetuates a static social order.15 First, with regard to archaic, Levy defines Bhaktapur not only as an old-fashioned place, but he also indicates that the city is run by a timeless oriental religious way of being in the world, which is opposed to the modern secular Western experience. Accordingly, Levy theorizes Bhaktapur as premodern, as lying on the other side of the great divide of our contemporary world. In fact, he counterposes the authentic Bhaktapur to the “first serious shocks of modernity [which] began only in the early 1950’s, when, following a political revolution, Nepal opened itself up to the West” (1990, 15). Second, by “symbol system,” Levy wants to indicate those vehicles of meaning by which the city is ordered through “something like a choreographed ballet” (1990, 16). Third, by “static social order,” Levy means to indicate “the city’s central orienting value of birth-determined and fixed social hierarchy” (1990, 16). That is, he continues the orientalist fascination with purity and pollution that posits caste as the essence of Hinduism (Dumont 1980; Inden 1990). Levy is able to argue that Hinduism is an agentless, ancient, static symbol system because he discounts history. As he writes, “[Mesocosm] is concerned with the struggle to order Bhaktapur, its particular way of carving out a space and common reality in the face of history” (1990, 15; cf. 23). He imagines this order as a dance of symbols that “had tried for

14


hundreds of years to turn the flow of history into what might seem a timeless eternal civic order” (1990, 619). Accordingly, Levy argues that Hinduism is “a powerful device for turning accident and history into structure, for trying to escape the contingencies and consequences of history, for trying to escape change, to make change seem illusory within an enduring order” (1990, 616). In Levy’s argument, because Hinduism is by nature antihistorical, it is both timeless and an accidental fossil that will dissipate in the face of modernity. As he writes in a letter from October 19, 1976, to a resident of Bhaktapur, “[Bhaktapur] may be the only existing center of deep and complete Hindu Culture [sic] that is left and it is a great pity that History [sic] will make it change” (cf. 1990, 2). By posing the city’s social practices both as accidental fossils and as devices to dispel history, he treats Bhaktapur’s religion as a blind repetition and thus strips people of their agency. How does the book justify this lacuna? Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Mesocosm’s book jacket and the initial page across from the title page features a photograph of a silent masked dancer that is simply captioned in quarter-centimeterhigh text, “Seto Bhairava dancing” (Levy 1990). Besides the fact that the Navadurga troupe, to which this dancer belongs, particularly forbids photography, the image reveals a postcolonial hierarchy of knowledge in which local elites speak for local nonelites, who are then spoken for by Western experts. Levy claims to be representing the entire “symbolic ordering of Bhaktapur” (1990, 8). Yet it quickly becomes clear that Levy is actually claiming to be speaking from the viewpoint of the Rajopadhyaya Brahmins. As he writes on page 8, “[f ]rom here on ‘I’ becomes ‘we’ ” (Levy 1990, 8). Across the page from the image of the silent dancer are the words, in half-centimeter bold text, “with the collaboration of Kedar Raj Rajopadhyaya.” By claiming that his depiction of the city is the normative view of the Rajopadhyaya Brahmins, Levy silences other counterclaims. As Levy writes, “Whatever the untouchable, for example, thinks about it all, it is these [brahminic] conceptions that form the matrix of his life. Against the ordering interpretation of the elite, popular interpretations where they differ are . . . simply ‘wrong’ ” (1990, 9). Yet, there are a multitude of ways inhabitants imagine Bhaktapur—a plurality of lived cities within a single space. It would be both morally wrong, and empirically inaccurate to privilege one vision by canonizing it, thereby denying reality to others (Parish 1994; 1996). However, while the Brahmins may be penultimate, Levy inscribes his own “modern” voice as the ultimate authority. Directly above the Kedar Raj Rajopadhyaya’s name, “Robert I. Levy” is written in bold half-centimeter text. This speaking for the Brahmins who are speaking for the silenced dancer


15

occurs because, while Levy understands the city literati as “sophisticated” and relies on them for collaboration, they cannot be “critical intellectuals” because they are essentially “traditional” (1990, 31–32; cf. Liecthy 2003, 232–46). As becomes clear by the end of Mesocosm’s 829 pages, the “we” from page 8 speaks not just for Levy and Kedar Raj Rajopadhyaya, and not just for an semi-anonymous set of Bhaktapur Brahmins, and not just for everyone in the city, but for “archaic society” as such. In fact, Levy’s “we” expands to include so many that actual people fall out of the discussion. Besides Kedar Raj Rajopadhyaya and a historical description of Malla Kings, the only Newars mentioned by name are Gautam and Devi Vajracharya, who translated Levy’s interviews upon his return to the United States. Other than these persons, Mesocosm presents itself as decoding an eternal truth whose authority stems from the timelessness of a mystic and exotic Hindu essence. Levy’s account has both ideological and empirical ramifications. Politically, by posing the city as archaic, Levy can imagine Bhaktapur’s “dirt and foul smells” not as poverty stemming from postcolonialization, but as “a clearing in a yet more ancient world” (1990, 56). Levy’s account is ideological, then, because he constitutes Hinduism in such a way as to transform a historical contingent set of power relations and hierarchies of knowledge into an essential symbolic order. He turns politics into an essential part of culture. As he writes about politics in the city during his fieldwork, “for the time being, however, at the city level Bhaktapur has little effective local political control” (1990, 62). There is also an epistemological reduction in what “counts” for Levy as proper knowledge. As we will see in chapter 6, Levy is forced to all but ignore the Cow Procession, which is arguably the most Bhaktapurian of any of the city’s celebrations (Levy 1990, 442–52). To give a pedestrian example, Levy names Bhaktapur’s processional route that circumambulates the city with the Sanskrit term pradakshinapatha ( pradak¥ingpgtha). This is not incorrect, but the word pradakshinapatha is only used by educated elites in formal settings. Most of the time people (even elites) use the word “Cow Road” (Salan in Newar or Gaikobato in Nepali), which, as I discuss in chapter 6, is used because it is on this processional route that people proceed during the Cow Procession (an event that Levy is more or less uninterested in). Levy’s scripturalist (mis-) interpretations would simply be academic except that how Hinduism is described by scholars has a direct impact on how Hinduism is used politically (King 1999). In Bhaktapur, over the last thirty years scripturalist understandings of Hinduism have been used to justify the obscuring of local agency. Such scripturalist accounts operate as tools of dominance because by denying history, they tend to submerge local

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agency under a blanket of romantic otherworldly scripturalism. As described in part I, this is especially apparent in the internationally funded monumental conservation projects that have literally reconstructed Bhaktapur’s landscape. For many residents of Bhaktapur, as well as many of the expatriates who worked on the conservation projects, the internationally funded projects have been run with little or no involvement from the Nepali side. As a German expatriate told me, “there was no emphasis on learning the languages, either Nepali or Newar. Basically, the unwritten policy was that, except for labor, there should be no participation of the local people” (personal communication, April 15, 1997). How can one write about Bhaktapur’s religion without becoming a tool used for dominance? How can one clean up such scripturalist accounts of Hinduism? One senses that, in Mesocosm, Robert Levy has at least an inkling that his romantic interpretation is lacking. As he qualifies his argument, “Our emphasis on the order of Bhaktapur is very liable to appear regressive, ideological, Orientalist, and various other unpleasant things in the contemporary climate of criticism of essays presenting ‘other’ times and ‘other’ peoples” (1990, 9). My difficulty with Levy, however, is not that he attempts to describe “other” people and “other” times. Attempting to understand other people’s worlds is not what makes one an orientalist. My concern with Levy’s account stems from the fact that one cannot assume that people’s actions stem form either passivity or ignorance. We need to approach people as creative and improvisational agents in a world that they themselves created. By describing the techniques by which people make mandalas, the following section begins the process of alleviating the postcolonial condition in which I found myself when I began to do research in Bhaktapur.

The Support: Cadastral Logic and Theorizing the Making of Mandalas Interrupting scripturalist accounts allows a space for comprehending how one can model Bhaktapur’s prosaic religion on the making of mandalas. Yet for this space to become useful, it must be supported by an effective theoretical base. Before I began to paint with Mr. Chitrakar, I had more or less purposely ignored mandalas. This was hard to do in the Kathmandu Valley. It has long been argued that many aspects of Nepal’s cultural landscape are organized through mandalas: cases have been made that music, hand symbols, people, festivals, ceremonies, temples, shrines, cities, and even the entire Kathmandu Valley have been configured this way.16 As Todd Lewis writes, “The internal order of Newar house, courtyard, neighborhood, city,


17

and Valley—ideally integrated externally with excursions and internally through dekhg meditations—has a mandala structure that orders and centers Newar life in many domains” (1984, 558). I had shut my eyes to their ubiquitous existence because Western scholars tended to subsume mandalas under scripturalist accounts that sanitize them as symbolic form, or even worse depict them as a method to decode the unconscious (Argüelles 1972; Jung 1972; Tucci 1961, to name only a few). Once I rolled up my sleeves and began to paint with Mr. Chitrakar, however, it soon become clear that images, like the mandala map (Yantrakara Khwopa Dey), are utilized as a magical diagrams (yantrgkgra) that configures the space of Bhaktapur (Khwopa) as a lived space (dey). In a sense, most approaches to mandalas would be similar to interpreting the symbolism of a hammer rather than articulating how people use it as a tool—valid, but with little relation to how the user comprehends it. As such, the mandala map should not be reduced to either an aesthetically appreciated artwork or a symbol that mimetically represents the city. Rather, it is a yantra—a magical device used for occult practices or salvation. To thus theorize the cultural work that mandalas do, one needs to comprehend the process by which the making of mandalas configures social space. To achieve this goal, we need to rehabilitate the notion of “mesocosm” by returning to its theoretical roots. Levy’s ethnography on Bhaktapur aptly describes the city as “a mesocosm, an organized and meaningful world intermediate between the microcosmic worlds of individuals and the culturally conceived macrocosm, the universe, at whose center the city lies” (Levy 1990, 2 [italics in original]; cf. 32, 337, 499–500, 600–01, and 757, fn. 2). Levy’s use of the term, however, falls short because, as indicated in the preceding section, his scripturalist understanding of tradition and historiography posits the city as “ancient,” “archaic,” “medieval,” and “traditional”: “a mesocosm out of time,” which “has tried for hundreds of years to turn the flow of history into . . . a timeless civic order” (Levy 1990, 28 and 15; cf. 619). If one pops the nimbus of scripturalism that surrounds Levy’s use of mesocosm and returns to its theoretical original usage as simply a way of describing world-building logics, then the term is apt for describing many of Bhaktapur’s prosaic religious activities. Levy takes his notion of mesocosm from the French Asianist Paul Mus.17 In contrast to what he glosses as the “Upanishadic interpretation” of Hinduism that concentrates on salvationist philosophy, ethical scripture, and caste, Mus theorizes a logic of world-building social logics by which societies in monsoonal Asia generate lived territory (Mus 1998, 6; 1975, 7, 11–12, 20; see also Vajracharya 1997). In Barabudur, Mus coins the term “mesocosm” to describe these logics (1998). As Mus writes, these spaces are “only a passing-place, and ‘mesocosm’ would be more exact, if we were allowed to have recourse to this neologism” (1998, 112, 332). Unlike Levy who

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conceives of a mesocosm as a “cosmological image” that manifests a perceived eternal order of stability and stasis, Mus theorizes it as a ceremonial device for producing social space.18 Mus argues that such mandalas are not symbols that represent an ontological essence, but are rather a type of prototypical god whose ceremonies produce the lived territory of the city. As Mus repeatedly argues, the mandala’s “value was not conventional, but constructive” (Mus 1998, 85). Mus theorizes how mesocosmic space is constructed through the use of cadastral logics. “Cadastral,” a term that comes to French through Provençal, Venetian, and, ultimately, late Greek, describes a survey showing boundaries and property lines and pertains to “cadastre”—an official register of ownership, extent, and value of real property in a given territory (Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “cadastre,” http://oed.com/ [accessed February 26, 2005]). The operating assumption of cadastral religion is that gods can be persuaded to offer aid and that if not placated, they can cause harm. Such deities are material god-images, often merely an aniconic stone. According to Mus, these stones are not “seats” of the deity, but the god itself. “Not the stone of the genie, but the stone-genie” (Mus 1975, 14). Besides the stone, a delegate (usually the chief or king, but also a priest) of the group is identified with the god. For the duration of the rite, in the delegate resides the power that assures the fertility of the locality (Mus 1975, 15, 21, 34). For Mus, cadastral sign objects consist of such things as Buddha statues, linga, and temples. Yet the cadastral object par excellence is the stupa (a sacred structure), which he understands as a three-dimensional mandala.19 Mus schematizes the cadastral cosmological generation in three interrelated positions: the divine, the sacred, and the human. The cadastral divine/ sacred/human pattern involves a radical disjunction between the plane of the divine, which is constituted by the ineffable, and the plane of the sacred, which is constituted by the concrete sacrificial action that ceremonially produces it. On the one hand is the ineffable divine; on the other is the human position. Between the two is the sacred, which, for the duration of the ritual, concretizes the divine by furnishing it with “eyes and ears” (Mus 1975, 14; 1998, 106). Through this sacred image, the human group not only interacts with the ineffable divine, but also “collectively . . . acquires its right to the land by means of this intermediary” (Mus 1975, 44). The key to Mus’s cadastral theory of how such mandala cosmologies are generated is the logic of projection. Contextualized in worship, a cadastral sign object projects two vectors that constitute the cosmos; (1) a vertical projection (↑) that points upward toward an imagined but unknowable divinity and by which samsara is escaped; (2) a horizontal (←→) projection that points toward imagined horizons and by which samsara is reconstituted.


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For instance, to create the cadastral cosmos, the mandala map projects two vectors (figure I.1). As detailed in chapter 3, a connoted vertical nirvanic vector is projected up into unknowability through the advertised secrets of esoteric practice. Second a denoted “horizontal” samsaric axis is projected out toward the horizons. According to Mus, it is through these two simultaneous projections (←↑→) that mandalic territories are made.

Laying out the Palette: A Set of Mediating Research Tools How can one extract a set of research tools from Paul Mus’s theory of cadastral logic? What are the methods needed to theorize the processes by which prosaic religion is used to construct worlds? When retheorizing religion in Nepal, along with the preparation of the canvas, before one can begin painting one must prepare one’s palette. In its most elementary forms, this consists of the three primary colors. Similarly, as a remedy to having religious practices distorted through resignification, I theorize three primary mediating remedies to illustrate the subjects in the following chapters. The first remedy is the “mediating effect,” which argues that the media through which we communicate plays a fundamental role in producing the message. The second is the “generative matrix,” which describes those fields of discourses, practices, institutions, and technologies for making lived worlds. The third is “dialexis,” which argues that scholarship ought to be a dialog not just at the level of conceptual content, but a discussion at the level of style (lexis).

The Mediating Effect Turning to the production of mandala painting is necessary because of what can be glossed as the “mediating effect”—the media we communicate by are not neutral conveyers of data, but play a fundamental role in producing the message (Derrida 1967). This premise is important because if media play a part in producing the message, then they constitute the social world (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Berger 1967). Moreover, mediation is never solely an ideal undertaking, never simply an exchange of “ideas.” Media always rely upon the material. Even speech, the most reified of media, relies on the material of air and the human body. For this reason, one must acknowledge the mediating effect because like the making of mandalas, the vast majority of the world’s religious practice relies on media other than the printed book (Babb 1975; McDannell 1996; Waghorne 1985; 1994). One should

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acknowledge the mediating effect because the media, discourse, and practices by which knowledge is transmitted play a part in constituting the message. The same words spoken are not the same words written down. To invoke Isadora Duncan’s infamous words, “If I could write about it I wouldn’t have to dance it” (1920). Similarly, reading about a religious ceremony does not give the same knowledge as participating in one. Like measuring a hammer, listing the measurement and symbolism of a painting does not convey the same knowledge as using one, let alone making one.

Generative Matrix To articulate how people use prosaic religion to construct prosaic material lived worlds, I have coined the term “generative matrix”—those fields of discourses, practices, institutions, and technologies for making lived worlds. In its most basic sense, a matrix is a situation around which something else originates, develops, or is contained. In more specific cases, it can mean “womb,” refer to a tabular representation of data, or a mold (Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “matrix,” http://oed.com/ [accessed February 26, 2005]). I use the term to refer to those instances or objects that play an essential part in cultural production. In Bhaktapur, this generative quality could be located in many objects: political pamphlets, ritual tools, and development catalogs. However, the most important generative matrix for my study was instruction from Mr. Chitrakar. His tutelage led me to understand that prosaic religious worlds (1) tend to rely on visceral and tacit knowledge and (2) do not merely reflect an underlying reality, but are brought into being and maintained through ongoing practice. First, to articulate the fluid generative nature of mandalas, one needs to be able to comprehend both the sensuous religious experience of making and also using the actual physical object. That is, to understand how mandalas “animate” Bhaktapur, it is important to concentrate on the process of making and using mandalas in Bhaktapur’s prosaic life. Second, it is important to understand the generative process because mandalas bring about religious values, norms, behaviors, and attitudes.

Dialexis As generative matrixes indicate, the study of signification is not just how “meaning” is created, but how it is that we people use material signs to make lived worlds. And as the mediating effect shows, media play a part in its construction. If these two remedies are correct, then while this writing is constantly telling a story about Bhaktapur, Bhaktapur’s generative matrixes


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are constantly disrupting this story by placing my writing into their picture. To take a very literal example, in the lower left-hand corner of the mandala map image, Mr. Chitrakar painted me into his world (figure I.1). Here are two small figures of my wife, Sarah Anne Krive, and me doing worship (puja) toward the city from the west. Such dialog goes beyond the challenge of taking other discourses seriously on their own terms, of signifying other people without reducing them to one’s own logic. It is the realization that we can and are signified by others. This is a realization that most elites have difficulty with but which most others are forced to live every day. Yet (keeping asymmetrical power relations in mind) as much as “we” compel “them” to fit into our world, they attempt to compel us into theirs. By being signified in and by another’s generative matrix our own matrixes are decentered. When others signify the West, European discourse is “provincialized.” It loses its unquestioned status as universal knowledge and becomes just one of the many voices on the world stage (Chakrabarty 2000). Part of this provincializing is that, not just the content, but the media of communication ought to be problematized. To capture the effect of others’ semiotic systems on academic writing, I coin the method of “dialexis.” Dialexis is a dialog at the level of style, that is, a dialog of “metacommunication” at the material level of mediation.20 Unlike dialectics, which works by confrontation, opposition, and assimilation, dialexis functions as a mutagenic, resignifying, not by synthesis but by dissemination and invention. Dialexis is necessary because while there has always been a creative tension in religious studies between theory and data, there is a flaw in this relation because the data are generally used to prove a theory. In the same hierarchical relation that the head has over the body, ideas over things, thinking over physical labor, the bourgeoisie over the worker, or even the symbol of the hammer over the physical hammer, “examples” serve “theory.” The other serves the scholar’s imagination (Smith 1992). As a remedy to this hierarchy, dialexis is a dialog not just of “meaning,” but of the structures, models, and conventions by which social reality is constituted. For example, it is not enough to just write about mandalas; as responsible scholars we need to allow the mandala to model our own writing. As such, the way out of the conundrum of orientalism is not a reworking of “theory” (“our” discourse), but rather a shift in the way that data (“their” discourses) are used.

A Rough Sketch: Tracing Out the Study In the making of paubhas, before one begins the process of painting— besides the smoothing down of the canvas and the laying out of the palette— one needs to draw a rough sketch. In a similar fashion, before one begins to

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write, one needs to trace out the parameters of the study. In Retheorizing Religion in Nepal, to dialexically mediate Bhaktapur’s prosaic generative matrixes, the “rough sketch” occurs on two levels. First, the organization of the study is structured on the process by which mandalas are made (figure I.3). Second, each of the book’s chapters places a local prosaic religious artifact or practice in dialog with a religious theory, those second-order discourses by which the discipline makes sense of its object of study—namely, religion (table I.1). The craft of paubhas can be broken down into two parts: prepainting preparation and the actual laying down of color. Following the process by which paubha paintings are crafted, Retheorizing Religion in Nepal also breaks down into two parts. Part I—titled “Tradition, Modernity, and the Challenge of Prosaic Hinduism,” and consisting of chapters 1 and 2— prepares the ground by orienting the reader to Bhaktapur’s history and territory (table I.1, rows B and C). The orientation occurs on two levels. First, part I describes the scope of Bhaktapur’s history and territory. Second, the chapters retheorize the categories of history and space in light of Bhaktapur’s prosaic religious practices and use the expanded categories to challenge the scripturalist understanding of the relationship between tradition and modernity. Part I argues that religion and tradition are effective contemporary social forces that ought to be understood as prosaic practices for constructing lived worlds. Part I, chapter 1, entitled “Framing the Study: Theorizing the Histories of Tradition in Bhaktapur, Nepal,” argues that to articulate how people make mandalas, we need to understand the city’s discourse of “tradition” and its relationship to “historiography.” Rather than a survival from an earlier era, Bhaktapur’s current form of tradition has been compiled from a number of social forces that I label prosaic tradition and romantic tradition. On one hand is a romantic-historicist view that posits tradition as a passive ontological essence that will, over time, develop into “modernity.” On the other is a cadastral form that chronicles the pragmatic use of those past social practices that are currently effective. To articulate the difference between prosaic and romantic traditions this chapter describes two strands of historiography that currently circulate in Bhaktapur: a monumental conservation approach and a chronicle approach. Yet neither the prosaic nor romantic tradition is Bhaktapur’s current form. The chapter concludes by arguing that Bhaktapur’s current contemporary prosaic use is a third form that has been compiled from both forms of tradition and can be labeled as “hybrid tradition,” which has been created through an appropriation of the romantic tradition discourse by the pragmatic effectiveness of a local prosaic tradition. Part I, chapter 2, entitled “Laying Down the Grid: Cosmology and the Place of Tradition in Bhaktapur, Nepal,” argues that while constructed,


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“traditional” cities such as Bhaktapur are reconstructed from a conflux of “cosmologies.” In addition to its usual connotations of “beliefs about the universe,” I define cosmology simply as “space” ⫹ “ideology.” I argue that three cartographic artifacts illustrate Bhaktapur’s three dominant cosmologies: the mandala, government, and tourist maps. By critically reading these three “maps,” one can decipher (1) that while “tradition’s” structural significance has a similar function in each map, the content of “tradition” differs in each case and (2) that comprehending the ideological role tradition plays in each map is key to addressing the cosmological “myths” by which space in Bhaktapur is transformed to place. Part II—Titled “Prosaic Religion and the Construction of Lived Worlds,” and consisting of chapters 3–6—illustrates Bhaktapur’s prosaic religious practices that surround god-images, worship, and performance, as well as festivals, and uses these practices to expand the categories of divinity, action, person, experience, and agency (table I.1, rows D–G). Part II, chapter 3, entitled “Sketching the Central Point: Cadastral God-Images and the Politics of Scriptural Mediation,” argues that god-images such as Bhairava challenge scriptural understandings of religion and are better understood as material cadastral deities. As illustrated earlier, scripturalism is a pattern of mediation that reifies texts as ahistorical and uses them to legitimize specific regimes of practices and beliefs. In scripturalism, the divine is viewed as supersensible, nonmaterial, dichotomous, and self-creating. While scripturalism may at one time have been solely a “Western” concern, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it also has come to be used by Hindu fundamentalist groups. Scripturalism mediates god-images through two interpretive strategies: symbolism and idolatry. Merely seemingly opposed, both erase the materiality of the god-images by supplementing them to scripture. Drawing on ethnographic accounts of prosaic religious practice in Bhaktapur, I argue that god-images should be understood as stone-gods, humanly constructed deities dominated by their material element. As the remaining chapters of part II indicate, god-images are brought to life by being enmeshed in a net of social practices. Chapter 4, entitled “Illustrating Samsara: Religious ‘Recipes’ for Making a Prosaic Lived World,” theorizes the dialectic relationship between Bhaktapur’s worship, which acts as a generative matrix, and the city’s samsaric background practices. To illustrate how samsara is created by “recipes” and how in turn these recipes are constituted by samsara, the chapter concentrates on a Mha Puja ceremony (worship of self/body/heart/mind) that I participated in on November 19, 1999. What Mha Puja indicates is that prosaic religious practices are concerned less with ideas and beliefs and more with material and methods. The ceremony indicates that worship is a type of recipe that brings together materials and methods that furnish the divine with “eyes and ears” by

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treating god-images as if they were extraordinary persons. Yet, to illustrate how people give the divine “eyes and ears” and to understand how this concretized divine gives life to a samsaric lived world, one needs to “provincialize” two of the prevailing “Western folk” assumptions that underlie social constructionist positions—namely, “action” and “person.” Part II, chapter 5, entitled “Performing Prosaic Tantra: Jhinjan Mijan Danigu’s Animating Affect and Social Critique of Religious Experience,” argues that in Bhaktapur’s prosaic religious practices, it is the experience of a tantric type of shakti—jhinjan minjan (jhi[n]ja[n] Mi[n]ja[n])—that constitutes cadastral practice’s vertical axis. I argue that shakti is an aesthetic discourse that draws people into relationships with inanimate objects. Shakti both places stone-gods in a discourse of gazes darshan (dar∂an) and also opens the stone-god’s eyes. The chapter concludes by arguing that Bhaktapur’s horrifying type of shakti (jhinjan minjan) offers a social critique of the concept of religious experience. Concluding part II, chapter 6, entitled “Bringing a Forged Mandala to Life: The Cow Procession and the Prosaic Improvisation of Cadastral Generative Matrixes,” compiles the preceding chapters by describing a particular instance where cadastral religious practices were used to make a lived mandala. It concentrates on a “forged” goat sacrifice. Forged religious practices seem enigmatic if one assumes that traditional practice consists only of the blind imitation of timeless structure. Yet the sacrifice was not mechanical repetition; it was the first and only time it was celebrated. Rather, the religious performance was a conscious manipulation of available traditional cultural logics that were strategically utilized during the Cow Procession’s loose carnivalesque atmosphere to solve a contemporary problem—what can one do when one lives beyond the borders of religiously organized cities such as Bhaktapur? Chapter 6 argues that the forged sacrifice was a means for this new neighborhood to operate together and improvise new mandalic space beyond the city’s traditional cultic territory. Like in the making of mandalas, the two parts are supplemented by this introduction that prepares the materials and a conclusion that ornaments the finished painting (table I.1, rows A and H). The conclusion concentrates on the contestation that occurred over the ornamentation placed on Bhaktapur’s Cyasi Mandapa, which the conclusion uses to detail the study’s major insights: (1) that all religious practice requires a material element; (2) that comprehending the material element is necessary for analyzing Hinduism’s prosaic world-generating practices; and (3) that far from being outdated in the contemporary world, such traditional prosaic religious practices are one of the main ways that Bhaktapur has mediated, implemented, and localized modernity.

Part I Tradition, Modernity, and the Challenge of Prosaic Hinduism

The history of religions in South and Southeast Asia, as [Paul] Mus interprets it, is a history in which the basic pattern and logic of indigenous cadastral religion is challenged, enriched and compromised and reasserted in new forms. —Reynolds, “Toward a History of Religions” It would appear that there is an intrinsic connection between the “Hinduism” that is being constructed in the political arena and the “Hinduism” of academic study. —Friedhelm Hardy (cited in King, Orientalism and Religion).


Chapter 1 Framing the Study: Theorizing the Histories of Tradition in Bhaktapur, Nepal

No “theory,” no “practice,” no “theoretical practice” can intervene effectively in [the whole field of historical, economic and political inscription] if it does not weigh up and bear on the frame, which is the decisive structure of what is at stake . . . —Derrida, Truth in Painting

Bhaktapur is known both domestically and internationally as a traditional “Hindu medieval city” and is often posed in scholarly literature, government documentation, and tourist discourse as an ancient fossil, a cultural relic from an earlier age. Standing in Bhaktapur’s narrow mist-enveloped streets, with the sound of temple bells and the smell of incense wafting on the wind, it is easy to be taken in by the “myth” that it is a timeless ancient place (Barthes 1972, 74–78, 109–58). As numerous tourists voiced their opinion to me, it is easy to believe one is seeing a model of how Nepal was before the “intrusion of the modern world.” However, there are three chief problems with the interpretation of Bhaktapur as a cultural fossil. First, between 1974 and 1986 the Bhaktapur Development Project (BDP), a German-run historic conservation program, renovated over 187 pieces of religious structures at an estimated cost of DM30 million (BDP 1976a, 1976b, 1978, n.d.A, n.d.B). Many of the structures that at first appear to be “timeless,” have in reality stood in their present form only a mere thirty years or less. Second, Bhaktapur receives over 100,000 Western tourists a

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year, who now play the major role in Bhaktapur’s economy. Since 1995, the municipality has charged tourists to enter the city, and they are now the major source of municipal revenue. Third, under the leadership of Narayanman Bijukchhe (Comrade Rohit), Bhaktapur is the center for one of Nepal’s major radical political parties, the Nepal Workers and Peasants Party (NWPP). What these three modern social forces indicate is that rather than being a survivor from an earlier era, it is Bhaktapur’s current form of tradition that has been used to transform it into a “Hindu medieval city.” Rather than being dichotomized from modernity, tradition is in fact a response to and a way of mediating modernity’s impact on the city. Accordingly, to articulate Bhaktapur’s contemporary tradition, we need to distance ourselves from the scripturalist assumption that tradition is the opposite of modernity. In fact, if one clears away this false dichotomy, one finds that, in Bhaktapur, modernity and tradition are not opposed essentialized qualities, but rather commingled pragmatic world-constructing logics. On the morning of August 10, 1999, I rode through this “traditional” landscape and parked my scooter in front of Mr. Chitrakar’s home where he lives with his wife, son, and three daughters near Bhaktapur’s Sky Bhairava temple in Bhaktapur’s central square. Their home’s upper stories are a mix of workshops and living space; the ground floor is a small tourist store. I walked up the stairs and began to work. After one prepares the canvas, the second step is the crafting of the frame (figure 1.1, c). Following Mr. Chitrakar’s instructions, I started by sewing the small sticks—two feet three inches long by quarter inch by half inch (figure 1.1, a)—to the one foot by ten inches by two feet, seven inches canvas (figure 1.1, b). This was done with a medium-sized needle and white cotton thread. The cloth was folded back about a quarter of an inch and then sewn around the small sticks. When a new piece of thread was added, the thread was wrapped around the stick a few times so that the knot did not interfere with the tension. The stitches were approximately an inch long. After sewing the small inner sticks to the canvas, a larger needle was used to sew a string all the way around the outer frame so as to create even tension. The outer stitches were done every third inner stitch so that they were about three inches long each. After loosely placing the stitches all the way around the frame, it was pulled tighter by looping the excess string around the corner joint of the outer frame (figure 1.1, d). The finished frame and canvas looked like a small trampoline. We were ready to paint. After getting instructions, I worked on the frame all through the morning. After tea, Mr. Chitrakar entered the room and I showed the frame to him. He nodded that it was fine and said, “the underlying canvas must be perfect so that the image is effective (has ∂akti). It is like tradition

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Figure 1.1 The paubha frame: (a) inner sticks; (b) the prepared canvas; (c) outer frame; (d) loops of excess thread (sketch by G. Grieve, 1999).

(para®parg). If we don’t follow tradition the painting will not have effectiveness.” To expand mandalas (ma“πalas) beyond scripturalist accounts, one needs to retheorize the category of tradition. Such a retheorizing entails not only a change in how we think of “tradition” and its relationship to “history,” but also a shift in how historiography writes tradition (table I.1, row B). Mr. Chitrakar’s words indicated that mandalas are not archaic symbols that

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represent an underlying static and eternal reality, but are rather dynamic “blueprints” that people use creatively to generate their lived world.

Historicizing Traditions: Romantic and Prosaic Traditions The comprehension that modernity and tradition are two cultural logics for the construction of lived worlds stemmed from a discussion I had, on February 6, 1999, with the Bhaktapur intellectual Yogesh Raj. Sitting over a glass of tea, he stated that “modernity is slowly polluting the city’s tradition.” I asked him what the difference between tradition and modernity is. He answered The idea that modernity is a break with tradition is a misconception . . . Some people might think that tradition and modernity are opposites. So that they welcome modernity destroying tradition. But it doesn’t work that way. You can have tradition and modernity at the same time. I’m in fact a little of both. (Personal communication, February 6, 1999)

Puzzled, I asked Yogesh, “If one can be both modern and traditional, how is ‘modernity slowly polluting tradition?’ ” He paused for a moment and then answered, “there is a difference between #tradition# (English in original) and parampara (Nepali in original). There is no exact translation. Parampara is that which is still alive, parampara is not the past, it is the present in continuity from the past” (personal communication, February 6, 1999). In effect, what Yogesh was suggesting is that the “English” or romantic translation of tradition is destroying “Nepali” tradition (parampara). For clarity, I label the “English” understanding “romantic tradition” and the “Nepali” understanding “prosaic tradition.” I maintain that romantic tradition (the “English” version) tends to be an orientalist-historicist view that posits tradition as a passive ontological essence that will, over time, develop into “modernity.” From this perspective, Bhaktapurians neither have tradition nor make tradition, but are traditional. Like Robert Levy’s quest for Bhaktapur’s authentic culture, the goal of such romantic accounts is to winnow authentic tradition from the chaff of modernity. As seen clearly in the workings of the BDP, labeling a group traditional is a powerful strategy to silence them. The false dichotomy between tradition and modernity breaks down, however, when one examines prosaic tradition (parampara), which tends to be used to describe effective everyday social practices that are compiled from past generations. Unlike

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romantic tradition, prosaic tradition is neither the seeking of pure origins nor the plotting of an evolutionary timeline. Instead, like a “history of the present,” a prosaic tradition chronicles the pragmatic use of those past social practices that are currently effective. Unlike romantic tradition, prosaic tradition is not necessarily at odds with modern practices. It just happens to be one choice among many world-building logics.1 To articulate the difference between romantic and prosaic traditions, this chapter describes two strands of historiography that currently circulate in Bhaktapur. The first is the practice of monumental conservation that operates with a romantic traditional understanding. This approach is evidenced in two texts, Aktuelles Bauen im Historischen Kontext: Bhakapur, Nepal (Scheibler 1982) and Bhaktapur: A Town Changing (Haaland 1982). Second are the chronicles (va®∂gvalr) of the city that operate under the rubric of prosaic tradition. These cadastral strands of historiography can be seen in two texts: the Gopalarajavamshavali2 and Nepalko Prajatantrik Andolanma Bhaktapurko Bhumika (Calise 1994). These two stands of historiography differ not just in content, but more importantly, at the level of style (lexis). Lexis is not the semantic meaning (logoi) but the medium by which such meaning is communicated (Havelock 1963). In cultural theory, “lexia describes different social texts which can mobilize a number of different ‘lexicons’—a portion of the symbolic plane that corresponds to a body of practices, techniques, and attitudes (Barthes 1972). More than at the level of content (much of which overlaps), it is at the level of style (lexis) that these two forms of Bhaktapur’s historiography differ.

Romantic Tradition: “American” Dreams To express the English understanding of tradition (romantic tradition), Mr. Raj described the short story “American Dreams” from Peter Carey’s collection The Fat Man in History (1993, 147–57). Carey’s story describes the creation of a scale model that exactly duplicates the buildings and inhabitants of a rural village. At first the town folk are elated because “[t]he Americans would come . . . . They would visit our town in buses and cars and on the train. They would take photographs and bring wallets bulging with dollars. American dollars” (Carey 1993, 155). Yet soon the town folk grew “sick of the game,” because “[the American tourists] prefer the model . . . They spend their time being disappointed and I spend my time feeling guilty that I have somehow let them down by growing older and sadder” (Carey 1993, 57). Carey’s story takes on even more resonance for Bhaktapur if one realizes

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that for many in the city the words “American” and “tourist” signify the same group—all those rich people from “modern” industrial countries around the globe. As the souvenir stall owner, Krisnamaya Koju, explained, “Tourists are known as Americans, but really they are French, Spanish, Italian, and German. There are all sorts of tourists” (personal interview, July 15, 1999). In Bhaktapur, “modern” indicates those American dreams that are associated with the emergence of global market capitalism. In other words, “modernity” is used to gloss the processes that have shaped the globe in the postwar period: third world industrialization, urbanization, the rise of mass communication, the increasing commodification of cultural life, new forms of imperialism, the creation of a global economy, and the worldwide dissemination of mass culture. As Keshab Hada stated, “Tall houses and other things are not only the sign of being modern, it has to do with communication facilities, roads, and other such things. It is also about changing people’s consciousness” (personal interview, May 5, 1999). Less educated people and laborers tended to see modernization as a change in forms of technology. When I asked the 67-year-old sweeper Basula Dyola what changes modernity brought to Bhaktapur, she said, “We have Hondas . . . television” (personal interview, July 20, 1999). Duru Kaji Suwal, a farmer and mason stated, “When the tractor came, it did the work of fifty men. In the past, all things were done by people, but now machines do much of the work” (personal interview, July 8, 1999). New forms of entertainment and communication were also seen as a main sign of modernity. As Krishna Pradhananga said, “The main source of change is television. But that is only eight or nine years ago. Before that the thresher was the sign of modernity” (personal interview, June 6, 1999). Finally, as the storeowner Ramesh Joshi stated, “A modern place should have somewhere for entertainment” (personal interview, June 18, 1999). Yet in Bhaktapur the chief marker is, as Bijayashree Kamacharya responded to my question, “money” (personal interview, May 11, 1999). For instance, in the locally produced film Nhisutu, the protagonist Dash Kumar wants to become modern by selling his family land so that he can have a wallet bursting with American dollars to purchase consumer goods. For almost all in Bhatkapur, the main contact with modernity comes from tourists. Like the inhabitants in Carey’s story, for most in Bhaktapur, tourism is seen both as advantageous and disadvantageous. Most see tourism as positive because it brings in business, helps renovate the temples, and is thereby a way to develop the city. For instance, in a March 22, 1994, speech, Comrade Rohit argued, “Art and culture is our legend of glory and pride. Because of that reason, tourism has been fostered in our country. The tourism industry comes in second or third position for generating badly

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needed hard currency.” And, as a sweeper, Durukaji Suwal, put it more straightforwardly, “Tourists are Americans, from their visits we are becoming developed. When [tourists] come to Bhaktapur and buy something they leave money. It is good because we don’t have much money” (personal interview, July 8, 1999). Yet the smokeless industry of tourism is not without its problems. Many felt that tourism leaves “#cultural pollution#.” This is a term usually uttered in English and is compiled from notions of industrial and ritual pollution. The most severe types of cultural pollution were those seen as affecting religious practice and young people. For instance, Ram Lochan Jha felt that tourism’s pure business motive was destroying the city’s religious structure: Tourism has changed the city because tourism is based on the business motive. Just about earning money . . . . It is not good to break [religious] rules (dharma) for money. All the rules are being broken for money, people are leaving the kind of work they should do, they are not doing their own religion, and they are not doing their rites of passage. This has caused harm to the city. (Personal interview, May 9, 1999)

Others, like the chief of the National Museum located in Bhaktapur, Damodar Gautam—not a native of the city but of Parbatiya Bahun—saw the worst effect of tourism as changing young peoples’ attitudes: If people have regular interaction with tourists, they learn [bad habits] from them. Like wearing skirts. Tourists wear #transparent# clothes. Isn’t that true? And our women are not allowed to wear that kind of thing. And men grow long hair and wear earrings. And the most important thing is that tourists take drugs and smoke. (Personal interview, June 21, 1999)

Yet it was Yogesh Raj who seemed to have given the negative aspects the most thought. After talking with him about tourism, I asked him how it was harming Bhaktapur. He answered at length: [It is harmful] because it increases self-consciousness about our culture, about everything. We used not to know who we were. What kind of us, what kind of we. It took outsiders to tell us that we are antiques and we have lots of culture. When we found this out, something went wrong. When we realized this we became #alienated# from ourselves. In my grandfather’s time they didn’t care about outsiders. They didn’t know about the history, and they were happy. (Personal interview, February 6, 1999)

As indicated by Mr. Raj’s words, and as seen in “American Dreams,” one of the main distortions of romantic tradition is that because it museumifies

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local practices, it transforms the difference between “traditional” (the town folk) and “modernity” (American tourists) into an essentialized dichotomy. Even though inhabitants of such traditional places as Bhaktapur are coeval with “us,” romantic tradition condemns them to a quaint dustbin of history. This not only silences locals, but justifies and even promotes their poverty. Accordingly, while romantic tradition is usually spoken of in terms of chronology, it has an implied orientalist geographic element. The “West” is modern, while the rest—usually far away, “colored,” and poor—are traditional. Beyond this geographic implication is an economic one. While the West is modern and rich, the rest are “underdeveloped” and impoverished (Ferguson 1994). In any case, traditional practices are anachronisms that must be scrapped in the face of modernity. Still, romantic tradition does not completely condemn old-fashioned practices—as in Carey’s short story, the “American” tourists want to come and see the model traditional town. In other words, the driving force of romantic tradition is a “positive orientalism” (Sadik 2000; Said 1978; 2000). What is implicated by positive orientalism is that in the West’s scramble for material possessions and worldly success “we developed ‘American’ moderns” lost our spiritual center. And just as the “folk” offered a solution to the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, traditional places are seen to offer solace to alienated moderns. Yet, like the inhabitants in “American Dreams,” while a seemingly positive attribute, romantic tradition places Bhaktapurians in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, people can actively scuttle their tradition and become rich, modern, and American, or, on the other, they can remain passively spiritual, but poor and underdeveloped— the epitome of the contemporary noble savage (Lopez 1999). In either case, local prosaic world-generative matrixes are obscured because they are treated as obsolete survivors from an earlier era.

(Post)colonializing Histories In Bhaktapur, the consequences of romantic tradition can be seen in the BDP’s historical conservation. Between 1974 and 1986, the BDP—or “German Project” as it is generally called locally—renovated over 187 pieces of the city’s religious architecture. The BDP was a cooperative effort between the West German development agency, Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), and His Majesty’s Government of Nepal (HMG). While appreciated by many in Bhaktapur, the German Project also met much resistance because it did not take local concerns into consideration. The BDP, which explicitly aimed to “improve the living conditions of the

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city’s inhabitants,” was plagued by a widespread hostility among Bhaktapurians—those whom it was supposedly helping. Most of the hostility stemmed from the fact that people felt the BDP neither consulted the local people in the project’s decision-making process nor had respect for the city. For instance, in March of 1997, I spoke with a high-caste and welleducated male professional who said, “[The BDP staff ] were always the #expert# and they KNEW how to do every thing [laughs] . . . that was the bad thing.” I asked him how this caused harm. His example, like many, centered on water and sewage problems. He pointed to the faucet in front of his home and said, “(Because of the BDP) it is no longer a faucet, but a kind of pond. They restored it, [he pointed to the water that filled in the sunken steps] but they did it wrong. ((This is #unhygienic# and unreligious.))” He also gave the example of the paving bricks in front of his home. “When they dug there they found stone pavement. Big nice slabs. And what they did is that they didn’t take them out, they just put the bricks over the top. They had no feeling at all for the stones.” Perhaps the most telling evidence of people’s widespread distrust of the BDP can be found in the fact that many people felt that the BDP had stolen local god-images. As a middleaged storeowner said to me in April of 1997 It is #alleged# that many [he points to the god-images on the building around us ] . . . were stolen. You can see all around the city the pieces that were there before the BDP came in. God knows where they went during the period of the BDP. For example, there used to be a deity in the Pujari Math . . . ((you know, in the upper part of the city)) . . . that should not be seen by anyone but the priest. That room is empty now, there is nothing but some fresco art on the walls. There is nothing left. Who is responsible for this kind of thing? (Personal interview, April 1997)

Much of the hostility arose because people felt that the German government operated as if it owned Bhaktapur. As a member of the municipality said to me in April 1997, “Another thing, many of the Germans regard the city as theirs.” I asked him to give an example, and he answered, “Just recently a local civic group tried to put some trash cans at key city sites. Those trash cans were contributed by the (international hotel chain) Soaltee Group and an Australian municipality. All those dustbins had Australian flags and the Soaltee Group logo. The German Embassy called on the thenmayor and objected to those trash cans.” I asked him why. He replied, “Because they had the Australian flag and the Soaltee Group logo . . . (they) have contributed a lot in the things around here, but it doesn’t mean that we are a #colony# of Germany.” Under the rubric of romantic tradition, the BDP legitimated its “ownership” of Bhaktapur by producing romantic-historicist accounts of the city.

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Take for instance Anne Haaland’s Bhaktapur—A Town Changing: Process Influenced by [the] Bhaktapur Development Project (1982) and Giovanni Scheibler’s Aktuelles Bauen im Historischen Kontext: Bhaktapur Nepal (1982). Published in 1982, Haaland’s text was a promotional piece produced by the BDP. Exclusive of the first chapter, whose data were collected by the anthropologist Todd Lewis, the text swings from romantic portraits of Bhaktapur life to propagandist justification of the BDP’s role in Bhaktapur. To give an example of the romantic depictions, Haaland writes, “(t)he mist lies like a heavy blanket over the winter morning, obscuring the characteristic skyline . . . This ghost town disappears, though, as one moves into narrow streets, where life has been busy since the first streaks of light made the roosters announce the new day” (1982, 6). Such depictions of picturesque poverty are counterpoised with the nuts and bolts of development discourse. Haaland suggests, “There are still difficulties with the LDCs (local development committees), but these are, slowly but surely, being weeded out as both sides gain more experience working with each other” (1982, 89). The romantic and development discourses come together in the photographs taken by Haaland, which display that picturesque poverty— images of traditional craft, agriculture, and religious worship—that marks Bhaktapur as traditional and an ideal location for development. Scheibler’s work, also published in 1982, was presented as his doctoral thesis for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. A study of historical conservation in Bhaktapur, the work uses architectural history to argue for the need for State-of-the art (aktuelle Technik) methods in Bhaktapur’s development. Pragmatizing the conceptual work of other scholars, Scheibler posits Bhaktapurians as traditional people who have not yet been spoiled by colonialism or industrialization (Gutschow 1980; Gutschow and Klöver 1975). His work traces out the steps by which such romantic-historicist visions can be implemented and made concrete. Like Haaland, Scheibler follows a scripturalist understanding of the city that bases traditional culture on a timeless religious essence: First and foremost, the ritual acts bind the open space in a creative context which cannot be understood functionally. They establish a spiritual infrastructure, which is employed daily by the inhabitants. One is no longer able to differentiate the ritualistic from the day-to-day activities, for transcendental and real world are understood as one entity, and every action of the inhabitant is orientated towards the hereafter. (Scheibler 1982, 47)

Layered on the romantic descriptions is a discourse of technical jargon used to justify concrete suggestions on developing local building techniques: “In order to establish decision-making principles for finding fuel substitutes,

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research must be done into the local market situation with respect to cost comparisons and delivery capacities of fuels” (Scheibler 1982, 192). While very different in purpose and audience, both Haaland’s and Scheibler’s historiographies share a romantic-historicist approach to Bhaktapur. By stripping people of voices and being blind to politics, such romantic historiography works as an ideology to justify and legitimate the BDP. Accordingly, as an economic actuality the BDP could engage in onesided development approaches because of the asymmetrical relations between the “developed” and “underdeveloped” nations (Escobar 1995). At the level of “myth,” the BDP believed that it should engage in such an approach because it imagined Bhaktapur’s religious architecture through a romantic-conservationist notion of history. The “mythic” nature of such romantic historiographies is apparent because they are not really historical. Instead, by attempting to capture the pure origins, they perpetuate transhistorical concepts that bolster ideological concerns (Foucault 1984). In an oxymoronic fashion, a history of origins assumes a level of meaning preexisting the world of accident. It assumes a metaphysic that predates history and is thus magically both prehistorical and outside of history altogether.

Prosaic Tradition: Demystifying the Difference between Toilet Paper and Napkins Early on the morning of October 29, 1999, Mr. Chitrakar wanted to show me some other designs so he pulled out an old cloth book that he had put together. The book was his copybook, or hakusaphu (hgkusaphu). In it he had compiled symbols, colors, and deities: block prints, photocopies, the odd picture cut out from a magazine, cards taped in the book, and drawings that he as well as his father had done. Most other artisans I met also had such model books, as well as folders and printed books that they used as templates for their work. The oldest surviving Newar copybook is from the fifteenth century, with the majority of such books dating from the earlyseventeenth to the twenty-first century (Blom 1989). Hakusaphus are employed by all kinds of artisans in the Kathmandu Valley, including painters, woodcarvers, sculptors, goldsmiths, and architects. Hakusaphu literally means “black book.” Mr. Chitrakar informed me that the name indicated the book’s black lining, “the most important part.” Other craftsmen told me that the name referred to the color of the pages, the cover, or the fact that the book held tantric knowledge.

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Later that morning, Mr. Chitrakar’s oldest daughter served a midmorning tiffin. As we warmed our hands on the teacups, I asked Mr. Chitrakar if he had any news. He said that he did; he had gone to a wedding feast and it had been a “parti (parør).” A “parti” is a type of buffet, which is perceived to be “American.” It consists of folding chairs, rather than the traditional way of serving food seated in rows on the floor, and, rather than Newar food, a hybrid mix of Indian curry and European-style finger foods. Mr. Chitrakar did not like it; he felt shy and liked the traditional Newar version better. The “clincher” for him was when, after eating meat, having gotten his hands sticky, he saw some toilet paper hanging from a pole (this is how it is normally done)—and he asked for toilet paper, and people laughed at him, saying, “no, that’s not toilet paper, that’s napkins.” He countered, “Well, it sure looks like toilet paper to me.” Mr. Chitrakar’s utterance revealed that he mistrusts modern “myths” because they have magically transformed toilet paper into napkins. His skepticism about the myth of napkins stems from the fact that while in many ways modernity has been good for Bhaktapur, it has taken much of the effectiveness out of prosaic tradition. By effective tradition, both in the concreteness of napkins and as the effective framing of a canvas, Mr. Chitrakar is indicating the successful practices by which prosaic life is constructed. As stated earlier, in Bhaktapur, such prosaic practices tend to be glossed by the term parampara. Like the images in Mr. Chitrakar’s model book, parampara means to use as your model what your father and grandfather did. As I came to learn from many people, Bhaktapurians tended to see prosaic tradition (parampara) as an active choice among a set of possible options. You are not limited by it. You can choose to use prosaic tradition or not.

Chronicling a Traditional City Like the compiling logic of Mr. Chitrakar’s hakusaphu, the effectiveness of prosaic tradition can be seen in two chronicles that frame the history of Bhaktapur. The first is the Gopalarajavamshavali or Chronicle of the Gopala Kings (Vajracarya and Malla 1985). The manuscript was “discovered” by Cecil Benal in Nepal’s Bir Library in 1889–99 and is currently housed in Nepal’s National Archive. The chronicle’s earliest date is A.D. 1057, and the latest A.D. 1389. Because King Jayasthitirajamalla is eulogized as the incarnation of Rama, Buddha, and the eight directional deities (dikpalas [dikpalas]), the chronicle was most likely compiled during his reign (A.D. 1382–95). Because most of the place names come from Bhaktapur, the

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text was most likely written there.3 The second chronicle, Pushparaja Calise’s Nepalko Prajatantrik Andolanma Bhaktapurko Bhumika (1940–91 A.D. [1997–2047 Vikram Sambat]) is arguably not a chronicle at all (Calise 1994). The book presents itself as notes to a brief political outline of Bhaktapur’s democratic movement and lists political events in Bhaktapur between 1940 and 1991. It covers the initial attempts toward democracy (1940–45), the first steps toward democracy (1950–60), and ends with Bhaktapur’s involvement in the end of the Panchayat system and the democratic movement (1960–91). While radically different in historical context, both manuscripts employ a form of prosaic generative matrix. As evidenced in these chronicles, prosaic tradition constructs Bhaktapur’s lived world in four chief ways. First, both the chronicles concentrate on Bhaktapur’s locality. For instance, Vajracarya and Malla write that the Gopalarajavamshavali has a “Bhaktapur-centric outlook” (Vajracarya and Malla 1985, xiv), and Nepalko Prajatantrik Andolanma Bhaktapurko Bhumika outlines Nepal’s democratic movement as it pertains particularly to Bhaktapur. In both chronicles, the local history is done to create a particular social effect. For example, the Gopalarajavamshavali consists of a mix of terse genealogical lists and the myth and historical narrative of itihasa-purana. Romila Thapar argues that the genealogical section of the Gopalarajavamshavali is telescoped, with only a bare bones of names and relationships, which are regarded by the chronicler “as the most significant to social needs” (Thapar 1978, 280). For instance, as Vajracarya and Malla indicate, the miraculous origin of Pashupati (folio 17a) is brief, whereas the eulogization of Jayasthitirajamalla takes up many folios. Similarly, Calise’s main point in his history is that political action is a form of praxis. He builds a platform upon which to articulate how Bhaktapur was inflamed by the People’s Movement of 1989–1990, including the role of the Nepal Workers and Peasants Party, especially the chairman of the Central Committee, Mr. Narayanman Bijukche. This can be seen in the fact that when Calise chronicles the events of 1989–1990 and the demonstrations for democracy, he slows down to a day-by-day, even hour-by-hour, account. Second, the main subject matter of both chronicles is historically situated political intrigue. For instance, as Vajracarya and Malla write in a commentary to the Gopalarajavamshavali, “most of the time, the royalty and the nobility were busy in campaigns of mutual extermination . . . The most frequently mentioned place of action in the chronicle is the fort, and understandably so” (1985, vii–xviii). Similarly, Calise’s aim is to outline the interaction between different political forces in Bhaktapur. He writes, “Throughout this period [1950–60], in Bhaktapur, as well as the rest of the country, reactionary forces were using terrorist actions against their rivals. It was more intensified

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at night; and in Bhaktapur people started taking turns guarding every neighborhood” (Calise 1994, 32). Third, the chronicles trace events of a sociocultural nature. Besides forts, in the Gopalarajavamshavali, other important places are temples. For instance, on folios 29b–30a, the chronicler gives a list spanning six centuries of gifts that were given to the Pashupatinath temple. Similarly, in Calise’s work, temples also are an important local stage: “In 1949 . . . for the first time the flag of the Nepal Communist party was flown on Nyatapola temple” (Calise 1994, 32). Dramas also play an important part in the Gopalarajavamshavali; folios 60b, 61a, and 62a detail the rehearsals and performances of the Bhairavananda. The importance of cultural events is also outlined in Calise’s work. He mentions that “such [dramatic] practices included singing a religious song from the Nepal National League: ‘Now it is time to open the eyes, time for darkness to leave your heart and let the bright air in.’ Narayanman Bijukche, father of Bhaktapur’s Nepal Workers and Peasants Party, said this was an inspiration for him in his youth” (Calise 1994, 27). Finally, the chronicles focus on the economic and social importance of the monsoon. In the Gopalarajavamshavali, the Lamkha-yata (rain-begging festival) and the construction of aqueducts are just two of the many instances where irrigation plays an important role. In addition, kings are remembered not just for their military conquest or their construction of temples, but also for waterworks. For instance, on folio 31, King Shivadeva is remembered not only because he was the incarnation of Bhairava of Kamarupa, but also because “he beautified the country by constructing water-conduits and wells in several places.” Similarly, Calise chronicles that, in 1957, the Nepal Communist Party established the Young Communist League, much of whose earliest work promoted public health through the cleaning of the city’s ponds.

The Politics of a New Tradition The words below greet visitors entering Bhaktapur. Dear Guests, You are cordially requested to help us renovate our common cultural heritage and make the following contribution: 1. Rs. 300.00 (Rupees Three Hundred) or US$ 5.00 (Five US Dollars) (for non-SAARC tourists) per tourist; and 2. Rs. 30.00 (Rupees Thirty) for tourists from SAARC countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Maldives) per tourist. We thank you for your cooperation and wish for your pleasant stay in this living heritage. Bhaktapur Municipality.

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It may seem paradoxical to insist that tourists pay to enter a traditional city. Yet the sign seems paradoxical only if one approaches “tradition” with either a pure romantic or a prosaic understanding of tradition. Instead, the sign indicates a pragmatic compiling of these two traditions, which can be seen at work in radical politics and cultural tourism; the catalyst that combined them was the discourse and practice of historical conservation spurred on by development ideology. Although the BDP ran extensive “Communication Studies” in the summer of 1979, fall of 1980, and winter of 1981, Haaland’s text seems to miss the crucial fact that people in Bhaktapur were suddenly resisting the project’s efforts because of politics (1982; 1980a; 1980b; Haaland and Datta 1979). Nepal’s 1980 referendum marked the first real political opposition since King Mahendra had banned political parties in December 1962.4 The reason that the BDP was blind to politics was that romantic-historicist accounts can only see local romantic tradition as prepolitical, static, undeveloped, and backward (Chakrabarty 2000). One could argue that the desire for self-government stretches back to the time when Bhaktapur was its own city-state (before 1769); evidence for modern progressive oppositional politics starts only seventy years ago. In Bhaktapur during the late 1940s, most of the political action consisted of demonstrations and strikes in opposition to the Rana regime. After the overthrow of the Ranas in 1951, political parties and individuals concentrated on opposing conservative forces. And after King Mahendra ascended the throne in 1957, there was a second round of demonstrations in an attempt to force elections. Probably more important for Bhaktapur, however, than direct political action in this period were progressive educational and social movements, which consisted of the building of schools, the creation of literacy programs, the construction of libraries, and the cleaning of the city. The most important groups were the farmers’ societies, which had a direct influence on the founding of the current party in power in Bhaktapur: the Nepal Workers and Peasants Party. In 1960, King Mahendra dissolved parliament and took sole power of the government through the creation of the Panchayat, or partyless democratic system. After the coup of 1960, the next major oppositional incident did not occur until the coronation of H.M. King Birendra in 1974. And the main challenge to the coup of 1960 was not raised until 1978–79, the first incident of major dissidence since 1950. The wave of protest was ignited on April 4 by the students’ movement, with which Bhaktapurians were actively involved. In 1979, thousands of demonstrators marched from Bhaktapur to Kathmandu. Eventually, this helped lead to a nationwide referendum on Panchayat rule, which the king announced on December 15, 1980. While in Bhaktapur the referendum for multiparty democracy was victorious, across the nation it was defeated.

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For Bhaktapur, the next major event was the Hyonju incident, which occurred in 1988 and is still a defining moment in the city’s political imagination. The incident was the beating and murder of Mr. Hyonju by a crowd angered by the way he had distributed relief funds for the August 21, 1988, earthquake. Mr. Hyonju was mistrusted by many in Bhaktapur because he had been elected as a member of the NWPP but had given his support to the “panchas” (those loyal to the Panchayat system). During the distribution of funds, Mr. Hyonju was accused of neglecting real victims and only giving help to “Pancha political cronies.” A crowd gathered and started to drag Hyonju violently around the procession route. The police came but failed to stop the procession. Suddenly, many inebriated people arrived. It is rumored that they were pro-palace police and spies. Others say that they were just drunks celebrating the festival of Gai Jatra (see chapter 6). In any case, the crowd soon started to beat Hyonju unconscious. He was then rescued by the police and taken to the hospital in Kathmandu but he died later that night. The event led to the arrest of Comrade Rohit along with twenty-four other Bhaktapur political leaders. But many in Bhaktapur say that these individuals were falsely accused. In Bhaktapur, many people suspect that the Hyonju incident was a conspiracy, led by the central government, to discredit Comrade Rohit and the NWPP. Others suspect that, while NWPP leaders had not planned on Hyonju’s death, they had aroused the people’s anger and directed it toward Hyonju as a symbol of the panchas. While it may or may not have been a government conspiracy, Hyonju’s death was the perfect excuse for the pancha forces to suppress Comrade Rohit and the other members of the NWPP who had won village, district, and national elections. After the 1990 restoration of multiparty democracy, the members of the NWPP were released and took the reins of government in Bhaktapur.

A History of Tourism: A Strange Romantic Partner There is a very modern reason to struggle to be traditional. From the fivedollar admission fee to the small boys who hawk their services as guides, in Bhaktapur when one hears the word “tradition,” one reaches for one’s wallet. Besides development (but integral to it), Bhaktapur is now also part of a large, coordinated tourist industry: organized by a central government authority and involving many locations throughout the Kathmandu Valley and Nepal. Central to this industry is the changing social and territorial reproduction of tradition. In the present global economy, tradition is a

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valuable commodity. And while tourist dollars may not have invented Bhaktapur’s tradition (there definitely was something there before tourists arrived), such monies have definitely helped repackage it for sale. Tourism’s commodification of tradition can be seen in a UNESCO study that defines cultural tourism as “the absorption by tourists of features resembling vanishing lifestyles of past societies observed through such phenomena as house styles, crafts, farming equipment and dress” (UNESCO 1976). The reason this scripturalist understanding of tradition has become important is that one of Nepal’s few resources in the global marketplace is its perceived otherness from the modern “West.” Bhaktapur, a convenient thirty-minute bus ride from the smog, noise, and hubbub of Kathmandu, offers the perfect site for tourist practices that for a short period, and for profit, “re-enchant” the tourists’ lives (Urry 1990). Nepal’s perceived exotic quality comes about because the country was virtually closed to Europe in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Nepal’s otherness became an even scarcer commodity following World War II. The 1960s fascination with the exotic East also coincided neatly with the “opening” of Nepal. For the thousands of travelers who followed the overland route in the 1960s and 1970s, Kathmandu’s ornate non-Western and densely populated capital seemed to be not only of another time but of another world (Liechty 2003; Shepard 1985). In 1976, the BDP decided that one way to increase development was to jump-start the tourist industry. To do this it was decided to make two of the newly renovated structures into restaurants. One restaurant was located in the upper part of the city across from the Pujari Matha in the Jangam Pati and became the Peacock Restaurant. The other, located in the lower part of the city’s Taumadhi Square, across from the Bhairava Temple in the Bhaildhyah Satah, became the Nyatapola Restaurant. The BDP hoped to be able to sell Bhaktapur’s otherness by transforming the city into an image of the romantic Orient. Both these conversions were completed over the objections of many residents, one of the biggest complaints being that there would be no place to store the unassembled part of the thirty-foot chariot used during the god Bhairava’s major festival, Biskah. Yet, as mentioned earlier, the BDP could continue because local residents had little voice in governing their city. And the BDP felt that it should continue because of the romantic historiography that denied “traditional” people a voice in the modern world. Yet, ironically, since the BDP left the city, the people of Bhaktapur have consciously taken up “developing tradition” and are reconstructing religious architecture as well as promoting the romantic notion that Bhaktapur is a timeless medieval city. For instance, during the local elections held in May 1997, temple reconstruction was one of the NWPP’s main platform planks.

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And during the fiscal year 1998–99, the municipality undertook a major UNESCO-funded mapping of Bhaktapur’s Protected Monument Zone. The rhetoric used to legitimate both these actions was the ideology of development. As the article, “The Discussion about Making Bhaktapur a Cultural City,” reads There is no doubt that historical and archeological heritage has played a major role in developing the tourist industry. Intellectuals have argued that the main solution of the problem is to love and protect our culture. To accomplish this, a renaissance is necessary. (Bhaktapur Magazine, April 1997 [Baisakh 2053, Vikram Sambat])

Developing tradition has reconstructed the concrete space of the city. Massive temple reconstruction has been taken up not only by various ad hoc groups in Bhaktapur, but also full-scale by the NWPP Municipal Government (Nhe Sa Twa Guthi 1993). In fact, between fiscal year 1992–93 and fiscal year 1996–97, 161 local structures have been repaired, restored, or reconstructed, the most important being Siddha Pokhari, Bhairava’s main temple, and Nyatapola temple. Temporarily, the outgrowth of the relationship between tourism and romantic reconstruction is especially clear in the Bhaktapur Festival, which was held on October 22–26, 1997. This cultural gala attracted about 400,000 people from Nepal and 20,000 foreign tourists. And just recently, an article from the April 1996 Bhaktapur Magazine indicates that the municipality has been attempting to turn the entire city into a monumental zone. This means not only that the whole area would come under the Monumental Area Regulations, but also that a series of stricter acts would be implemented. Yet Bhaktapur’s “otherness” has to be cultivated (VNY ’98, 1997). The tourist industry did not start until the country was opened to Europeans after the fall of the Rana regime in 1951. In 1954, tourist visas were liberalized, and in 1959 Nepal joined the United Nations’ World Tourism Organization. A Tourist Development Board was set up in 1957 under the care of the Ministry of Transport and Communication and in accordance with the provision of the Development Act of 1956. In 1959, the new directorate was constituted with a separate staff. In 1962, the board was converted into the Department of Tourism and then into the Ministry of Tourism. In 1965, the ministry plotted places of interest, started courses for tour guides, and instituted forms for tourist statistics. Yet by the mid1970s, tourist sites had started to become saturated. A Tourism Marketing Strategy (1977–81) was begun, which surveyed potential tourist areas and their developments. It also began construction of infrastructure, at Pokhara, Jomoson, Langtang, and Mount Everest. The marketing strategy concentrated

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on four goals for Nepal: first, to earn hard currency; second, to increase the number of tourists and lengthen their stay; third, to replace foreign goods with domestic products; and fourth, to provide employment opportunities through tourism-related industries. By the mid-1990s, tourism was again lagging. The year 1998 marked Visit Nepal Year (VNY ’98, 1997). This was a massive effort by the Nepali government, the Civil Aviation Ministry, and tourist organizations to revitalize the nation’s tourist industry. Along with posters, monthly calendars, logo stickers, and a newsletter, the bureau published brochures and leaflets. These included one in Hindi, thirty-nine in Nepali, and eighty in English. “Nepal Guides” were also published in German, Japanese, and Russian. There were also electronic media, which included three videos, as well as 236 spots about sports on Star TV, a CBS TV “Everest Challenge,” a series by Scandinavian Broadcasting, and a South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation seminar and exhibition on poverty alleviation through women’s entrepreneurship. Since 2000, when I completed my fieldwork, because of the palace massacre and the Maoist insurgency there has been another sea change. The year 2002 saw the lowest level of tourism in two years, only three fifths of 1999’s peak.5 Yet, while there is no doubt that tourism will continue to be adversely affected, there is also no doubt that no matter what the future holds, tourism will continue to be important for both Nepal and Bhaktapur.6

Conclusion: Compiling a Hybrid Tradition Scriptural conceptions of tradition rely on a historiography that fosters the ideology of a general historical movement from tradition to the modern. Yet what histories about Bhaktapur indicate is that traditional places are not mired in the past, but are coeval. When one unhinges the ideology of a general historical movement, one not only problematizes the concept of a homogenous modernity, but one also dissolves the notion of an essential tradition. A traditional city then is not determined by the static purity of its “ancientness,” but rather by how its “ancientness” is imagined and used. To articulate how Bhaktapur’s ancientness is imagined and used, one needs to look not only at history, but also at historiography. As mirrored by Mr. Chitrakar’s hakusaphu, Bhaktapur’s local historiography tends to follow prosaic tradition and thereby can be modeled on chronicles, which “compile the past.” Compiling historiography is a form of prosaic praxis. It understands tradition cadastrally and aims to create a particular social world by

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compiling what is at hand. Contrarily, scripturalist historicist historiography follows romantic tradition, a form of historiography that searches for the pure origins of the city. The problem is not simply that romantic tradition attempts to sift authentic tradition from modern pollutants. More significantly, like the characters in the short story “American Dreams,” by placing tradition on a developmental timeline, historicist accounts posit tradition as “prepolitical” and thus pave over local voices by museumifying local practices. So what kind of tradition has been used in Bhaktapur to compile a contemporary “Hindu medieval city?” What gives Bhaktapur its legitimacy to call itself a “traditional city?” And maybe even more importantly, as the ticket sign mentioned earlier indicates, why are people willing to pay for it? What one finds is that Bhaktapur’s current everyday practice of tradition cannot be reduced to either romantic tradition or prosaic tradition. Instead, Bhaktapur’s contemporary everyday use is a third form that has been compiled from both prosaic and romantic traditions and can be labeled as a hybrid tradition. Bhaktapur’s hybrid tradition has been created through an appropriation of the romantic tradition discourse by the pragmatic effectiveness of a local cadastral prosaic tradition. In the present global economy, tradition is a valuable commodity that can be used not only to gain distinction, but also monetary capital. Or, to put it bluntly, through the social force of local politics and international tourism, what has occurred is the “cashing in” of the scriptural myth for prosaic local ends. Using the flotsam and jetsam that history and the global economy have given them, the residents of Bhaktapur have used both romantic and prosaic traditions to construct an effective and often profitable new form of hybrid tradition. It is Bhaktapur’s contemporary compiled hybrid tradition that answers the question of how Bhaktapur can be both a “medieval city” and also house the NWPP, one of Nepal’s most progressive political parties. The worth of the traditional city comes then not because it is a remnant of an earlier era, but because it is valuable in Nepal’s contemporary vernacular modernity. While having family resemblances to ancient practices, Bhaktapur’s contemporary hybrid tradition has been developed in the context of oppositional politics and tourism, and the catalyst was the discourse of historical conservation spurred on by the development ideology of the BDP. One might argue that this is not authentic tradition. Yet it is only from the perspective of romantic tradition that such notions of authenticity are valid concerns. Instead, what recent histories of Bhaktapur show is that there is nothing inherently sinister about compiling this postmodern hybrid tradition. Instead, like any myth or ideology it is a “gun for hire” (Doniger 1998). It is not abstract ahistorical categories, but human beings living in concrete historical situations that decide what tradition is and how it will be used.

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Bhaktapur’s “local” histories create both theoretical and pragmatic benefits. Theoretically, by comparing romantic and prosaic forms of history, one can understand how tradition is configured and contested. Moreover, local historiography illustrates how people in Bhaktapur construct notions of development vis-à-vis those of tradition. Reciprocally, scripturalist histories reveal a provincial European vernacular view of tradition—for instance, the assumption that modernity is a globalizing process led by the technological, economic, and political superiority of the West. On a more pragmatic level, many development schemes such as the BDP have failed because their instigators have designed them according to their own personal views of tradition, never taking into account (except as objects of their actions) the people for whom the project is ostensibly run. To “map out” how local people use hybrid tradition in Bhaktapur, the following chapter illustrates the interaction between three of Bhaktapur’s main cosmologies: mandala, government, and tourist.


Chapter 2 Laying Down the Grid: Cosmology and the Place of Tradition in Bhaktapur, Nepal

Signs do not constitute maps. At most, they are a pointer to the cosmological structures of the people who made them. —Woodward, Cartography People are the function of their geography, geography is everything. Community. Everything #and dot dot dot.# —Yogesh Raj (personal communication, February 6, 1999)

Cosmology Today: Decoding Bhaktapur’s Traditional Space If you walk north from Mr. Chitrakar’s house, through Durbar Square, and exit through the main gate and the tourist fee entrance, and then pick your way down the newly reconstructed city gate and stairs, you arrive at the newly built Tourist Motor Park. A litany of Bhaktapur’s cosmological concerns are indicated in a statement made for the inauguration of the Tourist Motor Park by Bhaktapur’s Mayor Prem Suwal on October 3, 1997. The mayor’s speech stressed that having the Tourist Motor Park outside the city

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would decrease pollution in Bhaktapur while at the same time still allow tourist revenue to flow into the municipality. These funds could then be ploughed back into preserving historic monuments and making Bhaktapur a “Traditional City of Culture.” The mayor then mentioned the upcoming municipality-organized Bhaktapur Festival 1997 and the nationally organized Visit Nepal Year 1998. He used the themes of religion, development, and tourism to request that the military stop encroachment on public lands in Bhaktapur. He also used these themes to elaborate on the municipality’s struggle over the sewage system, as well as its efforts to clean up the Hanumante River and to decrease unemployment and the need for prompt repair of the road between Sallaghari and Nagarkot. The logic of this seemingly random litany of concerns can be comprehended if one analyzes the relationship between the making of mandalas (ma“πalas) and traditional social space. On July 29, 2000, Madhu Chitrakar and I began to lay down the central grid of my painting (table I.1, row C; figure I.3). Madhu said, “if the underlying lines are out of kilter, the painting will not have effectiveness (∂akti).” The first step was to put a line directly down the center. Madhu let the ruler dangle from his fingers to find the true vertical and then measured off the canvas from this central point. Then he had me make the central vertical line. He broke off a piece of thread and used it to mark a vertical line and had me trace this out with a pencil. My four “equal” blocks were a little off, so he remeasured and we moved the horizontal line down two centimeters so that the center of the line was perfectly in the center. Next we measured twelve centimeters out from the midpoint so as to make a square whose trueness Madhu checked with a picture frame he pulled off the wall. Lastly, Madhu plotted points on the vertical and horizontal line at eighteen centimeters and created a second square. Then, using a compass, he made a number of circles using the original point as a center. To paint an effective mandala painting one needs to lay down a true grid. Similarly, to illustrate Bhaktapur’s traditional space one needs to accurately trace out the cosmologies from which the city’s lived world is compiled. Yet what is the relation between space and tradition in Bhaktapur? The preceding chapter argued that a traditional city is determined by how its “ancientness” is imagined and used. While constructed, “traditional places” such as Bhaktapur are reconstructed from a conflux of “cosmologies.” Often cosmology is understood as the study of cosmic views, or as a specific view or collection of images concerning the universe held in a religious or cultural tradition (Bolle 1986, 4:100). In addition to this usual connotation, I use the term strategically in a fashion similar to how Roland Barthes describes “myth”—as a semiological system that is the result of ideology (1972, 109–57). In myths, cultural products are dehistoricized so as to

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essentialize their significance and make them appear a natural human experience. As such, myths are anything but natural. They serve the particular interests of different groups that use myth to promote specific cultural production.1 Accordingly, if myth is language ⫹ ideology, then cosmology can be theorized as myth about space. That is, cosmologies turn first-order “space” into second-order “place.”2 The difficulty with critically reading space, however, is that while chronological texts such as histories read serially, it is difficult to capture a territory because space spreads out in all directions at once (Yaeger 1996, 4). To address the relation between the contention discussed in the mayor’s speech and traditional space, I argue that three cartographic artifacts illustrate Bhaktapur’s three dominant cosmologies: the mandala, government, and tourist map. Because they “lie,” far from being straightforward visual texts, each of the three maps is a form of “territory robbery.” Yet each robs differently because each has specific effects of power and obeys its own logical modes of functioning. Each map refers to a different mode of territorial unity, of socioeconomic distribution, of political conflicts, and of identifying symbolism. To articulate their forms of “space robbery,” I theorize the “maps” through three intertwined positions: cartographic artifact, authoritative lexicon, and interpellative discourse (table 2.1). First, by cartographic artifact I am speaking of the actual physical document. Second, a lexicon is a portion of the symbolic plane that corresponds to a body of practices, techniques, and attitudes (Barthes 1972). By authoritative, I refer to an ascribed asymmetry that causes audiences to act as if the lexicon commands their confidence, respect, and trust (Austin 1962; Lincoln 1981, 4). Third, an authoritative lexicon becomes emplotted onto the territory through an interpellating apparatus that compels people to participate in a particular ideology. People are forced to act out the lexicon because they are “hailed” by an authoritative set of discourses and practices (Althusser 1971).3 Table 2.1 Cosmological matrix. The mandala, government, and tourist “maps” as schematized in cartographic artifacts, authoritative lexicons, and interpellative apparatus Map (1) Ma“πala (2) Government (3) Tourist

Cartographic Artifact (a)

Authoritative Lexicon (b)

Interpellative Apparatus (c)

Yantrakara Khwopa Dey (n.d.) Nepali government (1976) Bhaktapur municipal tourist guide (1997)

Cadastral

Religious practice

Governmentality

Political practice

Pragmatic orientalism

Tourist practice

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Retheorizing Religion in Nepal Table 2.2 Cosmologies and their ideological relation to tradition Map

Tradition

Ideology

(1) Ma“πala

Caste social structure

(2) Government

Effective religious practice Underdevelopment

(3) Tourist

Exotic orient

Interstate postcolonial relations Commodification

As indicated in table 2.2, Bhaktapur’s three current dominant cosmologies can be schematized in the following manner. First, the mandala map, painted by Madhu Krishna Chitrakar, can be understood as a yantra, a prosaic religious tool by which people generate religiously organized social worlds through cadastral mandala logics. Subjects are interpellated into the mandala through religious practice. Second, the government map, made by the Nepali government in 1976, gains authority through “governmentality”— a term that describes how people are increasingly implicated in the exercise of sovereign power (Foucault 1984, 11; Foucault 1991, 87–104). In Bhaktapur, subjects are interpellated into the government map through politics. Lastly, the tourist map was produced in 1997 by the Bhaktapur Municipality and commodifies Bhaktapur’s tradition so that it can be sold and is authorized by a pragmatic orientalism. Subjects are interpellated into this map through tourist practice and discourse. By critically reading these three “maps” one can decipher (1) that while tradition’s structural significance has a similar function in each map, the content of tradition differs in each case; and (2) that comprehending the ideological role tradition plays in each map is key to addressing the cosmological “myths” by which space in Bhaktapur is transformed to place (tables 2.1 and 2.2). In the mandala map, tradition describes effective everyday religious practices that have been compiled from past generations and inscribes an ideology of caste based on a “myth” of ritual purity. In the government map, tradition describes “backwardness” and emplots postcolonial relations that are inscribed by the “myth” of development. In the tourist map, tradition is the “exotic orient” and emplots an ideology of commodification that is inscribed by a pragmatic orientalism.

The Mandala Map If you walk about five minutes uphill along the newly brick paved road from Bhaktapur’s Tourist Motor Park, you arrive at the goddess Indrani’s


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open-air shrine. This is one of the locations of the group of nine mother goddesses whose sites surround the city (Levy 1990; Slusser 1982; Teilhet 1978). Take a seat at one of the nearby covered resting spots. If you wait for a moment, you will see people casually walking down the street, touching the god-image, ringing her bell, touching their heads to it, and sprinkling on material offerings. On festival days, this spot becomes a much more active locality. From dawn to dusk, in a steady stream, people will come and offer blood sacrifices to the goddess. While individuals perform such religious practices for numerous and diverse reasons, the totality of actions play a part in emplotting a “mandala map” onto the city. As illustrated in the introduction, a mandala is a Hindu or Buddhist graphic cosmological image, which in its most basic pattern is usually in the form of a circle divided into four separate sections. It has long been argued that many aspects of Nepal’s cultural landscape are organized through mandalas.4 How the mandala configures space can be comprehended in (1) the cartographic artifact of the painting Yantrara Khwopa Dey, (2) the authoritative cadastral lexicon, and (3) the interpellative apparatus of religious practice (figure I.1 and table 2.1).

The Cartographic Artifact: Yantrara Khwopa Dey As can be seen in the Newar painting, the mandala map of Bhaktapur (Yantrara Khwopa Dey), crafted by Madhu Krishna Chitrakar, “mandalization” is most readily apparent in images that configure geographic space (Shepard 1985).5 The basic mandala pattern consists of a recognition of the four directions, which are located at the periphery, and a focus on the center. The mandala map depicts three rhomboids of green earth and blue sky surrounding a small down-turned red central triangle. Just above the red triangle is a smaller up-turned triangle painted to resemble clouds and sky. Set symmetrically along the triangles and rhomboids are images of gods visually lifted off the background by red-orange nimbuses. Beyond the central shapes are four rivers that divide the central images from the surrounding scavenger-infested funeral grounds. Past the funeral grounds are mountain images that correspond loosely with the geographic landscape that surrounds Bhaktapur.

Authoritative Lexicon: Cadastral World-Building Logics To theorize how Bhaktapur’s mandalic symbolic lexicon configures space, I work from the foundations of the scholarship of Paul Mus and his notion of

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“cadastral religion.” Cadastral practices are pragmatic world-building social logics that pose an alternative to what he glosses as the “Upanishadic interpretation” of Hinduism (Mus 1998, 6; 1975, 7, 11–12, 20; see also Vajracarya 1976). Mus schematizes the cadastral cosmological generation in three interrelated positions: the divine, the sacred, and the human. The cadastral divine/sacred/human pattern involves a radical disjunction between the plane of the divine, which is constituted by the ineffable, and the plane of the sacred, which is constituted by the concrete sacrificial action that ceremonially produces it. On the one hand is the ineffable divine; on the other is the human position. Between the two is the sacred, which, for the duration of the ritual, concretizes the divine by furnishing it with “eyes and ears” (Mus 1975, 14; 1998, 106) The key to Mus’s cadastral theory of how such mandala cosmologies are generated is the logic of projection. For instance, to create the cadastral cosmos, the mandala map projects two vectors: (1) a connoted “vertical” (↑) nirvanic and (2) a denoted “horizontal” (← →) samsaric axis. According to Mus, it is through these two simultaneous projections (← ↑ →) that cadastral territories are made. Utilizing these two projections, the human group not only interacts with the divine, but also through the sacred, it “collectively . . . acquires its right to the land by means of this intermediary” (Mus 1975, 44). The mandala’s lexicon gains authority not simply because it visually represents the space of the city, but because it acts as a ceremonial device that produces the ritual space of Bhaktapur. Accordingly, while the symbolic meaning of mandalas has been well explored by Western scholarship (Argüelles 1972; Jung 1972; Tucci 1961, to name only a few), such scholarship is of little help in understanding the relationship between mandalas and Bhaktapur’s lived world. Instead, the image is utilized as a magical diagram (yantra) that configures the space of Bhaktapur (Khwopa) as a ritually organized place (dey). In classical usage the word mandala simply denotes circularity (Blom 1989). The word has been used to express everything from leprosy spots to a ring of neighboring states. In contemporary usage as part of “tantra-mantra,” in Bhaktapur, mandalas tend to be conceptualized as an arrangement of deities laid out as a “magical” diagram. As such, the mandala map should not be reduced to either an aesthetically appreciated artwork or a symbol that mimetically represents the city. Rather, it is a yantra, “a mystical diagram believed to possess magical or occult powers” (Stutley and Stutley 2003, 347). In a similar fashion, Mus maintains that such cadastral sign-objects as the mandala map are not symbols that represent an ontological essence, but are rather a type of prototypical god whose ceremonies produce the lived territory of the city. What cadastral signobjects have in common is that they are not merely symbols that represent the territory, but “blueprints” on which the territory is based. As Mus


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repeatedly argues, the cadastral sign’s “value was not conventional, but constructive” (Mus 1998, 85).

Interpellative Apparatus: Prosaic Religious Practice To map how the cadastral projections configure territory, I will sketch the ritual structure of Bhaktapur’s mother goddesses (Levy 1990).6 Let me start with the cadastral divine signification. Through a connoted “vertical” element, the divine is projected out of human intelligibility altogether (↑). Mus maintains that, in such “nirvanic” semiotic acts, “understanding stops” in “unintelligibility” (Mus 1998). In cadastral practices, the ultimately unknowable divine element is always just out of reach. It is a teleological point that can be pointed to but never represented. As I argue in chapter 6, by creating a horrifying form of shakti (jhinjan minjan [ jhi{n}ja{n} Mi{n}ja{n}), blood sacrifice operates in Bhaktapur in a similar semiotic fashion to Mus’s conception of how nirvana acts as a sign. From the zenith point, the cadastral geographic logic projects out a horizontal this-worldly (← →) element, which configures the space of the city by being tethered to physical sacred spaces. As such, temples and shrines act as an interpellative apparatus because they “pin” the mandala lexicon to the landscape through both material and virtual referents. To articulate the structure, I begin by working from the edges of the map inward. Implied in the mandala map, beyond the edges of mountains are the cardinal directions that house the directional deities. While in Bhaktapur these deities have no material places of worship, they are significant because their address is the imagined horizons. As Mr. Chitrakar described the guardians of the cardinal directions (starting to the east at the top of the painting and moving clockwise), they are Indra (saffron), Yama (dark blue), Varuna (gray), and Kubera (yellow). Other manuscripts list eight or ten of the deities, as illustrated in a copy of the Sacitrapatrani from the National Archives of Nepal (ms. no 1.1314, reel no. A544/6). Moving inward along the mandala map, we first transgress the funeral grounds and then ford the rivers. Such movement corresponds to the ideal, if not the actual, territory of Bhaktapur (Levy 1990, 149–99). The physical periphery of Bhaktapur is indicated on the mandala map by the outer ring of mother goddesses, such as the goddess Indrani’s open-air shrine.The use of a mother goddess to configure space is a pervasive South Asian representation of a boundary and its contained area within which ritual power and order are held and concentrated. Each of Bhaktapur’s eight mother goddesses has a sanctuary outside the city limits where she resides—usually in an unimpressive structure completely hidden in a thick grove of trees. The goddesses are

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approximately at the eight points of the compass and the city center. For example, starting in the east on the top of the mandala map, the mother goddess’s shrines are symbolized as follows: Brahamani, Maheshvari, Kumari, Vaisnavi, Varahi, Indrani, Mahakali, and Mahalaksmi. In the mandala map, Mr. Chitrakar described the central mark as Tripurasundari and other mandala paintings as either forms of the god Bhairava or of Vishvakarma.

The Government Map Walk up the stairs from the Indrani shrine and through the newly constructed city gate, turn right, and walk for about ten minutes until you arrive at Bhaktapur’s Bharbaco neighborhood, the spot where the express bus from Kathmandu drops off passengers. If you walked this path on Sunday, January 24, 1999, you would have come across a newly constructed brick gate about thirty feet tall. Hanging from the gate’s temporary bamboo scaffolding was a sign in Nepali proclaiming, “The Nepal Workers and Peasants Party Third Annual Major Convention.” As described in chapter 1, the Nepal Workers and Peasants Party is the local leftist group that has dominated politics in the municipality since it was founded in 1976. The gate is one of the six that the municipality is planning to build around the perimeter of the city. As you walk through the gate, to the right is a row of teashops, where young men quickly take a glass of tea or a cigarette and often talk politics before they make the forty-five-minute commute into Kathmandu. To trace how government and politics play into configuring Bhaktapur’s territory, I describe (1) the cartographic artifact of a Nepali Government map drawn in 1976, (2) the lexicon of governmentality and its authoritative myth of development, and (3) the interpellative apparatus of politics (table 2.1).

The Cartographic Artifact: Nepali Government Map Printed on rough, thin paper, the government map is twenty-three by twenty-six inches. It is printed in purple ink and was made by the “solar blue print method” of reproduction. The map, written in Nepali, was produced by the national Panchayat in 1976. Its main concern is with depicting political districts, and it also displays building patterns, roads, and rivers, along with town borders.

Authoritative Lexicon: Developmental Governmentality The government map’s lexicon construes “governmentality,” a form of power that is exercised through an ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses,


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and reflections, which results in the formation of specific governmental apparatuses and of a whole complex of power (Barthes 1972; Foucault 1984, 11; 1991, 87–104).7 Such power does not work through force or exclusion, but by implicating people as living subjects in a web of procedures that include such diverse practices as the policing of health and welfare, a social interest in poverty, a calculation of statistics, and as we are currently experiencing in the United States, an extension of authority under the ideological rubric of “security.” In the developed industrialized nations, the “government” tends to dominate over all other social forms, resulting, on the one hand, in the formation of a series of specific government apparatuses and, on the other, in the development of a whole complex of knowledges—health figures, economic numbers, unemployment percentages, threat advisory levels and so on. Since the 1950s, governmentality in Nepal has been legitimized and spread through the ideology of development—a process by which people develop themselves and their institutions so that they are better able to manage resources to produce sustainable and justly distributed improvements in their quality of life (Maskay 1998, 2:12, n. 39). This understanding of development stems from the United States’ global politics after World War II. In his speech of January 20, 1949, which initiated the Truman Doctrine and ushered in a new understanding of how world affairs should be managed, Harry Truman announced “a worldwide program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing. Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge” (cited in Escobar 1995, 3). Truman’s proclamation was situated at the end of the New Deal and in the midst of the Marshall Plan in Europe. It was ambitious. With the defeat of fascism and the Depression, it seemed that by replicating the high levels of industrialization and urbanization of the “advanced” democracies, the American Dream of “peace and abundance” could be extended to every “underdeveloped” corner of the globe. In Nepal, people on a prosaic level have come to see themselves through the lens of development (Pigg 1993a; 1993b). In Bhaktapur, how they see themselves depends on one’s occupation and one’s relation to physical labor. Storeowners and office workers, such as the shopkeeper Mr. Hada, tend to define development as “facilities: communications, roads, transport and other similar things” (personal communication, May 5, 1999). Farmers and laborers tend to see development in terms of the technologies it brings to their work. Durukaji Suwal, a mason and farmer, said, “Now we have lots of new tools that we did not have in the past—that is development” (personal communication, July 8, 1999). Intellectuals tended to see development as both economic and mental. For instance, Yogesh Raj, a Brahmin and Newar activist, defines development both as “a high standard of living, good health, and a good economy” and “improved mental peace” (personal communication, February 6, 1999).

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Yet how did Truman’s American Dream for the globe become the dominant modern “myth” of Nepal? The Nepali word for development is bikas (bikgs), which is defined as “bloom, expanding, progress, development” and stems from the Sanskrit “vikasha,” “to appear, become visible, shine forth.” Since the introduction of the “Break-Open the Fountain of Development” (Bikasko Mul Phutaunu) Plan in the early 1970s, “bikas” has taken on its contemporary meaning and come into use with increasing regularity in both national and local media (Wake 1980). Because of its immense rhetorical power, bikas is one of the most commonly heard words in Nepal today. Now bikas is such that anyone who has worked in Nepal since that time hardly could have missed daily exposure to the word. In fact, the myth of development is probably the single most important ideological factor in contemporary Nepali society. Crudely stated, the development myth narrates Nepal’s emergence from the “dark ages” of Rana isolation in the early 1950s and the nation’s modernization and unification with the outside world. Ideally, the myth of development promises social betterment and an increase of wellbeing, equality, productivity, and opportunity. More concretely, it vows to create better health facilities, environmental factors, employment conditions, and educational opportunities. In other words, development discourse is an overriding ideology that operates as a social field that binds together many different ethnic groups, political parties, and classes (Des Chene 1996). The bikas myth seeps into almost every aspect of Nepali life. At the highest levels, development discourse finds its way into political speeches, editorials, and daily news. Moreover, it trickles into everyday use as what it means to be “Nepali.” For instance, the Sunday supplement to the Kathmandu Post features a weekly section called “School Side,” composed of poems, stories, and pictures by children. The children’s work is regularly about development. Take, for example, an essay from the Kathmandu Post, September 12, 1999, by Pragya Chalisey, grade 6 from the Gyankunj HS School, which reads, “We are taught in the school that Nepal is a poor and least developed country. We frequently read the same thing in the newspapers. The same voice is heard on Radio Nepal. Nepal television highlights the poor situation of Nepal. For a long time, our leaders have been begging foreign assistance in the name of poverty.”

Interpellative Apparatus: Political Discourse If the government map gains authority through a myth of development, it is political discourse and practices that emplot the map onto the space of the city. “Politics” can be defined as the science or art of governing by which a body of people are organized. On a more realistic level, it is strategies of obtaining power, the methods or maneuvers by which one’s will and desires


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are made manifest. The general word used in Nepal is “rajniti (rgjniti)” (literally the “policy for governing”), and it glosses both these meanings. Yet, within this definition, the word holds a wide play of significations. A longterm politician said, “When we simply look at [politics], it is a part of life. And life cannot operate without politics. It is a mechanism for running the country” (personal communication, June 10, 1999). Almost all other people felt that politics was corrupt, that the politicians were not living up to democracy. A middle-aged shopkeeper said, “In Nepal, [politics] is a path for filling one’s pockets. In other contexts, it is social work. Some politicians get money, and those that do social work get fame” (personal communication, May 7, 1999). Yet even with this disillusionment, there was a sense that politics still contained a chance for social justice through development. A high-level bureaucrat said, “[Politics] is an oath to achieve human rights” (personal communication, May 21, 1999). And a local farmer told me, “In action, [the politicians] are just reaching out their hands. People’s needs are neglected . . . Because there are a lot of peasants in Bhaktapur, the government is always oppressing them. Here in Bhaktapur, politics has been good for the people” (personal communication, August 12, 1997). The farmer’s assessment was supported by the perspective of a young, middle-class, leftwing intellectual, who said, “In Bhaktapur, there are lots of peasants, and they have a hard life and much oppression in daily life. I’m active in helping to solve these problems. Politics in Bhaktapur has been good. But national politics is another story. For that reason, we in Bhaktapur have to look after our own interests” (personal communication, August 14, 1997). Political discourse is interpellative because when someone “hails” you with it, you must respond. For instance, on a Sunday night before Nepal’s 1999 election, I sat drinking tea and talking at the Chandrayan Sweets tea stall. I had bought some Nepal Workers and Peasants Party political materials and was sitting on the street corner browsing through the pamphlets. A group of acquaintances came over to talk with me. They saw what I was reading and one said, “Are you going to become Chicago’s Rohit (Narayan Man Bijukchhe)?” I replied, “We’ve already got one, his name is [Richard] Daley.” Although I tried to use humor to deflate the incident, I could tell that I had alienated some and made others friendlier. Politics in Bhaktapur is a serious everyday concern. With whom you talk and associate not only has an effect on how you are perceived, but also has a direct impact on your prosaic affairs.

The Tourist Map Finish your glass of tea, walk out of Chandrayan Sweets, and turn to your right and retrace your steps. If you walk east around the edge of the pond,

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past the furniture stores, past the photo shops, and past the cinema hall, you will arrive in Itachhe Square. To the east is a white gate built by King Bhupatindra Malla, which is located just west of Bhaktapur’s Durbar Square. As described in chapter 1, next to the gate is a sign that requests tourists to pay a fee to enter the city. If you are a “tourist,” you will need to purchase a ticket to continue. Since 1993, the municipality has requested foreigners to pay an entrance fee to the city. The fee began as NRs 50 (US $1.00), and in July 1996, it was raised to NRs 300 (US $5.00) and then again to $10.00. To map how tourism plays a part in configuring Bhaktapur’s territory, I describe (1) the cartographic artifact of a Bhaktapur municipal tourist guide, (2) the lexicon of a pragmatic orientalism, and (3) the interpellative apparatus of tourist practices (table 2.1).

The Cartographic Artifact: Bhaktapur Municipal Tourist Guide (1997 ) Folded, the tourist guide is eight by four inches and is in full photographic color, printed on slick high-quality paper. The cover features a photograph of Nyatapola Temple and below it the words “Bhaktapur” (in Newar script), “Bhaktapur” (in Devanagari), and finally “Khwopa,” the Newar name for the city (in Roman script). In the lower right corner, set off by a frame of light blue and by the fact that it is tilted counterclockwise at a forty-fivedegree angle, is the word, “complimentary.” Turning the map over, the back cover features the logo for the nationally sponsored “Visit Nepal ‘98” program. Also, framed in a small blue block are the name, address, and phone number of Bhaktapur’s Municipality. Opening the map, one encounters a third page, which folds out from the left edge of the back cover and features a photo of Wakupati Narayan Temple, as well as an advertisement for the publishers. The advertisement is roughly split diagonally in between two drawings of traditional Newar homes (in brown) and rice fields (in blue). In the lower left corner is a small red and white etching that depicts a woman in Newar farmer dress. Opening the map completely reveals the “Map of the City,” which depicts tourists sites and businesses.

Authoritative Lexicon: A Pragmatic Orientalism In tourist discourse because maps determine what one “sees,” they play a significant social, cultural, and personal role. In fact, as the tourist map indicates, any notion of an “unguided” or independent tourist is erroneous. While travelers in South Asia valorize such independence against the “group-tour” types, there are, in fact, very few individual travelers who go anywhere “on their own” without at least one much consulted guidebook or


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map. Such a map, just like a flesh and blood guide, tells one what must be seen and how to see it. Tourists are thus always embedded in discourses and structures that make tourism a meaningful, rule-bound, and economically productive activity. Bhaktapur’s tourist map gains authority because people act as if the city represents ancient isolated eastern religiosity. That is, in Nepal’s tourist discourse (and for most of the tourists with whom I talked), religion is perceived as what is authentically indigenous, premodern, eastern, and exotic. In Bhaktapur, the tourist lexicon casts the city as “medieval,” “oriental,” and “isolated.” As I overheard numerous tourists exclaim, “this is what Nepal must have been like before the coming of the West.” Opening the map completely displays a surface that is twelve by sixteen and one-half inches and is made up of six panels (four inches by eight inches). The text, in English, on the upper three panels describes Bhaktapur as a city of culture where the “peasantry and artisans still celebrate age-old festivals.” It goes on to tell about continual invasions by intruders, the Newar King Yaksha Malla’s fortification of the city and the installation of the eight mother goddesses, and the harmony between Hindus and Buddhists. It ends by endorsing the municipality’s efforts to preserve the city and local environs and hoping that the tourist’s “sojourn, be it a prolonged or a brief one” is “blissful and perpetual.” The local use of the rhetorics of “exoticism” and “authenticity” can be understood as a pragmatic form of orientalism.8 By calling the tourist map’s authoritative lexicon “pragmatic,” I mean to indicate that an orientalist style of dominating is not limited to the West. For what the tourist map indicates, as a locally produced document, is that “orientals” can use the myth of orientalism for their own purposes.

Interpellative Apparatus: Tourist Practices Tourism has been described in numerous ways.9 These descriptions, however, can be categorized into two basic theories: critical and romantic. On the one hand, the critical description poses tourism not only as essentially spurious and superficial, but as politically and ethically wrong. The tourist is described as one of the most virulent viruses of neoimperialism, the foot soldier of late capitalism. On the other hand, romantic studies of cultural tourism have tended to theorize it as a pilgrimage by alienated modern individuals who seek the authenticity of other times and places away from their everyday life. Tourism is understood as a leisure activity that presupposes its opposite, namely, regulated and organized work and the consumptive labor of late capitalism. As John Urry writes, “Tourism experiences are, by comparison with the everyday, out of the ordinary” (1990, 2).

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While these two theories may have some descriptive value, they fail to capture how tourism operates from a local perspective. That is, both the critical and the romantic approaches describe tourism from the “buyer’s” rather than the “seller’s” end. For most people in Bhaktapur, tourism was seen both as advantageous and disadvantageous. Most saw tourism as positive because it brought in business, helped renovate the temples, and was thereby a way to develop the city. Yet, as the mayor’s speech at the bus park indicated, and as discussed in chapter 1, many felt that tourism leaves “cultural pollution.” Seen as either positive or negative, however, it is money that defines tourism in Bhaktapur. Tourists are what they buy. And tourists are seen to experience Bhaktapur in a theater of purchases. Everything they touch is tinged with a monetary nimbus. What the tourist consumes is the perception that Bhaktapur is an exotic oriental location, which is not only on display in the form of “authentic” religious objects and antiques, but also commodified through souvenirs into objects for sale. On a local level, what gives the lexicon of the exotic East authority is its monetary value. How the tourist map emplots money and religion can be viewed in the lower panels of the map. On one side are three panels that list lodges, restaurants, and hotels. Spread throughout the other six panels are eleven photographs and corresponding numbers that indicate their locations on the map. The map itself shows the main streets in the city, ponds and rivers, and transportation sites and main squares. There are also ten numbers that indicate the location of monuments, which are correlated to the photographs. For instance, number 1 corresponds to Nyatapola Temple, while number 2 corresponds to Wakupati Narayan Temple. On an individual level, commodification of religion also interpellates people into the tourist map. For instance, one morning in August 1995, I was walking, in Bhaktapur’s procession route. I came across an altercation between a local woman worshiping at a nearby Ganesh shrine and a tourist. It seemed that the tourist had taken the woman’s photograph and that the woman was demanding that the tourist pay her for it. The tourist was yelling back that he did not need to pay her because he had already paid the entry fee to Bhaktapur.

Cosmologies as Depoliticized Space Bhaktapur’s “tradition” is not an essential indigenous category but has been produced at the intersection between global forces and local concerns. To comprehend how “tradition” configures the space of the city one needs to tease out the cosmologies embedded in three cosmographic artifacts: the


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mandala, government, and tourist maps. By reading these three maps through a critical theory of cosmology, one finds that in each “tradition” plays an ideological role (table 2.2). Yet while the structural significance of tradition plays a similar function in each map, the meaning of tradition is different in each case. In the mandala map, tradition describes effective everyday religious practices that have been compiled from past generations and inscribes an ideology of caste social structure. In the government map, tradition describes underdevelopment and emplots postcolonial relations. And in the tourist map, tradition is the exotic orient and commodifies the city’s landscape. In the mandala map, by “prosaic tradition” I am indicating the successful practices by which Bhaktapur’s religiously organized space has been constructed. As we saw in chapter 1, in Bhaktapur, such everyday practices tend to be glossed by the term “parampara”—“a prosaic tradition.” Parampara is traditional because it uses as a model what your father and grandfather did before you. This sense of tradition as an active and oral handing down of knowledge is still embedded in the English word “tradition.” For instance, Francis Bacon defines tradition as “the expressing of or transferring of our knowledge to others” (1605, cited in Williams 1983, 319). The mandala map’s use of tradition is ideological because its logic constructs a hierarchical space that imposes caste restrictions based on notions of ritual purity (Parish 1994; 1996). This is an ordered territory in which social status is expressed by greater or lesser proximity to the center. Moreover, verticality and elaboration of decoration also reproduce social hierarchy and decrease with the distance from the center (Gutschow 1980; Gutschow and Klöver 1975; Gutschow, Klöver, and Shresthacarya 1987). In the past, the hierarchy was visually and materially manifest through sumptuary regulations that, while now not law, are still part of the cultural landscape. The mandala map demarcates concentric zones that are roughly identical to the hierarchy of the town’s social topography. Closeness to the center indicates higher rank. For instance, on the mandala map the central zone demarcated by the three Ganesh sanctuaries on the inner rhomboid encloses the ideal residential quarters of the Brahmins. This quarter is also closely affiliated with the royal Malla palace and the center of political power. Currently, the municipal government is housed in the Rana-era neoclassical addition to the palace. Other castes are plotted on the map according to prestige and status in the Hindu caste system. Other artisans, butchers, scavengers, and menial laborers are located outside the inner city, and some even outside of the city proper (Gellner 1985; Parish 1994). In the government map, tradition operates as “underdevelopment,” an ideology that dismisses traditional habits and beliefs as inconvenient to modernity (Williams 1983, 319–20). In Bhaktapur, during the span of the

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Bhaktapur Development Project (BDP), such notions of tradition as underdevelopment became a potent form of postcolonial ideology, which utilized architectural conservation discourse to reconstruct the city’s landscape. In Bhaktapur, the notion of tradition as underdevelopment operated ideologically because it transformed political resistance into underdevelopment. The result of such development projects is not the lessening of suffering and poverty, but rather the expansion of bureaucratic state power and the transmutation of the political aspects of poverty into technical problems that can only be solved by development experts (Ferguson 1994). Such mechanisms of control and power are justified, because industrialized nations of North America and Europe are held up as appropriate models for societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Escobar 1995). As we saw in the preceding chapter, this ideological use of development is evident in Anne Haaland’s book, Bhaktapur-a Town Changing: Process Influenced by [the] Bhaktapur Development Project, which was produced by the GTZ, the Federal Republic of Germany’s development agency and the parent organization for the BDP (1982). The reason the book was published was that between the middle of 1979 and the middle of 1980, the GTZ found itself in a predicament. Rather than appreciating the temple restoration that the BDP had done, the people in Bhaktapur were tearing down some of the project’s works and expressing open hostility toward the project staff. Rather than viewing these actions as local concerns brought to a head by Nepal’s political troubles, Haaland writes these off as lack of education and resistance to change (Haaland 1980a; 1980b; 1982). In the tourist map, besides development (but integral to it), Bhaktapur is now part of a large, coordinated tourist industry, organized by a central government authority and involving many locations throughout the Kathmandu Valley and Nepal. Central to this industry is the changing social and territorial reproduction of “tradition.” While tourist discourse may not have invented Bhaktapur’s “tradition” (there definitely was something there before tourists arrived), it certainly has “repackaged” it for sale. Tourism’s repackaging is a type of commodification, which refers to the subordination of culture to the logic of capital. Commodification, a term often used critically to describe the loss of human qualities in capitalist production, is the tendency to turn goods, services, land, and even human labor into products for sale on the open market. In the present global economy, tradition is a valuable commodity that can be used to gain not only distinction but also monetary capital. In a tourist cosmology, the “traditional city” is created by translating religious practices into “tradition.” The symbolic capital of tradition is then exchanged (“cashed in”) for monetary capital in the social field of the traditional city.


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Such exchanges are ideological because the exchange of money naturalizes and obfuscates a host of asymmetrical power relations behind the fetish of commodities. As Karl Marx writes, “The fetishism with commodities arises from the social character of the labor which produced them . . . . It is only by being exchanged that the products of labor acquire uniformity of values . . . seemingly inherent in them” (“Marx & Engles Internet Archive,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4 [accessed February 13, 2005]). Accordingly, while on the ground in Bhaktapur the mixing of tourists and locals brings in other cultural forms and fields of desire, its defining feature is a commodity fetishism that naturalizes an orientalist view of Nepal because it obscures the social labor needed to reproduce the tourist experience. Because the people of Nepal themselves are part of what is on sale, tourism often turns people themselves into commodities. On the one hand, locals become service providers whose cheap labor is justified through vague notions of orientalism. And like the story of the tourist and the photographer, “the native” may be viewed as an object for sale. In extreme situations, as Erik Cohen writes “as far as the tourists are concerned, the inhabitants of exotic places are not human beings but rather zoological objects” (1988, 365). Conversely, as many of the tourist guides in the city repeatedly explained to me, the tourists are sometimes seen not as people, but as “walking dollars.”

Conclusion: Hinduism’s Challenge to Tradition and Modernity A study of how people in Bhaktapur use prosaic religion to make lived territory challenges scripturalist accounts of Hinduism that describe the current religious practices as corrupt and decayed (Levy 1990, 15). There is a long strain of such orientalist discourse that negatively compares the pure origins of Hinduism—whether posited as Vedic society or medieval kingdoms—to the polluted present. A sense of anxious nostalgia clings to such descriptions, which stems from a projected disjoint between an ideal “map” (what should be there) and the city’s actual “territory” (Harvey 1990, 306). The disjoint in such scripturalist descriptions, however, stems more from a nostalgic “mental map” than from Bhaktapur’s traditional reality. While ethnographers may have once unproblematically maintained a link between identity and place, there is now a growing recognition of the hybrid nature of “place” and of the arduous cultural labor required to maintain the “local” (Appadurai 1995). This is even more apparent in Nepal. Rather than creating a single “abstract space,”

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globalization has caused certain spaces to become overpopulated with place (Liechty 1996, 98). Such fluid overlapping, and “symbol-crowded” places may in fact be the norm for South Asia, which utilizes a “symbol pool” (Cohn 1967, 2; cf. Eck 1981; Schwartzberg 1992, 382–83). Once one clears away the nostalgia for authentic traditional space, two points become clear. First, while the tourist and government “cosmologies” may have been imported, they are now firmly planted in Bhaktapur’s territory. Second, while once the tourist and government maps may have been “Western” cosmologies used to dominate Bhaktapur, they are now, like a gun for hire, being utilized for local purposes. Just as colonial cultural forms were often folded back upon the empire, development discourse can be appropriated as rhetoric for mobilizing against the state. That is, as the mayor’s speech at the Tourist Motor Park indicates, the three maps can be used by local groups not only to resist the authority of international organizations and the state, but for local ends (cf. Fujikura 1996). The myths of “underdevelopment” and “romantic Asia” have occurred in Nepal not simply because people have had the wool pulled over their collective eyes. Rather, as the mayor’s speech indicates, there is gain to be made in being perceived as “backward,” “exotic,” and “poor.” For example, in Bhaktapur, because of the myth of underdevelopment, the BDP acted as if the city were a “blank slate” unaffected by modernity or colonialism, and it was able to justify and gain the authority to pour millions of deutschmarks into the city (Grieve 2002). In a similar fashion, while there may have been resistance to early events, such as transforming the Bhaildya Satah into the Nyatapola Restaurant, pragmatic orientalism now plays a major role in Bhaktapur’s cityscape (Grieve 2002, 53–62). The clearest example may be the filming of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993), which not only literally reconstructed the streets of Bhaktapur to conform to the director’s orientalist imaginings, but also seemed to shower the city in cash. However, while the tourist and government maps now play a major role in creating “tradition,” it is the mandala cosmology’s grid on which Bhaktapur’s lived world is drawn. Such a grid is generated by local religious practices. Your walk through Bhaktapur has left you in front of the main gate into the city. Similarly, part I of Retheoring Religion in Nepal has prepared you to enter the city with a critical eye for comprehending how prosaic religious practices build lived worlds. Part II illustrates the operation of prosaic religion by articulating the social practices that surround godimages, worship, performance, and festivals, as well as uses these practices to expand the categories of divinity, action, person, experience, and agency.

Part II Prosaic Religion and the Construction of Lived Worlds

This peasant-but-modern political sphere was not bereft of the agency of gods, spirits, and other supernatural beings. —Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe Today it is the colonized peoples who assume the full and ethical and political condition described by Marx as that of the proletariat. —Barthes, Mythologies


Chapter 3 Sketching the Central Point: Cadastral God-Images and the Politics of Scriptural Mediation

I never pass by a wooden fetish, a gilded Buddha, a Mexican idol without reflecting: perhaps it is the true God. —Charles Baudelaire (cited in Benjamin, “On Perception”) Bhairava has three eyes and six arms; the divine figure is adorned with tiaras and earrings. In his left hands he carries the skull cup, the trident and the skull staff; in his right hands he carries the hook, the small spear and the thunderbolt. He is decorated with several ornaments and jewels. —Dhyanasamgraha

On September 16, 1999, Mr. Madhu Krishna Chitrakar and I began to sketch the paubhg painting’s central mandala image. He said that this was important: “It is just like a magical diagram (yantra). The underlying structure must be perfect so that the image is effective (∂akti).” I asked him, “But how do you make a god-image effective?” He did not answer. Instead, he pulled out a copy of A.W. Macdonald and Anne Vergati Stahl’s Newar Art: Nepalese Art during the Malla Period (1979). I then reminded him that I wanted to do the god Bhairava, and since this book was all Buddhist images, he pulled out his old cloth copybook (hgkusaphu). He could not find what he was looking for so he went upstairs and pulled out a ceremony-stained image of Bhairava. He said that this was from last year’s celebration for the goddess Durga (Mohani Puja) that his family had done in the “treasure room,” but now because the image was dirty from the ceremony he would not be able to sell it.

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Who is the god who is enthroned in the painting’s center? Stop and take a second to look at the god-image of Bhairava, a fierce form of Shiva from the Nepalese city of Bhaktapur (figure 3.1). What can you make of this god-image? Bhairava is a stone-god Lohandyah (loha{n}dya:)—a humanly constructed concrete deity. Lohandyah literally translates from the Newar as

Figure 3.1 Bhairava mask from Bhaktapur’s Navadurga Dance, Puna Chitrakar (1999). 22.5 ⫻ 18 inches (from author’s collection).

Sketching the Central Point

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“stone (loha[n]) god (dya:)” and is the local idiom for the pan–South Asian notion of murti (m˚rti). Murtis are concrete signs of gods and can be either aniconic or iconic. They are the ritually consecrated images at the center of the chief form of Hindu religious practice, worship. Looking face-to-face with Bhairava’s god-image necessitates a retheorizing of the concept of the divine (table I.1, row D; figure I.3). If you, like me, find yourself trained in and by “Western” academic discourses or if you have been trained in educational systems in other parts of the globe that gain distinction by modeling themselves on elite occidental pedagogy, it is difficult to face up to Bhairava’s otherness (Bourdieu 1988). This god-image challenges one’s understanding. When one gazes at his three fish-like eyes (two large, one small), sharp, fanged teeth, flaming orange-red lips, and elaborate, multicolored, snake-encrusted headdress, it is hard to escape one’s own historical, class, and geographic bias. In a skewed Levinasian sense, the “idol’s” face resists our powers to understand (Levinas 1969). A look at Bhairava shows that there is no innocent “eye,” no naïve viewing. What you see is not always what you get. Instead, what we see depends on mediation. That is, because our descriptions of the world are culturally located, our “naïve” descriptions are neither innocent nor objective. Rather, all social objects are mediated by intervening socially grounded, culturally generated, and historically particular mechanisms. Moreover, these intervening mechanisms are marbled through and through with power relations. For instance, the Bhairava image that hangs on the wall of my office holds a different social meaning than an image of the god in situ. In such a case, the image transforms from “god” into “art.” That is, the stone-god’s in situ contextual sacred meaning is replaced with a depoliticized aesthetic one. The resistance to the god-image occurs because, while many of us are outwardly too sophisticated to employ the nomenclature of idolatry and devil worship, the habit still lingers (Appadurai 1986; Eck 1981; Waghorne 1994). Not only is there systematic and widespread underemployment of the visual senses in every field of academic study (Arnheim 1969), but religious studies creates patterns of knowledge by which all religious discourse is reduced to scripture. This is especially ironic in the study of Hinduism, where god-images are the most obvious and empirically observable manifestation of religion in South Asia (Waghorne, Cutter, and Narayanan 1985; Waghorne 1994). While the most observable of all South Asian religious practices, because of the Western academic tendency to privilege scripture, god-images tend to be all but ignored in scholarship. As examined in the study’s introduction, such “book knowledge” reproduces “scripturalism,” a pattern of mediation that reifies texts as ahistorical and uses them to legitimize a specific regime of practices and beliefs. Scripturalism rests upon a transcendental understanding

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of the divine as supersensible, nonmaterial, dichotomous, and self-creating. As I spell out further, while scripturalism at one time may have been a Western orientalist affair, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries it has also come to be used by Hindu nationalist groups such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). To form a nonscriptural view of god-images, I turn to ethnographic accounts of prosaic religious practice in Bhaktapur. My aim here is twofold: first, in a necessary critical moment, I maintain that scriptural mediation of god-images can be broken down into two “strategies”: symbolism and idolatry. While seemingly opposed, because both strategies deny the materiality of god-images they both end up reducing them to scripture. And second, in a constructive moment, I argue that Bhairava is a murti: a humanly constructed deity whose material element dominates. The material image gains “power” (shakti) because it is brought to “life” (jivan) by being situated in an everyday “net” (janjal) of cadastral social practices. Besides giving a more accurate account of Bhaktapur’s religious practice, the defamiliarization created by Bhairava’s god-image maps the politics of mediation surrounding Hindu god-images. Before I detail either the critical or constructive moments of the argument, however, it is necessary to spell out the “bookish” generative matrix behind scripturalism.

Scripturalism: Colonial and Postcolonial Readings of the Book The book structures Western civilization (Derrida 1967, 3). Modern western religion, philosophy, literature, and the very conception of the world are inextricably woven into the printed book. In a narrow sense, a book is a collection of sheets of printed pages, bound together to form a material whole. However, in a more abstract sense, the book with its front and back cover, its first and last page, is a model of a desire for completion, wholeness, and closure that upholds a desire for etiology and teleology. In short, the book is a strategy for mediating knowledge that forces discourse into (1) a predetermined “plot” that has a beginning and end; and (2) is written by an author/god who, existing prior to the writing of the book, guarantees its truth. A chief component of the book mediation is “logocentrism,” a chief element of which is the “transcendental signifier.” A transcendental signifier is simultaneously conceived as (1) outside the semiotic structure and thus beyond scrutiny or challenge; and (2) at the very center, providing the structure with an unchanging anchor (Derrida 1967). While this transcendental


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signifier has changed over the course of history (Man, Imagination, Reason, Being), all these “god terms” are just reverberations of the Christian creator god. While the idea of the book stretches across the whole of Western thought, it echoes the exegetical study of the Bible (Derrida 2001, 102–36). Logocentric readings of religious texts lead to “scripturalism”—a pattern of mediation that reifies texts as ahistorical and uses them to legitimize a specific regime of practices and beliefs. Through orientalism, scripturalism was imported from Europe and the United States to South Asia. When European “orientalist” scholars first encountered Indian religions, they forced the diverse traditions and practices into a “Protestant” bed of scripture (Waghorne 1991).1 Such scripturalism has forced Indian religions into a “world religion’s” echo of Christian theology (King 1999). Ironically, however, while in the nineteenth century the “booking of Hinduism” may have been solely a Western orientalist concern, by the twentieth century scripturalism had become one of the most powerful rhetorical tropes of Hindutva fundamentalist political groups such as India’s BJP (Jaffrelot 1996). Scripturalism rests upon a transcendental understanding of the divine as supersensible, nonmaterial, dichotomous, and self-creating. It differentiates itself by accusing others of idolatry—the worship of material human constructions. Hindu Vedantic texts, at least since the time of the Upanishads, have articulated such “mystic” transcendental notions of the divine. Yet, the “discovery” of Vedantic scripture as the central theology of Hinduism is a European orientalist construction (King 1999). This view of Hinduism is a romantic fantasy that it is deeply rooted in mystical, introspective and otherworldly experiences (King 1999, 142). While the transcendental conceptions were there before the Europeans arrived, it took the orientalists to define such concepts as the essence of Hinduism. Still, in the Mobius strip discourse that is the postcolonial globe, current Hindu “fundamentalist” notions strongly voice a scriptural Vedantic understanding of the religion (Ghosh 1999; Jaffrelot 1996). Putting a reverse “English” spin on nineteenth-century pejorative dialogs, neo-Vedantic conceptions of Hinduism are used by nationalistic groups to claim the spiritual superiority of the East over the idolatrous material West. For instance, in Bansi Pandit’s The Hindu Mind: Fundamentals of Hindu Religion and Philosophy for All Ages, the author defines Hinduism as the eternal religion (Sanatana Dharma) that is founded on a supreme reality (Nirguna Brahman) and rooted in the Vedas (1990). Far from being a neutral taxonomy, the book tends to structure knowledge not only to benefit the West, but also elite educated males (Ong 1967; Sullivan 1990). In the human sciences, bookish knowledge has tended to privilege the linguistic, the discursive, and the cognitized over the

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visceral and tacit. It tends to lead to words about words, to books about books. As we have seen, the cautions about scripturalism are more apt for religious studies; the subtle knowledge modeling of the book transforms all religion into a poor reflection of a Protestant-based Christianity (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994). The concern is not just with content, but with strategies of mediation. These paradigms emphasize a series of hierarchical dichotomies between such categories as sacred and profane, belief and practice, doctrine and law, individual and community, universalizing and particularizing, as well as tradition and modernity. The modeling of religious practice on the book is even more distorting for the study of South Asian religions (Waghorne, Cutler, and Narayanan 1985; Waghorne 1991). Not only has it forced Hinduism to conform to a Christian theological model, but it has inadvertently strengthened Hindu fundamentalisms. As Joanne Waghorne has argued, what orientalists “once argued with words,” fundamentalist groups now “fight with bricks and blood” (1991, 16). Whether wielded by orientalist scholars or Hindu “fundamentalists,” the scriptural mediation of Hinduism not only masks how god-images are actually used in everyday practice, but perpetuates a damaging rhetoric. If we understand the strategies of this mediation, and what harm they cause, we may be able to correct some of their “iatrogenic” damage.2

Hypocritical Scholarship: Two Scriptural Mediating Strategies From a scripturalist position, god-images are seen at best as supplements, and at worst as deterrents, to a real understanding of the divine. Mirroring this, scriptural accounts tend toward two mediating strategies: symbolism and idolatry. By mediating strategy, I mean to gloss no particular school, method, or theory, but rather the wider tactics by which god-images are “turned into” book knowledge. The first interpretative strategy, symbolism, erases the materiality of god-images by positing them as material signs of spiritual transcendental categories. In “Images and Symbols,” Mircea Eliade writes that “images, symbols and symbolism have now become current coin” (Eliade 1969). Some fifty years later this symbolic “coin” has circulated for so long and through so many hands that its human-made character has been all but forgotten. Like an overused trademark, “symbol” has passed into the background of the tacit taken-for-granted reality of not only what it means to practice religious studies, but religion. Because symbolism is such common currency, the implications of its use have become obscured. In symbolic


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“veneration,” worship is conceived as being given to the spiritual essence that the material image is perceived to actually reveal (Eliade 1959; Ricoeur 1970). In the broadest sense, the symbolic function has been posed as the general function of mediation by which consciousness constructs all perception and discourse (Cassierer 1946). In the narrowest sense, it means something other than what is said (Ricoeur 1970). Always, however, the symbol is a vehicle at once universal and particular. Moreover, because symbols’ referents are often vague, the symbol is crucial for bringing together abstract scriptural concepts and concrete signs (Firth 1973; Ricoeur 1976). The second mediating strategy, idolatry, interprets concrete gods such as Bhairava as material objects of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion. In the simplest sense, an idol is an image or statue of a deity fashioned to act as an object of worship. Yet often such worship is perceived as immoral because idolatry gives the name of god to that which is not god. For instance, all three religions of the book—Islam, Christianity, and Judaism—condemn idolatry because it is the worship of a humanly manufactured signifier rather than the uncreated divine. Because all signification is dependent on material signs, however, all religions must worship matter to some extent. Accordingly, “idolatry” is not simply the worship of matter, but the accusation of another’s “strange worship” (Halbertal and Margalit 1992). Lingering in the rhetoric of the idol is one of the most persistent forms of orientalism. Historically, idolatry’s condemnation differs in the form it takes and toward whom it is directed, but in every situation idolatry is a strategy by which a community creates self-identity by othering others (Halbertal and Margalit 1992, 17, 236). Idolatry has become an important academic strategy in the discipline of religious studies. Idolic reduction is not a critique about subjugating material signs to abstract ideals, but about accusing others of worshiping the wrong abstract ideals.3 Accordingly, idolic reduction is usually not used in its purely critical form, but rather in a twofold maneuver. First, the interpreter accuses the worshipper of misrecognition (the false worship of idolatry). Second, the interpreter introduces an abstract category that is given as the real addressee of the worshiper. The idolic reduction then is not merely the critique of idols per se. Like any accusation of idolatry, it alleges incorrect worship while implying the existence of a correct form of worship. Neo-Hindu and Hindutva sources are keenly aware of the rhetorical value of idolatry. A post to a discussion thread on www.hindunet.org/ alt_hindu_home/1994/msg00024.html (accessed February 26, 2005), reads, “There are a number terms that are applied to Hinduism in the Press, not only in the West but in India itself, which foster a negative image of it. Hindus are called worshippers of idols . . .” The thread goes on to state, “However, there is a strange dichotomy in how such religions are judged.

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When they are part of the Christian tradition they are called icons and classified as works of art and regarded as sacred in nature. When they are non-Christian or pagan traditions they are called idols.”4 Moreover, much contemporary neo-Hindu mediation of the role of god-images follows the strategy of symbolic reduction. There is no doubt that these neo-Hindu accounts are patterned on historical Hindu sources. Yet there is also no doubt that these traditional sources have been mediated through romantic Western understandings of symbolism. For instance, a post on hinduwebsite.com/symbolism.htm (accessed February 26, 2005) posits, “(Hindu symbols) convey deeper philosophical truths, not obvious immediately to ordinary individuals. Like all manifest creation, they also have a manifest content and a hidden content.” Often the notion of symbolism is posed as an apology. For instance, a Web article entitled AUM, published on the Nation of Hindutva homepage in 2000, suggests that “Hinduism is famous for its so-called idol ‘worship’ (it is important to note that this is a misappellation, since it is not, in fact, the idol that Hindus worship, but the concepts and values which the individual is reminded of by that idol)” (quotation marks and italics in original). This need for an apology occurs, as Naveen D. Arcot writes in “Symbolism in Hinduism,” because “in the absence of such an understanding the whole periphery of Hinduism will appear funny, unintelligent and absurd. In the process of knowing this science of symbolism one discovers the deeper meaning of the real Hindu tradition” (htttp://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/8424/ symbolism.html [accessed February 26, 2005]). As Rajiv Malhotra suggests in the Web article “The Position of Hinduism in America’s Higher Education,” the need for such apologies occurs when Hindus interact as a minority with Abrahamic traditions. “In American neighborhoods, [Hindus] are asked to define their beliefs in the Judeo-Christian categories of monotheism and polytheism—a dualism that does not exist in Hinduism—and told that they are idol worshippers” (http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/ s-es/s-es-malho_h_edu.thm. [accessed February 26, 2005]). The danger with the two scriptural meditative strategies is not that Hinduism is being interpreted through outsider categories. The peril is that scripturalism perpetuates discourses that systematically operate to benefit the already privileged members of society at the expense of others (Lincoln 1981, 112; 1989; 1994). For instance, rather than being an essential object, the “idol” is created by a constellation of discourses that are linked with the idea of misrepresentation. Similarly, the danger with symbolism is that the material god-images are high-jacked to reveal a scriptural transcendental signified and to reinforce a dominant view of the world. In both cases, Bhairava is defaced. He is no longer situated in his own domain of social practices, but becomes a signifier of scriptural transcendental categories.


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Both mediating strategies are not so much critical, as hypocritical. They hide their own agenda behind the mask of the “other.”

Drawing Down a Prosaic Deity During September 1997, I was writing a walking tour of Bhaktapur’s religious architecture for the town’s municipality (Grieve 1997). At one point, I was attempting to locate a chetrapal (chetrapgl ), a deified stone that acts as the protector of a neighborhood. I had been told by Mr. Om Charan Amatya (the director of the municipal secretariat for which I was working) that a good representative stone could be found near the eastern end of Durbar Square in front of the Chatubramha Maha Bihar. However, when I arrived at the spot, there were two possible candidates. As it turns out, one stone was just a rock, while the other was a deity. I asked the storeowner whose shop bordered the guardian stone why it was a god. He said that he did not know and that I should go speak with a Brahmin, “maybe the one who teaches at the Ram Ghat every Saturday. He knows a lot.” When I asked my boss, Mr. Amatya, the same question, he said he did not know and in exasperation told me “to look in [Robert Levy’s] book [Mesocosm ]” (1990). When I replied that Levy did not give any explanation, another man in the room answered with one of those ubiquitous proverbs, “If celebrated a god, if not worshipped, a stone.” What was the difference between the god and the stone? The deified stone had no readily apparent symbolic meaning, no iconic significance, and no one knew any immediate legends about it. Rather than some underlying reason, it was a god because it was worshipped, and it was worshipped because it protected the area. The concreteness of the stone forces one to focus not just on the semantic meaning, but also on the material element as it is embedded in social relations. As spelled out in the opening scene of the study, when the high school student asked me, “What is a god?” he simultaneously pointed to Bhairava’s god-image. When I asked the question, “What is a god?” to other people in Bhaktapur, I received numerous answers—often more than one from the same person. As Mr. Raj, an activist for the Newar language and culture, joked, “You can call anything or anyone a god. [Pointing] I can call you a god, or him, or him [laughter]” (personal interview, February 6, 1999). Moreover, the prosaic stone-gods that I am discussing here did not speak for everyone. For example, there are around forty Islamic families who have lived in the city for at least 400 years and speak a mix of Urdu and Newar. On July 30, 1999, sitting in a crowd of worshipers going to prayer, I asked

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Nasim Mohammed the question “What is god?” and he answered, “Allah.” I then asked him, “Who is Allah?” and someone else answered, “Allah is the Kudha.” Again I asked, “What is the Kudha?” and someone else answered, “god is like darkness,” to which someone else added “an invisible hiddenness” (personal interviews, February 6, 1999). Furthermore, because of the large and active Marxist element in the city, not everyone in Bhaktapur believes in god. An active party member and principal of a lower secondary school answered my question with, “I don’t believe in the gods, because I haven’t seen any” (personal interview, August 15, 1999). He then went on to give a Marxist interpretation of why people believe in religion. Finally, there are people in the city who do not practice religion, not for any ideological reasons, but because they perceive that the gods have done little to relieve their suffering. Nani Maiya Prajapati, a mother of five multiply disabled daughters, answered my questions with, “I must go and worship during Mohani or Biskah when we gather with my husband’s family— otherwise because of my children I don’t have time for the gods” (personal interview, June 19, 1999). Even for those people who were Hindu or Buddhist and believed in the gods, their conception of the divine depended on their gender, age, education, occupation, and caste, as well as their personal interest in religion. Higher-caste, educated males tended to see god as a suppressible power that ordered both nature and society. Ram Lochan Jha, a fifty-two-year-old Brahmin lawyer and a teacher of language and culture understood “god [as] an invisible power (shakti) that encourages people to do good deeds and protects them from doing bad . . . . You can say there are natural things like rain, but these still need someone to operate it. That is the invisible power” (personal interview, May 9, 1999). Non-Brahmins and younger men tended to give the matter less thought; Keshab Hada, a thirty-two-year-old storekeeper said, “As we’ve been told by the traditional stories, and as we are practicing from the past, that is a god” (personal interview, May 5, 1999). Younger educated men also struggled with the seeming contradiction between their modern, “Western-style” education and traditional views on religion. Damodar Gautam, chief of the National Museum, who holds an advanced degree in History and Culture said, “I think I have a wide view. For the present time, those who can provide the right scientific principles for human nature and the natural environment, they are a god. That could be a human, or anything else. That is a wide view” (personal interview, June 21, 1999). Women and men with less formal education tended to see god on a more practical level. Ramesh Joshi, a thirty-one-year-old shopkeeper, said, “A man who does good works is also god. And those who sit in temples are god; and those who are blissful” (personal interview, June 16, 1999).


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Women’s understanding tended to differ from that of men. Bijayashree Karmacharya, a twenty-eight-year-old accountant and new bride, defined god as “those who do good and help those who suffer” (personal interview, May 11, 1999). Some older women who have had little formal education have still given the gods much contemplation. For instance, when I asked Dhrubeswori Gongah, the senior woman in the house where I stayed during my fieldwork, she answered with a list of uses and henotheistic relationships: All gods are one. The goddesses are one. The most powerful goddess is Teleju-bhawani, who is the mother of the Navadurgas, and [the most powerful god] is the Bhairav from Taumadhi. He is the most powerful of all. Yet, all the gods respect Mahakali, and Mahakali respects Indrayani, etc. Still, Devidurga is the highest. And amongst all the [male] gods Vishnu is the highest. (Personal interview, June 14, 1999)

To fragment matters more, the understanding of god cannot be rendered down to a social equation. People’s inclinations also played a large part in their views. Krishna Pradhananga, who has a similar social background as Keshab Hada but who is interested in religion because of his involvement in local ritual drumming, answered my question with, “Whoever has religious power is a god. Whoever can fulfill our needs. God is not only that which is described in the Mahabharata and Ramayana, but god is that which drives us in a positive way, who can give aid” (personal interview, June 6, 1999).

Bhairava’s Names and Forms As I worked on the central god-image of Bhairava, Mr. Chitrakar was preparing a second canvas to paint along with me. But he said that he would do one of the Buddha instead. “It would be easier to sell that way.” The two paintings would be the same except for the central image (mine would be Bhairava and his the Buddha) and the top image (mine would be Ganesh and his Tara). He added, “If you add a lightning bolt symbol, he becomes Buddhist anyway.” Becoming confused, I asked, “Then what is a god?” Mr. Chitrakar paused and then said, “A god is the god-image . . . of Vishnu, Shiva. Understand?” Looking at Bhairava, and with Madhu’s words in mind, I came to comprehend that in Bhaktapur’s prosaic religious practice gods do not “represent” a transcendental essence, but rather gain effectiveness through the material circulation of their names and forms in a cadastral generative

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matrix—those fields of discourses, practices, institutions, and technologies for using mandalic social logics to make lived worlds. Bhairava is conceived of either as a wrathful form of Shiva or as one of Shiva and Parvati’s sons (Blom 1989; Doniger 1973; 1976). For the most part, Newars imagine Bhairava as an emanation of Shiva or, in prosaic practice, as a dangerous (gya[n]pumha) form of Mahadev who has released his shakti (Levy 1990; Toffin 1984). Sylvain Lévi estimates that there are five million Bhairavas alone in the Kathmandu Valley (Lévi 1905; Nepali 1988; Toffin 1984). Certainly, there is no place in Nepal not pervaded by the god (Nepali 1988). As Mr. Chitrakar’s painting shows, even Newar Buddhists worship a form of him as Harkhandya, and Tibetan tantrism has adopted the god’s esoteric currents as Varjabhairava (Gellner 1993, 160). As we see in figure 3.1, in his anthropomorphic form, Bhairava has fangs, bulging eyes, and dark blue or black coloring, carries a wide range of destructive weapons in his many arms, and has a garland of skulls. Indian and Nepalese iconographic manuscripts mention hundreds of Bhairavas. Each Bhairava in these iconographic manuscripts is listed with a short description, including the number of arms, heads, and eyes and types of ornaments and instruments. For instance, in the Sacitrapatrani (Nepal National Archives Catalogue ms. 1.1314, Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project, reel no. A 544/6), Bhairava is depicted with a grimace, garland of skulls, snake ornaments, and elephant skin. In his twelve arms he carries the threatening finger, arrow, axe, hook, sword, elephant skin, trident, and staff with skull at the top. In Mr. Chitrakar’s model book, a four-armed Batuka Bhairava is shown standing on a demon that drinks blood from a skull. The god’s left arm holds a beautiful form of Vaisavi. He is adorned with all kinds of ornaments, skull garlands, a moon-sickle, and a tiger skin. The face is large and full with three large open eyes and a fanged-tooth grinning mouth. In his first two right hands he carries a skull and a knife; in the remaining arms he carries a skull staff and a trident. The paws of an elephant skin are hung over his body. In Bhaktapur, there are at least twenty-eight major manifestations of Bhairava.5 As we encountered in the introduction, the most important anthropomorphic Bhairava is Sky Bhairava, whose temple in Taumadhi Square is frequented by over 750 people on a typical day. Sky Bhairava’s temple is not only the pivotal point for Bhaktapur’s Biskah festival, one of Bhaktapur’s three largest annual events, but also a focus of all major festivals in Bhaktapur. Sky Bhairava’s temple enthrones three forms of the god. As indicated in the study’s introduction, in the front, facing the square is a small six-inch-tall god—the Death Bhairava—who receives most of the public worship. Inside, on the second floor, is Sky Bhairava’s actual god-image. This image, however, is only a head. Myth has it that this is the


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head of a decapitated image of the god in Varanasi, India. Behind the temple is an image of Vetala, who in Puranic accounts is Bhairava’s brother (Doniger 1973). Vetalas are also a class of demons, ghouls, and vampires who live in burial grounds. In Bhaktapur, Vetala is thought of as Bhairava’s henchman or even his vehicle, and he rides on the prow of Bhairava’s chariot during the festival of Biska. Vetala’s appearance, with a mustache and a more human face, approximates Indian iconographic representations of Bhairava. In other Bhairava temples in Nepal, it is often Vetala who takes blood sacrifices (Nepali 1988). Other “semianthropomorphic” images of Bhaktapur’s Bhairava are Funeral Mat Bhairava (Pulu Bhairava) and the Bhairava god in the Shape of a Cow (Baila Dyah Yagu Su), which, as we will see in chapter 6, is used in Bhaktapur’s Cow Procession Festival. Beyond Bhaktapur, Bhairava is one of the most important gods of Nepal (Gellner 1993; Nepali 1988; Slusser 1982; Toffin 1984; Vergati 1995). Besides the numerous large centers of worship—Kala Bhairava, Pacali Bhairava, Sveta Bhairava, Tika Bhairava, and Vyaghreshvara Bhairava—are the iconographic manuscripts that depict him, as well as the tantric manuscripts such as those that record his dialog with the yoginis. On a prosaic level in Bhaktapur, “impurity eating deities” are imagined as a form of Bhairava. Usually found at major crossroads in Newar cities, these deities are stones for the disposal of objects exerting a magical threat, such as clothes of the dead, umbilical cords, and the ashes of the torch used to exorcise evil spirits from a house. They are considered to “eat” ritual pollution as well as protect the area from thieves, illness, and misfortune caused by evil spirits. After every major feast or rite of passage, an offering must be made to these stone aniconic Bhairavas, lest they become neglected and troublesome. Similarly, Bhairava is also imagined to inhabit the wood block forming the base of the threshold of the main door of every house. Conversely, Bhairava is imagined as the god of locomotion. His image can be seen on the tongue of Matsyendranath’s chariot. Even the three eyes on each of Sky Bhairava’s chariot’s wheels are themselves considered forms of Bhairava who are concerned with locomotive force. His locomotive aspect explains his logo on the Royal Nepal Airlines jet plane. The god’s most significant aspect, however, is as a guardian of the directions. In his eightfold manifestation of Astabhairavas, Bhairava presides, either alone or paired as consort with the eight mother goddesses, over the spatio-ritual organization of sacred cities. Take, for example, the aforementioned mandalic depiction of Bhaktapur painted by Madhu Krishna Chitrakar (figure I.1). The eight Bhairavas are depicted in the second inward band. Each of the eight Bhairavas—Asitanga, Ruru, Canda,

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Krodha, Unmatta, Kapala, Bhinada, and Samhara—is chief of seven other Bhairavas, all together sixty-four of whom are the companions of the sixty-four yoginis. The Bhairavas and yoginis are associated with tantric religious practice. Their fullest account is given in the Srrmatottaratantra from 1609 C.E., which is a verbatim copy of a section of the Kulalikamnaya from the Kubjikamatantra (Blom 1989, 22). The eighteenth chapter, called “Circle of Yoginis,” gives a detailed description of each of the eight Bhairavas, starting with Asitanga. All the gods are either cruel, frightful, or vicious. All have ornaments, garlands, multicolored crowns, earrings, and bracelets. In the manuscript Ngngstotracitrasamgraha, each of the eight Bhairavas—such as Unmatta Bhairava on his deer vehicle with the boar-headed consort Varahi—is depicted in turn. Starting in the eighteenth century, there is evidence from temple struts and from model books in Bhaktapur that the Astabhairavas are of great importance (Blom 1989, 23; Macdonald and Stahl 1979). Outside of Nepal, in the rest of South Asia, Bhairava’s wrathful forms are an important point of conjuncture between “folk cults” and “high” Hindu gods (Visuvalingam 1989, 157). Although there are specific local features, Bhaktapur’s Bhairavas are not an isolated phenomenon. There is no doubt that there is a continuing conversation between Bhaktapur’s Bhairava and his larger constellation. For instance, in the Hindi film Bhairavi and the Underworld, which played all over India in 1985, a tantric adept seeks magical powers through human sacrifice. This depiction corresponds closely to one of the founding myths of the Navadurga cult in Bhaktapur (Visuvalingam 1989, 211; cf. Toffin 1984, 468–69).

Bhairava’s Effective Transgressive Fecundity The operating assumption of cadastral religion is that gods can be persuaded to offer aid and that if not placated they can cause harm. Bhairava’s powerful transgressive fecundity makes him an important deity for such prosaic purposes. For the most part, the god’s fecundity is expressed sexually. In a set of narratives that tell of his decapitation of the creator god Brahma, Bhairava wanders for twelve years, using Brahma’s decapitated head as an alms bowl and having intercourse with various sages’ wives (Visuvalingam 1989). Bhairava’s transgressive manner can be seen in his origin myth, which concentrates on his act of bhraminicide, that is, that he cut off the god Brahma’s fifth head. In Bhairava’s origin myth, recounted in both manuscript and oral forms, Brahma and Vishnu were arguing over who was the supreme god when a pillar of heaven-illuminating


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light appeared between them. Within the light was Shiva, to whom Brahma’s fifth head said, “I know who you are, you are Shiva (Rudra), whom I created from my forehead. Take refuge with me and I will protect you, my son.” Shiva, hearing this belittlement, was so angry that he created the wrathful flaming Bhairava. Bhairava, with the tip of his left thumbnail, cut off Brahma’s head (Doniger 1973; 1976; Sontheimer 1989; Visuvalingam 1989). This phallic generative nature is also apparent in tantric manuscripts, such as the Kubjikamatatantra, which proclaims Bhairava as the author of the Tantras and the generative god at the center of the mandala (Brooks 1990). In a similar vein, for Kashmir Shaiva theoreticians, Bhairava is the supreme expression of the divine, the generative point at the center of the mandala who is the ruler of creation and dissolution. This Bhairava consciousness is understood on the bodily level of the tantric adept (Flood 1993; Sanderson 1986, 1988). It is the trembling Bhairava who is the polar point at the center of the manifest cosmic body, embraced and garlanded with the goddesses comprising the universe. Bhairava is the hub of the mandala, effortlessly bringing about creation, maintenance, and destruction. He is the source of the essential cosmic body (Flood 1993). More to the point, in some versions—such as a collection of oral texts collected between 1967 and 1972 by Sontheimer—Brahma’s beheading is preceded by the emergence of Bhairava as a cosmic phallus (1989). In any case, as seen in the nineteenth-century Newar painting from Nepal’s National Art Museum located in Bhaktapur, which is entitled “Flaming Bhairava,” the combination of fierce and phallic-generative power is clear. This ithyphallic image depicts a terrifying god surrounded by a glowing orange flame. On the level of prosaic practice, throughout the Kathmandu Valley, Bhairava is worshipped as a “fecundinator.” The most important form is Unmatteswar Bhairava, located in Kathmandu near the Pashupatinath temple. This god-image is five feet tall and has a huge erect penis. Women suffering from sexual or menstrual irregularity go to worship this deity’s genital organ, the mere sight of which is thought to be enough to cause a woman to be seized with strong sexual desire (Nepali 1988; Toffin 1984). In Bhaktapur itself, a clear example of Bhairava’s sexual nature occurs during Sky Bhairava’s Biska festival. On the fifth day, the chariots of Bhairava and his consort Bhadrakali are arranged facing each other in Gahiti Square. They are placed near the stone-deity of Masan Bhairava, the spot where his consort (Shakti) became angry with Bhairava and cut off his head as he sank into the ground. The two chariots are slammed together three times in what is said to be both a quarrel and sexual intercourse (lewakaegu: “going at it”) (Levy 1990, 486).

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The Social Life of a God-Image As stated earlier, the function of prosaic religion is not to represent ontological reality, but to affect the world. To articulate how people use Bhairava’s transgressive fecundity, we need to understand how social practices transmute the stone into a stone-god. To do this let us return again to the opening scene of the study and ask, “What is a god?” As the high school student guide asked me “What is a god?” he simultaneously pointed to Bhairava’s god-image. The indexicality of the student’s “pointing” indicates the two aspects necessary to constitute a stone-god: a relational component and a material sign. These two components are summed up in a statement by Mangal Laxmi Sahi, a souvenir seller with whom I often sat and chatted. When I asked her what a god was she answered, “A god is that which all people respect. Normally we say a god is a stone-god” (personal interview, July 16, 1999). Let me reverse the order of Ms. Sahi’s sentences and take her second point first: “Normally we say a god is a stone-god.” Ms. Sahi’s words stress the importance of the material aspect of the god. If asked to differentiate between the concept of a god and its material depiction, people in Bhaktapur will call the depiction a “stone-god.” In the words of Durukaji Suwal, a farmer and laborer, “A god-image is a stone, which has been made into a god” (personal interview, July 16, 1999). As we saw earlier in the tale of two stones, however, all rocks are not god-images. As Mr. Chitrakar voiced, “There are rocks in the river, there are stones on the road, but they are not god-images until life is given to them” (personal interview, August 13, 1999). So while one needs material signs to signify god, not all material signs will do. Stones are constituted as stone-gods in two ways: descriptively and through ceremonies and continuing rituals, which give the stone life. Descriptively, god-images depict the deity. As Lilabhakta Munikarmi said, “If you believe in (the god) Vishnu then you need a god-image describing what he looks like. You know him the same way you would know by seeing your father’s photograph. That he has two arms, hair and also you can see the fashion of the time” (personal interview, June 10, 1999). In this sense, the carved image is seen as an aid to visualizing the god. Not only are there carved statues that are not god-images, there are many aniconic stones that are worshipped as gods. The symbolic signification is secondary to the stone-god’s power (shakti) that is created by its life force. God-images can be both symbolic and have “power,” but it is the life force that transforms the stone into a stone-god. As Krishna Pradhananga voiced, “A god-image is something that has been given tantric power. And


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that can give us power. But something else is just a symbol” (personal interview, June 6, 1999). Hence, while the descriptive quality and conceptual levels of a god-image are important, they are not the defining features, because, as Mr. Pradhananga went on to say, “a statue has not been given power, but a stone-god has” (personal interview, June 6, 1999). The material aspect is especially significant for Bhairavas, most of which are aniconic. What the materiality demonstrates is that instead of an iconic symbolic representation, a god-image’s signification comes from giving life to a stone. In fact, as the study examines in chapter 4, a god-image is “dead” until life is put into it through ceremonies. Thereafter the image is not merely a symbol of that deity, but it is that deity. For instance, when I asked Keshab Hada the difference between a statue and a god-image, he said, “A god-image is when you give life to a statue, it becomes a god. If you don’t it is just a statue” (personal interview, May 5, 1999). Similarly, as Ramesh Joshi voiced, “If we don’t give life to a god-image, it won’t be a god” (personal interview, June 6, 1999). There are two pieces of evidence that god-images are signified as “alive,” one embedded in linguistic practice and the other in visual practice. Linguistically, a stone-god (lohandyah chamha) is placed linguistically in the same category as living beings. That is, “loha[n]dya chamha” signifies a murti (literally—“stone-god one-animate marker”). Newar, the local language of Bhaktapur, has one of the world’s most complicated classifier systems. English, on the other hand, has one of the least complicated, and only a few items—such as a “glass” of water or a “book” of matches—require a classifier. Newar, however, requires a classifier morpheme in order to code the quantity of every noun (Shakya 1997). These classifiers both differentiate between categories of inanimate nouns and also between animate and inanimate nouns. Animate nouns—a woman (misa chamha), two dogs (khicha nimha), six bugs (krkhumha)—require “mha.” Or more to the point, a “khwg: chapg:” is just a flat mask, while a “khwg: chamha” is a god (Daya Shakya, personal communication, February 20, 2005). Inanimate nouns receive a classifier depending on the shape of the objects and usage in the sentence; the general classifier is “gu.” Plants get their own classifier, “ma”—cho chama is a wheat plant. For native speakers of Newar these categories are intuitive and obvious. Besides the linguistic level is the visual signification level. One of the ways that people in Bhaktapur indicate that they are going to worship a god is through the notion of darshan (dar∂an), which literally means to see and to be seen by a god-image.” People go for darshan for a number of reasons. Durukaji Suwal said, “Darshan is for the heart’s contentedness” (personal interview, July 16, 1999). And Bashula Dyola voiced, “It gives you religion (dharma)” (personal interview, July 20, 1999). Krishna Pradhana(n)ga said,

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“Darshan is done for the benefit of the universe” (personal interview, June 6, 1999). And as Ramesh Joshi said, “for bliss” (personal interview, June 6, 1999). But while people go for different reasons, they practice darshan in a similar fashion. As Damodar Gautam said, “To go to the temple and have a face-to-face with the god’s image—that is darshan” (personal interview, June 21, 1999). Yet when one goes and has a “face-to-face” with the god, it is not just that the worshiper is seeing the god, but that the god looks back at the worshipers (Eck 1996). In fact, one of the most prevalent features of the Newar landscape are the eyes that are painted on everything from the largest temples, such as Swayambunath stupa, which gazes down on the entire Kathmandu Valley, to door frames that overlook courtyards, down to small dristi eyes that one can buy at a local painter’s house for plastering on household utensils. The seeing and being seen between worshiper and god, the investing a god-image with the ability to look at us in return, is a tactic for bringing it into social relations, thus animating it. At the center of cadastral worship are stone-gods, which are not “seats” of the deity but the god itself. Yet, what social labor do stone-gods do? As we shall see in the following three chapters, once we clear away the specter of scripturalism and the two mediating strategies that it breeds, we find that Bhairava’s material image is a humanly constituted god that is brought to “life” in a web of social practices. And in a dialectical fashion, it is this stone-god which makes these ceremonies, performances, and festivals effective (have shakti). Yet this effectiveness is dependent on the god’s material element. Like a bank note pulled from circulation or a linguistic sign isolated from lived concrete language, if the god is plucked from his in situ social logics, he loses his pragmatic world-constructing value. The following three chapters—4, 5, and 6—give ethnographic descriptions of how such world-constructing is generated by describing a puja ceremony, a tantric dance performance, and a processional festival. To understand Hinduism, however, we need more than just ethnographic evidence. On one hand there never is simply evidence. No matter how detailed an ethnographic account, local knowledge is always mediated. On the other hand, even if scholarship could draw a perfect one-to-one map of a social context, there is not one autochthonous authentic essence that can be pinned down as “Hinduism.” Instead, Retheorizing Religion in Nepal analyzes how the religious practices operate as cadastral generative matrixes. To turn to the analogy of culture as gastronomy, what is described is not the flavor and experience of eating, but rather the prosaic recipes by which people cook food. That is, what is described and analyzed is not the experience of a reality, but how to construct a particular way of being in the world.

Chapter 4 Illustrating Samsara: Religious “Recipes” for Making a Prosaic Lived World

When you think about how to do worship (pjja) the question is raised what religious formulas (mantras) are needed. We need flowers, purified uncooked husked rice grains (kiga:), vermilion powder, some snacks and sweets. But most of all we need a method. We need rules. —Lilabhakta Munikarmi (personal communication, June 10, 1999) Society is a dialectal phenomenon in that it is a human product, and nothing but a human product, that yet continuously acts back upon its producer. —Berger, The sacred canopy

On October 29, 1999, I returned to my mandala (ma“πala) and started to paint the upper Ganesh and some frame designs, but, because of a slight fever, I spent most of the day just talking and drinking tea. As Mr. Chitrakar painted on the colors to a wheel of life image of samsara (sa®sara), I asked him what made for a good painting. I couched my question in terms of creativity and taste. Yet instead of responding directly, he gave a long list of materials and a set of rules for making an effective (∂akti) object. Among the materials he mentioned, “powdered pigments, glue, canvas, the frame, and the inner tightening sticks.” A sample of the rules is as follows: 1. “Start at top, work to bottom. This way you will not smear the paint.” 2. “Start in the distance, at the Himalayas, then you see a house or two, a tree, soon you’re at your own stuff [waves arm around room], and then it

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Retheorizing Religion in Nepal is into your own heart/physical body (mhg) [points to the middle of his chest].” 3. “In the making of a design, make a curved line in the form of a [Devanagari] 7. Then along the inside edge of this figure make what is like a backwards [Devanagari] 3 . . . but with an extra curve . . . make sure that the last loop is curved inward. Then where the last loop curves, draw a curved line over the back of the design.” 4. “When drawing a god and his consort, always draw the male god f irst.”

Madhu divided these rules into two basic types: practical (paint down so your hand will not smear the image) and religiously effective (paint Shiva first then his consort; that way they will merge together to create shakti). Madhu tended to call the practical rules yama, which he defined as small regulations or restraints, which, as he said, are really for kids; and the religious observances, niyama.1 Madhu said, “If you follow the smaller rules you will become a man, if you follow the bigger rules you will become a yogi.” As Madhu’s words indicate, the unfolding of Bhaktapur’s lived worlds (samsara) are constructed in a dialectical relationship between peoples’ skillful activity and material reality as channeled through a matrix of methods. While such worlds are a human product, they nevertheless affect their producers (Berger 1967). In a similar dialectical fashion, the preceding chapter argued that god-images gain “power” (shakti) because they are brought to “life” (jivan) by being situated in the generative matrix of a cadastral lived world, while this chapter maintains that it is worship (puja) of such material deities by which people make cadastral lived worlds (Davis 1991; Fuller 1992; Humphrey 1994). To articulate this dialectical relationship, this chapter (1) theorizes worship in Bhaktapur as a generative matrix that can be understood as “recipes” that bring together materials and methods and (2) theorizes samsara as the cadastral background practices on which such world generating takes place (figure 4.1) (table I.1, row F). To illustrate how samsara is created by “recipes,” and how in turn these recipes are constituted by samsara, I concentrate on a Mha Puja ceremony I participated in on November 19, 1999. Mha Puja falls on the lunar new year, and its focus is the worship of one’s self/body (mha). The ceremony is part of Swanti—a five-day set of intertwined ceremonies that reinforce the significance of household relations and is associated with the pan-Indic festival of Divali. What Mha Puja indicates is that prosaic religion’s practices are concerned less with ideas and beliefs and more with material and methods. They are a thing done, rather than a thing believed (Babb 1975, 31). Yet how is it that such material practice is effective at generating a lived world? As described in chapter 2 the cadastral cosmological generation

Illustrating SAMSARA

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Figure 4.1 Samsara’s four aspects as depicted in a “Wheel of Life” image—a widespread motif in Himalayan art. Painting produced at the Lama Thangka Painting Center, Bhaktapur, Nepal 1997 (from author’s collection).

contains three interrelated positions: the divine, the sacred, and the human. In a cadastral cosmological structure there is a radical disjunction between the ineffable plane of the divine and the concrete world of humans. People bridge this gap through ceremonial actions such as puja, festivals, and sacrifices,

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which produce the sacred. It is the sacred in the form of lived performance and material god-images which, for the duration of the ritual, concretizes the divine by furnishing it with “eyes and ears” and thus makes it accessible to human beings (Mus 1975, 14; 1998, 106). As discussed in the preceding chapter with relation to the god Bhairava’s social net, it is through worship that the divine is made concrete. This occurs because religious practices treat material stone-gods (loha[n]dya:) as if they were extraordinary persons. Such practices are pragmatic and thisworldly. “It has,” as Peter Berger writes, “no other being except that which is bestowed upon it by human activity and consciousness” (1967, 3). However, to illustrate how people give the divine “eyes and ears” and to understand how this concretized divine gives life to a samsaric lived world, one needs to “provincialize” two of the prevailing “Western folk” assumptions that underlie social constructivist positions such as Berger’s—namely, “creation” and “person.” While worship plays a part in making worlds, one cannot tie it down to an orthodox social constructivist position, because there is never simply “doing,” but always different kinds of doing; and there are never simply people, but different kinds of persons.

Mha Puja: The Ceremony of Self-Worship In November 1999, my wife, Sarah Anne Krive, and I arrived at 2:00 p.m. at Sarbagya Raj’s home for Mha Puja. We had come a little early and sat downstairs watching the video of the classic Newar folk tale Rajamati, talking with Sarbagya and his brother Yogendra and helping to shell peas. During that time we had samae baji—a ritual dish that consists of a mixture of beaten rice, dried fish, roasted water buffalo meat, eggs, soybeans, and ginger pieces—and a few glasses of tea. Around 6:00 p.m., Sarbagya’s mother came down and asked us if we wanted to make mandalas. We went upstairs to the chota room where sitting pillows were arranged for the ceremony along the two far walls. Along one wall were a fish tank and a metal cabinet; against the other wall were piles of fruit and other ceremonial materials. Before we arrived, the floor of the room had been scrubbed and washed. Sarbagya’s father was sitting against the far wall making a mandala out of ritualized polished rice kigah (kiga:), wheat, and popped corn kernels. There was a small pile of rice flour in front of each pillow, six in all, with one for my wife, Sarbagya, Yogendra, his mother and father, and myself. Besides the mandala for the human beings, there was also one made for the god Ganesh and two smaller ones for the god Yamaraj and his consort.


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With a little direction, my wife and I made the mandalas. The kigah went in the center ring, then a ring of wheat, and finally a smaller ring of corn. The senior Mr. Raj said, “As long as you follow these simple rules you can make the mandala however you like.” Sarbagya Raj came back and made his mandala, and my wife and I finished the other ones. Sarbagya’s mother then came in and put red vermilion powder in the mandala, filling in the designs. Yogendra Raj then added yellow chrysanthemum petals. Oil wicks were then placed on all the mandalas to form a cross. Yogendra Raj then arranged fruit baskets, using Newar dumpling cookers. In the baskets were bananas, apples, tangerines, persimmons, and, most importantly, the pummelo (bhogate or citrus maxima). In the basket was also a thread garland made of multicolored material and flowers, and I had brought Mha Puja flags for celebrating the New Year, which we stuck in each mandala along with small candles. During the preparation, people were negotiating over just how things should be done: Should we use a plate or a dumpling cooker level? How should we arrange the fruit? What is the next step? Who should light the wicks? Sarbagya’s mother then lit the oil lamps in front of the Ganesh and the other gods’ mandala and then smeared a little vermilion on each. She then lit incense and waved it around the room. Sarbagya and his mother then stood in front of his father, who chanted a mantra and touched a bowl of yogurt and the puja plate to his forehead. Both the mantra and mandala were made for the heart, the place where the mha (heart/ mind/emotions/self ) is seen to rest. The puja plate had kigah, yellow vermilion powder (mhasusinhan), and flowers on it. Sarbagya’s father took some kigah, tossed a little toward the Ganesh, a pinch at the god Yamaraj, and then some at his own mandala. He then mixed a handful of kigah, vermilion powder, a little curd, and flowers and tossed a little at the god Ganesh and a little at the other gods and then took the rest and threw it as hard as he could so that it would stick on the ceiling. As our eyes followed the mixture toward the ceiling, the senior Mr. Raj broke into a smile because remnants from prior years’ celebrations were still evident. Sarbagya’s mother then made a mixture of husked ritual rice and red vermilion powder and made a mark on her husband’s forehead. She then took a bit of yogurt and smeared it on his forehead. This was repeated by each person in the following order: Sarbagya, Yogendra, his mother, me, and my wife, Sarah. People traded off, so that when it was his mother’s turn, Yogendra and Sarbagya were doing the offering, while his mother offered it to me and I offered it to my wife. Finally, completing the circle, my wife then offered it to Sarbagya’s father. We then started the cycle again, but this time we offered the baskets of fruit. A towel was put down first so as not to get people dirty. Then the

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fruit, which had been sitting in front of each mandala, were first touched to the person’s head and then put in his or her hand. Then flower petals were sprinkled on each person’s head, and the men placed one big flower behind their ears and the women stuck one in their hair. Then a string garland of multicolored cloth and a garland of flowers were put on each person. This occurred in the same order as before. Finally, all the wicks in the mandala were lit—the window had to be closed because the wind was fanning the fires and they threatened to set the pillows on f ire. After the wicks burnt themselves out, Mr. Raj and his mother offered metal trays with beaten rice, some buffalo meat, chickpeas, greens, and pickled radish. They offered samae baji again, but this time each of us took a sip of alcohol and a bite of each food (this was repeated three times). I was reprimanded because the first time I took a bite, my fish from the samae baji was upside down. This was repeated again for each person. We then had a feast. The fruit was packed up to go as material offerings (prasgda). We watched a little television, and at around 9:00 p.m. my wife and I went home.

The Material Self as Extraordinary Person Made up of materials and methods for their use, worship (puja) constitutes lived worlds by utilizing cadastral generative matrixes to structure social relations. Mha Puja offers a unique instance for understanding worship in Bhaktapur because the “self ” (mha) occupies both the role of devotee and that of the god (these correspond to the position of the human and the sacred in the cadastral scheme). Yet what is the notion of the self, of the person that makes Mha Puja effective? The western category of “person” is not natural, but has been produced by a particular culture and history (Mauss 1985, 1–25; 1973). Because the self is produced and not given, one must attend to the role of ideology in constituting concrete individual subjects (Althusser, 1971, 116). So pervasive is ideology in its constitution of subjects that it forms our very frame and thus appears as not only undeniably “true,” but overwhelmingly “obvious” (Althusser 1971, 118). “Person” came into English in the thirteenth century from the French persone, which stemmed from the Latin persona. Persona originally meant a mask used by a player and from this came to mean a character in a play and the part played by such an actor. It was only in the sixteenth century that the term came to signify a human being and to be used in the sense we now recognize as an individual. In Bhaktapur, persons are signified through a mutually dependent samsaric semiotic. That is, people are not closed, abstract


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completed entities epitomized by Descartes’ cogito ergo sum “I think therefore I am.” Rather, in Bhaktapur, they are fluid—ready and open to be constituted by and to constitute other selves and other signs (Daniel 1987). This fluid samsaric self is in accordance with personhood in general in South Asia (Marriot 1976). Similarly, Newar society (Bhaktapur’s samsara) is tied together through a complex web of giving and receiving both goods and favors. As analyzed in the preceding chapter, Newars in Bhaktapur speak of this web as a net (janjal ) (Parish 1994, 130). For Newars, self is not bounded, but is created by a net of social relations. As I was told many times, “Life is not just for ourselves, but for relatives and family. You can’t live only by yourself.” In Newar society the self is generated by material transactions and social relations. As the Bhaktapur resident Tejeswar Babu Gongah said, “I am a different person to different people. To my father I am a son, to my son and daughters I am a father, to my teacher I was a student, to you I am a teacher” (personal interview, August 10, 1995). In a samsaric fashion, through these relations, people make themselves and are made, in turn, by others. Personhood is constituted by embedded relationships, a matrix of social relations (Parish 1994, 130, 186–87). One social habit, which I witnessed numerous times, was that when going to someone’s house for the first time, one was shown the family photo album. Each person in the photograph would be named and his or her social relation depicted. Having to classify someone within the larger family structure seemed crucial. It was as if everyone had to stop acting until all the roles (personae) were assigned and clarified. Similar to the incident described in the study’s introduction where Madhu painted me into the mandala painting, numerous times I watched as my kinship ties and social status, however fictional, were negotiated. For example, on February 12, 1999, a friend of the family with whom I was staying came over with her nine-month-old baby son. The mother made sure that the baby knew that I was its matrilineal uncle (mgmg), but then, after a period of renegotiation, it was decided that since I had attended at the wedding as part of the bride’s kin I counted as an older brother (jicg dgju). Besides the social net, persons are created through rites of passage (sa®skgras) (Allen 1975; 1976; 1982). First, for Newars, creating a person is not a natural process, but a ritual process (Parish 1994, 237). The chief set of rituals are the rites of passage, a developmental sequence of life starting with Jihvashodhana (writing on the infant’s tongue), going through puberty rites and marriage, and ending with funeral ceremonies (Levy 1990, 658–86; Parish 1994, 233–75). In Newar culture, the innate, unrefined person is not viewed as sufficient for social life. As Tejeswar Babu Gongah once told me, “Just as a rough rock is polished

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smooth, a child must be rubbed into a person by culture [sa®skriti], which means ‘#to be perfected# (original in English)’ ” (personal interview, June 15, 1997). In Bhaktapur stone-gods are treated as if they were extraordinary persons. There is no absolute distinction between gods and people. Because they are persons, stone-gods need to be created and in the samsaric fashion as human beings. When I asked Ram Lochan Jha how a statue differed from a god-image murti (m˚rti) he replied If you are asking if a statue and murti are made out of the same material, it is the same. Even a murti of [the god] Narayan is also carved as others. But if you are asking about god’s murtis, in a special rite we recite a special mantra with Yajya (Vedic ritual), we give vitality, it becomes a murti. As we do hairshaving ceremony [busgkhg—a form of adolescent boy rite of passage] or Upanayanan [a busgkhg for Brahmins] for young men, and the young man is able to be religious (dharmic) after the ceremony. One cannot just be born a Brahmin. Brahmins should be between seven and eight, when he is given a sacred thread and some mantras. Then he becomes a real Brahmin. The something is done to the murti, which is called given vitality. We don’t do this to statues. (Personal interview, May 9, 1999)

The Bhairava mask described in the preceding chapter goes through a similar process each year that changes it from just a flat mask (khwg: chapg:) to a god (khwg: chamha). This samskara cycle begins with the Dasha Karma, which is considered the god’s rebirth, and then proceeds through the other rites of passage until it reaches its mature form. Moreover, as we have illustrated, when a statue is given life, it is said that its eyes have been opened, and once its eyes are opened, it gazes back at the worshipers. The seeing and being seen between worshiper and god, investing a murti with the ability to look at us in return, is a tactic for bringing it into social relations and thus constituting its personhood. As a “person,” Bhairava both dialectically creates others and is in turn created by his social relations to others. Bhairava the stone-god is “alive” (jivan) because he is set in a social net (janjal) of samsaric mutual dependency in which he is treated as if he were a person. The stone-image loses value if not set in a circulation of social transactions. Yet in this net Bhairava is not just any person, he is extraordinary. As indicated in the last chapter, in Mangal Laxsmi Sahi’s first sentence—“a god is that which all people respect”—the murti’s social signification is also relational. Accordingly, as Lilabhakta Munikarmi, a local historian and folklorist, argued, “God is that thing we have to respect. Compared with ourselves, it is huge. Our forefathers are also god. Those who give benefit are also god” (personal interview, June 10, 1999). Suspended in a social net, by respecting the god, one also


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expects to receive benefit from it. By giving something to Bhairava, one would expect to receive something back from such a venerated personality. It is a relationship full of benefits and duties. Like social relations in Newar society as a whole, a stone-god gains power from being entered into a net of social situations as if it were a person; as a giver and a receiver, it is created and also creates. This happens not just between the god and worshiper, where the worshiper offers the god puja and expects, at the very least, prasada in exchange. It also happens between gods. During his festival of Biskah Jatra, Bhairava is seen to fight with his consort Bhadrikali and then to make up with her by sending clothes and ornaments. Bhairava’s godimage is treated as “paradigmatic sovereign” demanding and receiving respect from his devotees and, in turn, redistributing resources to temple, servants, donors, and worshipers (Breckenridge 1979).

Puja Yayegu: Recipes for Giving the Divine “Eyes and Ears” How does worship (puja) furnish a stone-god with “eyes and ears?” As detailed in the introduction, “generative matrixes” are those fields of discourses, practices, institutions, and technologies for making lived worlds. In Bhaktapur, worship operates as a generative matrix by treating stone-gods as if they were extraordinary persons. Pujas can be done for one’s own desires or for the maintenance of the family and protecting the neighborhood. They can be daily pujas, occasional pujas, or optional pujas. Pujas can take place at temples or shrines dedicated to pan-Hindic gods such as Shiva, Vishnu, and the Devi, or local village deities, such as aniconic forms of Bhairava. Pujas can consist of simply bowing one’s head and folding one’s hands, or they can be elaborate affairs, which take many days. Pujas can be addressed to an aniconic stone, to a murti, or to many other puja objects (p˚jgpada). The Pujaprakasha, one of the most exhaustive treatises on puja, written between 1610 and 1640 C.E., suggests as appropriate objects of worship [W]ater, fire, sun, earth, sky, food, brahmins, cows, a vessel, a lotus, teacher, parents, Vishnu, wind, the heart, all beings, unexpected guests, shaligramas, linga, books, weapons, tridents and swords, yantras, mandalas, winnowing fans, walls, sheets of cloth, and one’s head or heart. (Cited in Bühnemann 1988)

In Bhaktapur, pujas can consist of many offerings (Rajopadhyaya Brahmans list more than two hundred), but the offering of broken husked rice (kigah)

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is the elementary gift (Levy 1990, 639). People, knowing that they may pass some favorite temple, will often take along some kigah, and in more elaborate pujas, there is a climactic moment of offering kigah, which is known as “doing the puja” (p˚jg ygyegu). What is “done” in puja? In all these instances (from the simple sprinkling of rice to the most elaborate ceremonies), pujas are socially acquired “recipes” that enable Bhaktapurians to know, for example, how to improvise a mother’s day celebration, stage an elaborate wedding, or rush through a minimally adequate funeral. In South Asia, there are many manuals describing how to do puja, as well as contemporary bazaar manuals and cassette tapes available in the markets. Typically, these have the worshiper prepare a sacred arena, provide a material form, and establish the deity by invoking its life force. The devotee then treats the god as an honored guest, bathing, feeding, clothing, and giving him or her gifts. In the more complicated pujas, the manuals list up to sixteen steps that form the core of puja. Yet, while manuals are important, people also have a general sense of how to do pujas. In other words, if pujas are seen as a recipe, then ritual manuals can be understood as “cookbooks,” and just as most cooking is done without a cookbook but from memory, almost all pujas are done from experience. Dhrubeswori Gongah gave me the following instructions on how to do a puja to the god Bhisin Dyah (Bhimsin): (1) you give the god a bath; (2) you place a bindu mark on his forehead; (3) you give him some kigah; (4) you give him some flowers; (5) you give him some samae baji; (6) you give him a shikri (a small garland made of white cotton cord that is seen to be just like gold); (7) you give him a small lamp wick. She added with a smile that this will make Bhisin Dyah so happy that he will do a little dance (personal communication, June 14, 1999). When I asked the Brahmin Ram Lochan Jha how to do a puja, he replied, “There are many types of pujas. If you just talk about the essential quality, we just throw kigah and flowers in our society. Besides that, in our Hindu culture, there are lots of pujas—five-step puja, sixteen-step puja, special puja, and simple puja” (personal communication, May 9, 1999). According to Mr. Jha, for the five-step puja, first you wash the god and clean the puja area. Then you dry it off and smear sandalwood paste on the god’s forehead. Then you put on vermilion powder and flowers. You give the god some sweets and some fruit, which you then take back as prasad. As Mr. Jha said about the sixteen-step puja You put water in a conch shell and wash the feet of the god. This symbolizes the guest entering your home and washing his hands and feet and face so as to wash away his fatigue. Later, you again put some water on the conch shell and wash the god’s throne. You offer the “five ambrosias.” The five ambrosias


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are cow’s milk, sugar, yogurt, honey, and ghee. You offer one of these at a time. Immediately after offering one thing you wash and dry the god. The washing is called “Suddodak Snan,” or purifying wash. Then we offer #complete medicine#, which is made of various good smelling herbs. Again we clean the god. Then you sprinkle #meditation flowers# on the god. We also offer a sacred thread, but it goes by a different name between Brahmins and (non-Brahmin) Newars. We Brahmins offer a sacred thread that we make ourselves, and the sacrificers (yajamgn [ie. the non-Brahmins high caste for whom the sacrifice is being done]) call it “jajanka.” And we put different sandalwood and other good smelling paste, and vermilion powder . . . then flowers . . . and a garland. (Personal communication, May 9, 1999)

Working Through Samsara: The Wheel of Life While puja supplies the materials and methods, these divine recipes operate within a matrix of samsaric background practices that are compiled from cadastral social logics. Samsara plays a part in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. In contemporary Newar, Samsara (sansar) connotes the world of birth, death, and transmigration (Manandhar 1986). In classical Newar, the term simply denotes empirical-phenomenological existence: the conditioned and ever-changing phenomenological world, as opposed to the unconditioned, eternal, and transcendent state of nirvana (Jørgensen 1989). Samsara—as the phenomenological world and as “rebirth” and “redeath”— is generated through karmic acts. (Mus 1998, 319). Yet one cannot reduce puja down to social construction, because there is never simply “doing,” but always different kinds of doing. In Bhaktapur, action is usually understood in relation to the concept of karma, a pan-Indic term that glosses “action,” “performance,” or “deed.” It stems from the verbal root kœ)- “do,” “make,” “perform,” “accomplish.” In grammatical usage, karman refers to the direct object in a sentence, the recipient of the action indicated by the verb. Hence, strictly speaking, karma is no more than action itself. Yet all South Asian philosophic schools, except for the purely materialist Carvaka, accept a more significant meaning of karma, that is, that an action will have a future reaction (Chattopadhyaya 1968). However, karmic acts are not the conceptual occurrences that the English “action” implies (Reichenbach 1990, 24–43). To treat action in Bhaktapur as a mere abstraction is to miss the crucial ethnosociological point of karma’s radical materialism, the procreative practices by which people construct the world (Doniger 1973, 271–73; Marriot 1976).

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To illustrate how karma’s radical materialism is understood to create a lived world, I turn to a “Wheel of Life” paubha (paubhg) painting, a widespread motif in Himalayan art (figure 4.1). Performative signs do not merely express an exterior reality, but rather constitute and transform the world (Austin 1962). Like a mantra—one of the most pervasive forms of language act in South Asian religions—such performative statements are a way to construct meaning (Apler 1989). Samsaric signification can be understood as a chain of signifiers that are (1) beginningless and fluid, as well as (2) mutually dependent. In addition, samsaric signification is (3) pushed from behind by past traces of action, while it is (4) pulled forward by an imperative call for action from the soteriological. In figure 4.1, the first aspect, the fluid beginninglessness of samsaric signification, is symbolized in the inner rim just outside the central hub. Here, a circle, divided in two, points to the ceaseless cycles of samsara. On the left white side, the figures are ascending toward a higher state; on the right black side, the figures are falling to a lower existence. The ascending and descending motion corresponds to the larger wheel also. The spokes of the wheel separate into six samsaric realms. At the top are the gods, in their heavenly luxury. To the right of this are the Titans, the enemies of the gods who are in a constant battle. Continuing down the wheel to the right are the realms of the hungry ghosts. The realm at the bottom is the hell state, where tormented beings are filled with pain and fear as they freeze, burn, and undergo horrific deaths. Moving up the wheel to the left is the realm of animals, whose activity is the search for food. The remaining realm is that of humans, who live their lives eating, drinking, fornicating, giving birth, being born, and becoming old and dying. Because of karma, people travel in ceaseless cycles. The six realms represent the inevitability of past and future rebirths in different states. No being ever dwells in any realm for long. Even the gods eventually are reborn in lower realms because of their pride. The Titans by jealously trying to reach the top realm are unable to remain static. The hungry ghosts’ intense insatiable hunger continually drives them through samsara. The hungry ghosts’ enormous, swollen bellies can never be satisfied because they cannot get enough nourishment through their thin necks. Fear and pain drive the hell beings. The animals, whose consciousness is duller, are driven by pure instinct to incur karma. The beginningless creativity of fluid semiosis stems from samsaric signification’s second aspect, mutually dependent origination. Mutually dependent origination—literally “this being given, that follows”—has been called the central doctrine of Buddhism and Hinduism (Larson 1980). It has also been called the key to the teaching of the Buddha, and, while not explicit in Hindu doctrine, it is implicit especially in the Samkhya school


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(Larson 2001). Mutually dependent origination is depicted in the “Wheel of Life” paubha painting by the outer rim of the circle. The rim is divided into twelve segments or links, which perpetuate the wheel of causation. Those links that are due to one’s past life are as follows: (1) ignorance, which is depicted in the painting on the upper right as a blind man with a stick; (2) ignorance being given, predispositions follow—these are depicted by the potter’s wheel. The links that are due to one’s present life are as follows: (3) consciousness, which is depicted by a monkey; (4) from consciousness arises name and form as depicted by the boat with passengers; (5) name and form being given, the field of the five sense organs and the mind as depicted by the empty house follows; (6) from the senses, contact arises as depicted by a man and woman embracing; (7) from contact, feeling arises as depicted by a man with an arrow in his eye; (8) from feeling, craving arises as depicted by a woman offering a drink; and (9) given craving, attachment follows, depicted by a person gathering fruit. Those links that are due to one’s future life are as follows: (10) becoming, as depicted by a woman bearing a child; (11) from becoming comes rebirth, as depicted by the woman giving birth; and finally, (12) having been born, the cycle of samsara begins again. On the level of narrative, mutual dependence arises when each story bites another’s “tale,” creating a set of bracketed signification, which goes beyond the metaphor of a set of Russian nesting dolls (each doll set within the other) because each of the narratives tells the other in a four-dimensional Möbius strip (Doniger 1984, 241). In a categorical impossibility, like the virtual reality of a video game, it is as if the innermost smallest Russian doll could somehow jump the frame and engulf the outermost figures. There is no original level, no stable position to which to pull back. There is no logocentric transcendental signified, only a chain of domino-like supplements. To give an example, take the pedagogical text Hitopadesha. This is a set of animal fables, like the Panchatantra, which create morality tales. The text is a nestled set of tales, a “Chicken-Lickin’ ” narrative in which characters in the story tell other stories in which yet other characters tell other stories (Doniger 1984, 209). Moreover, there is no original, no transcendental Urtext, only redactions, which are, in a sense, telling each other. The redactions I have worked with are from Nepal’s National Archives and are written in Sanskrit, Newar, and Nepali, but the Hitopadesha has also been translated into Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Greek, German, French, and English. I have even located an Amar Chitra Katha comic-book version in the Glorious Heritage of India series (Pai 1997). Beyond illustrating how samsara is produced, the “Wheel of Life” depicts a cadastral generative matrix—the social logics behind the fields of discourses, practices, institutions, and technologies for making a cadastral

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lived world. This depiction is possible because these texts are not just representational but performative. There is still another final twist to the telling. The Hitopadesha tells the reader how to read and thereby how to act. In the Kathmandu Valley, the Hitopadesha primarily served an educational purpose, to teach young aristocratic Newars. So the Hitopadesha’s narrative frame, which tells of the Guru Vishnusharma teaching a group of princes, is not representing the event but becomes a mutually dependent narrative pedagogical tool for reading the children into the story and for reading the story into the children. The Hitopadesha was not just telling, but by constructing a conceptual and bodily comportment, it produced a particular samsara and thereby a particular type of person. The “jumping of the frame” that occurs during such metamutually dependent signification occurs also in the “Wheel of Life” painting. The wrathful god who holds the wheel is Yamaraj, the lord of death. He has control over the fate of all those who live in samsara. The jumping of the frame occurs because the wheel is understood to be a mirror, which depicts the samsaric existence of the viewer— that is, the “Wheel of Life” not only depicts cosmic lived reality, but one’s personal place within it.

Conclusion: The Necessary Elements of Puja Like Madhu’s description of a good painting, and as seen in Mha Puja, worship in Bhaktapur consists of “recipes” that bring together materials and methods for honoring different socially significant objects and people. The shopkeeper Keshab Hada said, “Puja is done in a systematic way. Which has to be prepared with kigah, vermilion powder, incense, and flowers. With all that we do puja” (personal communication, May 5, 1999). And Mangal Laxsmi said, “I do [puja] with kigah, vermilion powder, and flowers” (personal communication, June 10, 1999). While the circumstances, people, gods, and ingredients may vary, what Mha Puja shows is that all pujas must have three main components—a giver, a gift, and a recipient.2 These elements must be arranged by a method in which the worshiper acts as if the god is an honored guest. The worshiper adopts the postures of host, servant, and devotee in turn. Both deity and devotee become dependent upon one another and receive benefits from their mutual interaction. The elementary “social equation” in which they act is that the worshiper gives out of respect, subordination, and hospitality, implicitly giving the addressee responsibilities toward the worshiper. The central action making this relation is the


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material transaction of prasàda, a portion of food or other material that is offered to a god and then taken back by the devotee. Mha Puja offers a unique chance for tracing puja’s samsaric social relations because it operates with a concentrated logic in which the “self ” is situated simultaneously as the sacred and the human pattern. This “self,” however, calls into question the assumption that the “person” is a bounded human separate ideal subject. What Mha Puja indicates is that in Bhaktapur persons (both material gods and people) are not so much a matter of belief, but of material practices framed within the cadastral logics of samsaric background practices. That is, what is celebrated during Mha Puja is not a conceptualized confederation of individual egos. Instead, Mha Puja celebrates the social and material transactions that hold a house, and ultimately one’s lived world, together. As the discussion on karma indicates, however, people are never just socially constructed—people are made different on the basis of culture and history. The “social equation” by persons—be they human beings or gods— that is made in Bhaktapur is effective as a generative matrix only when set within the material background practices of cadastral religion’s samsaric axis. Cadastral generative matrixes have two significant axes: a divine, connoted “vertical” nirvanic (↑) and a sacred denoted “horizontal” samsaric aspect (← →). In his own work, Paul Mus concentrates on the “vertical” nirvanic axis of cadastral logic, what he calls the “logic of projection.” Yet, cadastral logic’s samsaric aspect can be used to understand how cultic operations generate lived territory (Strong 1989, 104). In Bhaktapur, samsaric lived worlds depend on stone-gods whose material element is situated in a web of social relations that treats them as if they have “ears and eyes.” The following chapter argues that material images are treated as if they were persons because they are experienced as having shakti, which operates in a similar structural fashion to Paul Mus’s conception of nirvana.


Chapter 5 Performing Prosaic Tantra: Jhinjan Minjan Danigu’s Animating Affect and Social Critique of Religious Experience

The small boy hid the piglet in his jacket, taking it out only briefly to tease the masked god. —Field notes, February 19, 1997

As discussed in the preceding chapter, cadastral generative matrixes have two significant axes: a divine, connoted “vertical” nirvanic axis (↑) and a sacred, denoted “horizontal” samsaric axis (←→). While unrepresentable, the telos of the vertical axis is not insignificant because it acts as a zenith on which the cosmos is tethered. Like a lotus that projects itself upward out of the world’s muck, the projected divine point becomes a sacred resting place for a local ruling deity. As Paul Mus writes: “The lotus by its petals, being equivalent to an explicit schema of the directions of space commands the cardinal direction, as does the cosmic peak, which its central plateau dominates, and up to which the Master ascends” (1998, 270). This connoted vertical sky point is the overlap between the divine and human worlds’ aspects onto which a polar deity is “piggy-backed” (Mus 1998, 274–76). Chapters 3 and 4 argued that Bhaktapur’s prosaic religious practice plays a part in constructing the samsaric aspect by treating stone-gods as if they were extraordinary people (←→). Worship (p˚jg) furnishes the divine with “ears and eyes.” This chapter maintains that, in Bhaktapur’s prosaic

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religious practices, it is the experience of jhinjan minjan (jhi[n]ja[n] mi[n)ja[n]), a terrifying tantric type of shakti (∂akti), which constitutes the vertical axis (↑).1 The chapter argues that shakti is an aesthetic discourse that draws people into relationships with inanimate objects. It is not only what places stone-gods in a discourse of gazes (dar∂an), it is what opens the stonegod’s eyes, and thus changes a flat mask (khwg: chapg) into a god (khwg: chamha). The chapter concludes by arguing that Bhaktapur’s horrifying type of shakti offers a social critique of the concept of religious experience. Jhinjan minjan illustrates that “[r]eligious sentiment is itself a social product” (Marx 1978, 109). Such a critique has political ramifications because “the abstract individual who [is implied] belongs in reality to a particular form of society” (Marx 1978, 109). On Thursday, November 11, 1999, I asked Mr. Chitrakar why people in Bhaktapur sacrificed animals to the gods. He paused and then answered with a question, “Where were you one year before you were born?” Thinking for a moment, I replied, “Up in heaven with [the god] Vishnu, maybe?” He laughed and said, “That is a big man’s answer. You are correct, but what I was thinking was, that you were the flesh, bones, and blood of your mother.” I continued to paint. A few minutes later he asked, “Where were you before that?” Unsure, I answered, “Still up with Vishnu, maybe?” He said, “You were the rice, meat, and fruit which were growing before your mother ate them. And before that, you were the seeds from which these grew.” I asked, “Are you talking about life breath (prg“a)?” “Yes!” he said, “that and life. Animals have life, and with a little more consciousness this becomes life breath.” Thinking about studies on South Asian aesthetics that I read before I arrived in Nepal, I asked, “Isn’t it life breath that makes statues realistic?” (Krishnamoorthy 1979; Ray 1973). “True,” Madhu said, “none have it until you give it to them.” I then asked, “How do you do this?” Having read that prana-filled images were depicted as exhaling, I thought Madhu was about to show me how to draw a such an image. Instead Madhu replied, “First you have to get a Brahmin priest, or a Buddhist priest. And they take a piece of thread and wrap it around a vessel of pure water; they then connect this thread to the statue, and also to themselves.” Madhu drew a triangle to point this out. “Then the thread works as a road on which the life breath travels.” He paused for a moment and then outlined the triangle with his pencil and went on to add, “After that, you need to open up the god-image’s eyes. Because if you don’t do that, it will not be able to see the outer world.”2 He poked a mark in the center of the triangle and added, “Then you do ceremonies for it every day. For gods that don’t eat meat, you give them the five ambrosias, which include cow milk, yogurt, water, honey,

Performing Prosaic TANTRA

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and buffalo milk. For gods that eat meat, you sacrifice animals to them. . . . That is how the god gets power (shakti).” While nonviolence is a prominent feature of Hinduism, sacrifice— especially in relation to the transgressive sacrality of gods such as Bhairava— has also played a central part in the tradition (Gupta 1992; Visuvalingam 1989; 2003; Visuvalingam and Visuvalingam 1989). Typically, scholars have analyzed sacrifice as symbolism. Such an analytic perspective ignores people’s experience of animal sacrifice. When I talked with people about how they felt during such sacrifices they tended to describe them as “horrifying” (jhinjan minjan danigu). The adjectival phrase jhinjan minjan is used to describe the feeling possessed by the home of a deceased person (a “haunted house”), walking alone in the jungle, or passing by empty burning ghats at night. In Bhaktapur, animal sacrifice is a technique for producing jhinjan minjan. Such horrifying animal sacrifices are performed for two reasons: first, they produce a tantric form of shakti, which here can be understood as an emotional discourse that draws people into relationships with inanimate objects. Bhaktapur uses a prosaic tantra the way some Hindu communities use bhakti devotion. Prosaic tantra, or “tantra-mantra” as it is referred to in Bhaktapur, is a routinized, domesticated, and public system of “dangerous” practices. Second, in a fashion structurally similar to Mus’s vertical nirvanic axis (↑), the tantric, shakti-filled events tether the created territory to the landscape and thereby animate the samsaric lived world. As Mus writes, the projective logic of the vertical axis, “functioning much more as ritual, magical action at a distance than as metaphysics, is only geared to this objective” (Mus 1998, 63).

Producing a Horrifying Experience On a February 19, 1997, Bhaktapur’s Navadurga troupe performed in the Yachen neighborhood.3 As mentioned in chapter 2, these dancers are similar to other South Asian groups of dangerous blood-taking deities that have been grouped together as the Eight Mother Goddesses (Astamatrikas) (Sharma 1974, 231–33). A crowd had already assembled when I arrived at Ganesh Bahadur Sizakhwa’s home in Yachen. There was a platform for the god Yachen Ganesh, and I spotted Bhairava, one of Bhaktapur’s Navadurga dancers. He was dressed like a king from Malla times, in what vaguely resembled Persian royal clothing. He had on big bronze bracelets, necklaces, other jewelry, and a white turban. He was not

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yet wearing his mask/face (khwah chamha /pa). There were about five other dancers, Bhairava’s minions. They were dressed in a similar, if not as lavish fashion. I went up to Mr. Sizakhwa’s house above the Ganesh temple and was told by his wife that he was at the local neighborhood tavern. I proceeded down that way and, after locating him, sat down to drink rice beer. I asked what was happening and was told by another man that “in the same way we people fish for fish, Bhairava is fishing for men ([n]g lgkegu).” At this point, a cacophony of voices erupted outside the tavern. The tavern keeper locked the doors, but then there was loud knocking. The lights went out, and although the doors seemed to have been locked, a crowd rushed in through the darkness. There was absolutely no room to move; the tavern was a space of about ten by fifteen feet, and I was smashed, cup of rice beer in hand, against the wall. There was much yelling and shouting, and people were shoving and being shoved. Then there was light. Bhairava, his mask pushed to the side of his face, was standing there holding a lantern. The door was now closed to the outside, and people were knocking on it. The man next to me said, “[Bhairava] is just like a king, he can eat and drink and doesn’t have to pay.” I asked if there was a problem, what all the knocking on the door was about. The man answered, “Yes, there is a problem. Bhairava doesn’t want to perform anymore, and the people want him to.” The shoving went on for a while, and then Bhairava left the bar and we resumed drinking. A few minutes later, Mr. Sizakhwa said it was time to go. I followed him up to the square, where Seto Bhairava was now dancing. The god was doing a dance with a white towel, pretending to clean himself with it. Seto Bhairava also kept trying to “fish for men” by chasing after children. People would threaten to toss children toward the quite frightening dancer. His dance ended, and Mr. Sizakhwa’s ritual drumming band began to play. The reason for the children’s fear became clear about a half an hour later. People from the neighborhood came up and started to worship the god’s platform. The crowd grew bigger and bigger until the “true” Bhairava appeared again. He danced up to the Ganesh statue, and a boy of around ten tugged me with a mischievous smile and made sure I was watching. At this point, the crowd grew tense, and as I stated earlier, someone handed Bhairava a piglet. The pig began to squeal. Bhairava stepped on the pig’s head with his foot, held its back legs tightly, and then with his left thumbnail cut open its belly. He then reached inside with his bare hands, pulled out the heart, and ate it. The blood spilled onto a big bowl of yogurt, which the assembled crowd began to fight over as a sanctified material blessing (prasgda).


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Prosaic Tantra Often people in Bhaktapur would tell me that although they did not personally like animal sacrifice, it was socially necessary on a tantric level. Krishna Pradhananga said, “I feel a little bit uneasy, because as I told you before, the tantric power is decreasing so that [the sacrifice] is only killing. If I feel anything it is compassion.” Bhairava belongs to Bhaktapur’s set of tantric, dangerous gods. Unlike many Hindu communities, tantric gods have a special place in Bhaktapur as legitimate and high-ranking members of the pantheon. As Robert Levy writes, the tantric gods “do not operate through moral interactions and manipulations, they operate in the only available mode, through power, and that is the way they, in turn, must be dealt with” (1990, 284; cf. 200–340). This does not mean that they run amok through the city. Fueling cadastral generative matrixes, the destructive forces of the dangerous gods have been domesticated to serve and protect Bhaktapur. Tantra literally means the warp of threads that extend lengthwise in a loom and glosses concepts and prescriptions for gaining worldly goods, bodily immorality, and liberation while in this life through the use of ritual techniques (Brooks 1990, 5–6; White 1996, 1–2).4 At first blush, the notion of a public prosaic tantra seems oxymoronic. Because, as Teun Goudriaan and Sanjukta Gupta write in Ritual and Speculation in Early Tantra, whether the adept is gaining magical powers or liberation in this life, “true tantric sgdhang [practice] is a purely individual way to release” (Goudriaan 1992, 6). Yet it is actually such civic tantrism that binds much of Bhaktapur’s social space together, because the private notion of individual salvation and individual power has been put to work in the use of the civic order (Levy 1990, 296; cf. 296–99, 319–35; Vergati 1995, 19). Moreover, if one backs away from the discourse of a perfectly “(im)pure” tantricism, one finds that tantric-like practices are currently a large current in the Hindu mainstream (Brooks 1990, xi, 3–9, 18, 26). A routinized and domesticated tantra or “tantra-mantra,” as it is usually referred to in Bhaktapur, has three aspects. First, for almost all those with whom I spoke in Bhaktapur, tantra was, as the shopkeeper Keshab Hada said, “an invisible power” (personal communication, May 5, 1999). Second, this invisible power, moreover, was seen as a semisecret—something more readily felt than verbally articulated. Third, tantric practices were seen as a way to produce shakti. In Ram Lochan Jha’s words, “If we follow tantra as it is described, it is a weapon, which provides power (shakti)” (personal communication, May 9, 1999). As Krishna Pradhananga said, “Tantra is shakti that you can get from spiritual study. It is different than visible physical power. Like the motor of a car . . . To move a car you need an engine, but tantra is different because it is run by shakti” (personal communication, May 11, 1999).

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“Shakti is Shakti, Stupid!”—Understanding the Four Aspects of Shakti One of the chief aims of Bhairava’s performance was the manufacture of a tantric form of shakti. When I got home from the sacrifice, I told the senior woman of the house, Ms. Dhrubeswori Gongah, about the celebration, including the eating of a raw, still beating pig heart. I was a little shaken. Ms. Gongah told me not to worry, that when the dancers have the goddess’s shakti in them, this makes them stronger, more tantric. At the time, I did not understand the event. I felt only drained and excited. Now, years later, I see Bhairava’s performance as a procedure for producing a horrifying sentiment that is experienced as shakti. Shakti can be seen as a religious aesthetic sentiment, which is a cultural and historic construction—a particular way of approaching and organizing the world. Often religious sentiment is understood as a natural part of a human being and is thus reified into a category that transcends culture and history (Matthews and McWhirter, 2003). What shakti illustrates, however, is that religious sentiment is socially produced as part of an emotional discourse, as a set of practices that systematically forms the objects of which they speak (Foucault 1972, 49). In other words, feelings are “unnatural.” They are sociocultural constructs, which are political and historically contingent, as well as contextually emergent, which gain their meanings and force from their location and performance in the public realm (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990).5 Yet, while not essential, religious sentiment is real because it can have force in the world. Religious feelings then, while being felt as other than speech, are ingrained dispositions that both reflect and reproduce the social relations that surround and constitute them. Postulating feelings as socially constructed, enables one to grasp how, as cultural products, they are reproduced and ingrained in people as embodied experience. Perhaps because it is such an “ingrained disposition,” shakti is difficult to define. Usually glossed as “religious power” and simultaneously as a male god’s animating consort, in practice people I spoke with revealed a much more fluid understanding of shakti as an underlying life-giving force. As Madhu’s description indicates, on a day-to-day level, people understand shakti as “invisible power.” This power was seen to make the world animate. As Krishna Pradhananga said, “When you think about shakti scientifically, it could be fuel. But in religious thought, shakti is a part of tantra.” When I asked him why we needed shakti, he replied, “Because it is impossible to live without it” (personal communication, May 5, 1999). Similarly, when I asked Mahalaxsmi Prajapati the same question, she replied, “Shakti is something that you get from religious actions. We need it because if we don’t have shakti


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we can’t work” (personal communication, June 18, 1999). This notion of needing shakti to work, or needing shakti to live, was often articulated in notions of self-confidence or courage in relation to the net of social relations that make up Bhaktapur’s lived world. Drubeshwori Gongah said, “Shakti is courage; you have shakti when you are strong. Whoever has devotion has shakti.” Still trying to define it, I asked her, “What is it that they have?” She answered, “They have courage to do everything, that is shakti. The ability to go to the god. To fast if you are hungry. To have religion is to have shakti” (personal communication, August 17, 1997). When I asked Bijayashree Karmacharya, a twenty-eight-year-old accountant, what shakti was, she blurted, “Shakti is shakti, stupid!” (personal communication, May 11, 1999). Ms. Karmacharya’s incredulity reveals a quality of shakti I found fairly constant throughout my research: people take the social habit of shakti for granted so much that they give it little conscious thought. Moreover, like the life of a god-image, shakti is perceived as being brought about and maintained by religious practices. As Uttam Jha, a Newar Brahmin priest, said, “Shakti is the centralization of force, which is not spread thin but centralized in a place. That is shakti. And shakti is utilized when needed. You can’t expect to have shakti all the time, only in specific places at specific times” (personal communication, August 4, 1999). Finally, more than what shakti is, people were concerned with what shakti does and what they could use it for. Ms. Kammacharya was flabbergasted with my question because shakti is a sensation more than a belief (Diehl 1956). It is not something to be thought and reflected on, but something to be felt and used. One morning I asked Ms. Gongah why she worshipped at a new neighborhood Ganesh statue every morning. She answered that, because it was brand new, it needed extra attention so that it would give power (shakti) to the neighborhood. Then I asked why one should do puja at all. She answered that it is the duty (dharma) of the chief woman of the household to make sure that the family is taken care of. I then wanted to know how she knew the Ganesh statue was working. She said that it was powerful (had shakti) because when she brought back prasad to people in the house, they were happy, healthy, and wealthy.

Dispositions of the Edge: God Sheds, Pig Sheds, and a Television Set I began the chapter by arguing that events such as Bhairava’s dance are performed for two reasons: first, they produce an experience of shakti that

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animates stone-gods, and second, they are structurally similar to the nirvanic axis in cadastral practices. The Bhairava sacrifice is crucial for understanding cadastral world-building logic, because besides the stone-god as discussed in chapter 4, a delegate (usually the chief or king, but it also could be a priest) of the group is identified with the sacred. For the duration of the rite, in the delegate resides the power that assures the fertility of the locality (Mus 1975, 15, 21, 34). In Bhaktapur, since the fall of the Malla kings, the role of cadastral delegate has been taken over by the Navadurga troupe, a group of ritual performers whose dances form a thematically interrelated set of twenty-one dances by which the city’s urban space is organized as a protective yantra (Levy 1990, 564–71). Bhaktapur’s tantric shakti plays a structurally similar role to Mus’s conception of the social work of nirvana. Nirvana may seem an unlikely source for analyzing animal sacrifice because, in Western literature, nirvana is often theorized as purely philosophic and soteriological and would seem to be the exact opposite of animal sacrifice. In fact, often (mis-)translated as “enlightenment,” nirvana has been interpreted through the lens of a pious “mysticism.” Yet nirvana literally means a “cooling [of karma]” that leaves nothing behind (Mus 1998, 316).6 Mus is concerned with nirvana as a border limit in which signification stops. As he suggests, in nirvanic semiotic acts, “understanding stops” in “unintelligibility” (cf. Mus 1936; 1998, 157, 201). Like nirvana, the feeling of jhinjan minjan asserts itself as a “border disposition” that marks the edge between representation and nonrepresentation. A conversation I had with a member of the local Bhaktapurian literati, Tejeswar Babu Gongah, on July 27, 1997, can help illuminate how this disposition is conveyed linguistically and spatially. Over a glass of tea I was asking him about the different words in Newar for “house.” We started to talk about the Newar word for “shed” (ga:). He said that this was the same word used for “god shed” (dega:) and “pig shed” (phgga:). I asked him then why people’s houses (che[n]) were not called “people sheds” (“manu-ga:s”). He said that this is not a word. “People dwell in the middle and use a different word. Even though gods are higher than men, and pigs are lower, because they are both on the edges they use ‘shed’. For that reason they are both the same.” Pointing at the television, he added that “science is the study of the middle, but religion is the study of the edges” and that Sanskrit philosophy was the study of the higher edge, while tantricism was the study of the lower edge. Here it is useful to compare this conception of the edge of knowing with the sublime. According to Immanuel Kant, as he writes in the Critique of Judgment, one encounters the sublime when one’s understanding comes up against things or ideas that cannot be grasped by one’s imagination (1987, 97–114).7 Kant utilizes the sublime to account for those disruptive


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moments of radical otherness that overwhelm rationality, those centrifugal forms of consciousness that threaten to overwhelm his systematic account of mind. For Kant then the sublime is a feeling that occurs when the imagination is brought to a full stop and can go no further. Yet, as the word sublimitas indicates, the sublime is that which is just below the limits of representation. The sublime then shows that there is a limit along whose edge the unrepresentable makes itself felt (Nancy 1993). Yet the otherness is not made present. Instead, the sublime asserts itself as that “border disposition” that marks the edge of representation. As Kant writes, the sublime is that feeling that we encounter in judging the radically other; it is “chaos” in its “wildest and most ruleless disarray and devastation” (1987, 99). This chaos impresses itself on us as a mental agitation, which differs from the restful contemplation presupposed by the beautiful. Such mental agitation is evident in people’s reactions to Bhairava’s dance. When I asked Durukaji Suwal, a fifty-seven-year-old farmer and mason, about how she felt during Bhairava’s dance, she answered, “When I see the cutting of the animal, I get a feeling of the “heebie jeebies” (jhinjan minjan danigu)” (personal communication, July 9, 1999). After answering with the same word, jhinjan minjan, Basula Dyola went onto add, “Even if I see a mask from the Navadurga dancers, I’m terrified (gygngpuyegu)” (personal communication, July 20, 1999; see figure 3.1). Such horrifying performances are not isolated to Bhaktpur. Jhulendra Pradhana, in Nepala Bhasa Bakham Sahityaya Itihasa, suggests that the horror emotion, “bhaya rasa,” one of the nine moods of classical Sanskrit dramaturgy, was consciously used in Nepal’s religious dramas (1970). Learning to intertwine jhinjan minjan with religious sentiment is a lifelong process. From early on, children are exposed to and often teasingly threatened with sacrifice. Bhairava would go “fishing” and mothers would hold their toddlers up toward the horrifying gods to playfully threaten them. Older boys and girls were mischievously offered to the gods. On March 7, 1997, I went to see a performance by the gods Sima and Duma. Like Bhairava, the twin gods were fishing for children. Between 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. they chased boys, ranging in age from four to twenty years, and anyone else who was brave enough to come near. The kids prodded terrifying masked gods by chanting, “Come! Come! Come! (Wa! Wa! Wa!)” Once caught by the gods, they would pay a small fee as prasad. Sanjeev Gongah, who was sitting with me, said that this was in exchange for not being sacrificed. If someone refused to pay, the dancers would drag them off and go through the motions of sacrificing them. Again, besides being fun, this dance generated a certain unsettled feeling. I asked one small girl if she was scared, and she said, “No!” but I could tell from the tone of her voice that she was (the child protested too much). In addition, one boy asked me

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for a rupee, and I picked him up and threatened to give him to the dancing gods. He struggled and ran away. When another child came up and asked for a rupee, the first kid screamed, “Don’t ask him,” and then in English “#no rupee! no rupee#!”

The Social Value of Tantric Shakti Shakti is a genre of aesthetic habits that veer from ascetic, austere, and inward turning to happy, noisy, sensually gratifying, intensely social events that are produced by religious practice. One could map its gradations from dangerous forms of tantricism on the left to loving types of devotional bhakti on the right. From a speculative standpoint, while shakti may have a family resemblance to other religious sentiments, such feelings are constructed differently by different societies (Marx 1978, 109). Still, religious sentiment in Bhaktapur is a type of aesthetic discourse, which, although socially constructed, is not “unreal” because it has a value that acts as the fuel that drives cadastral generative matrixes—those fields of discourses, practices, institutions, and technologies for using mandalic social logics to make lived worlds. For Bhaktapur’s dangerous deities, it is such sublime but horrifying emotions that cause people to treat stone-gods as if they were extraordinary persons. Jhinjan minjan, then, is a type of religious sentiment. Rather than personal and transcendent, however, in Bhaktapur it is a corporeal knowledge expressed as a bodily feeling that is a social, even legal, matter tied up with material local concerns (cf. James 1990). For example, Nepal’s Ancient Monument Conservation Act of [Vikram Samvat] 2052 uses “dhgrmika bhgvana” to describe people’s feelings for religious sites. While there are obvious differences, the closest English gloss for the South Asian term “bhgvana” is “religious sentiment” (Byrski 1974). This notion was echoed by my interlocutors. When I spoke with Yogesh Raj with regard to the Bhairava performance, he said “There is a #popular misconception# (original in English) that tantrism is frightening, people have #negative# feelings and run away from tantrics. But tantra is not like that. Tantra is merely religious sentiment” (personal communication, February 6, 1999). When I asked him to expand on his statement, and he described “religious sentiment” (dhgrmika bhgvana) as a “feeling of devotion that created a religious place (dhgrmika bhavana).” When I asked him for an example in relation to the god Bhairava’s performance, he narrated the following story: A couple of mask makers. You know the people who make the Navadurga masks, here in Bhaktapur. They are Chitrakar, the painter caste. There was a


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man from that caste, and his wife. They spent one month making the Navadurga mask. ONE MONTH! During that time they had to follow rules. I asked them, “How does it feel living with the masks?” The painter replied, “When we are making the masks it seems like they fill the inside of the whole house.” How long did it last? It lasts until the masks are taken away. So, during the making of the masks, it felt like they filled the whole house. This is the experience of god.

Conclusion Besides giving a more accurate account of what is happening on the ground in Bhaktapur, an analysis of jhinjan minjan critiques the category of religious experience that has been central to the study of religion. Jhinjan minjan critiques the category of religious sentiment because it is a type of border disposition that interrupts a Kantian concept of the sublime. In the twentieth century, especially for the history of religions, the sentiment of the sublime has become an important means for describing religious experience. The difficulty with Kant’s conception of the sublime is that he founds it in an a priori transcendental concept of mind that reifies a modern European subject. Not only does he make normative a particular type of human being, but he also reduces legitimate religion to the bounds of scripturalism alone. Starting from a Kantian foundation but arriving at a radically different endpoint, Walter Benjamin’s short essay “Experience” suggests that “edge” feelings are the key for understanding the totality of human experience (Benjamin 1999a). He writes that “Kant’s system is an attempt to regulate experience, to police it in an Enlightenment mold” (1996a). For Benjamin, the modern European framework of experience and knowledge are impoverished. He maintains that we ought to extend the bounds of experience to include “soothsaying from coffee grounds” because “there is no greater error than the attempt to construe experience—in the sense of life experience—according to the model on which the exact natural sciences are based” (1999a, 553). Benjamin argues that Kant’s “transcendental” ought to be replaced with a “speculative” notion of experience. By this he means that Kant’s universal a priori categories of mind ought to be replaced with speculative ones derived from culture and history. From a speculative position, then, a prosaic critique expands the category of religious experience beyond its scripturalist roots and analyzes it as a cultural artifact that differs by culture, class, historical period, and

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geography. Like all human practices, religious experiences are not only made by and for, and used by, people, but are the product of a particular form of society. As the following chapter illustrates, by illustrating a forged goat sacrifice, expanding the category of religious experience is crucial for comprehending agency in the production of cadastral lived worlds. It is sacrifice—even a forged sacrifice—that makes an imagined world real.

Chapter 6 Bringing a Forged Mandala to Life: The Cow Procession and the Improvisation of Cadastral Generative Matrixes

[E]very field anthropologist knows that no performance of a rite, however rigidly prescribed, is exactly the same as another performance . . . . Variable components make flexible the basic core of most rituals. —Tambiah, Performative Approach to Ritual

On the cold afternoon of November 23, 1999, Madhu explained how to put on washi (a dark blue paint) and mina (a dark red paint): “These are the most powerful colors—even more beautiful than gold. You paint on just a little here and there to bring the painting to life.” Madhu turned to his daughter and told her to fetch some sakali paint and not nakali. I asked him what he meant by this, and he replied, “Nakali is not good quality, not pure, polluted by other colors . . . old. Sakali is pure, it can mix with other colors . . . it is pure. This goes for people also. And also for consumer goods. Chinese or Indian goods are forgeries of Japanese goods.” To articulate the difference between nakali and sakali in the making of mandalas (ma“πalas), we need to retrace this study’s steps (figure I.3; table I.1, rows A–G). Chapter 1 argued that in Bhaktapur tradition describes effective prosaic social practices that are compiled from past generations. Chapter 2 argued that the lived space of the city is made up of “social maps”: the patterns, discourse, and constellations of concrete media

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and institutions by which agents construct lived territories. For prosaic religious practices in Bhaktapur, the most important is the “mandala map,” which operates with a cadastral generative matrix (figure I.1). Chapter 3 began to sketch out the cadastral generative matrix by which mandalization operates; it argued that in cadastral religious practice material images are made into stone-gods by being treated as extraordinary persons (figure 3.1). Chapter 4 went on to theorize how these stone-gods are used by people to create samsaric lived worlds through worship (figure 4.1). And chapter 5 showed how the tantric form of shakti (∂akti) operated in Bhaktapur’s cadastral religious practice in a similar structural fashion to Paul Mus’s conception of nirvana. The present chapter compiles those that precede it by “bringing to life” a particular instance in which a mandala was forged. In Bhaktapur, Nepal, around 5:30 p.m. on August 19, 1995, a castrated male goat was sacrificed to Suryavinayak, the local form of the god Ganesh. As part of the city’s Cow Procession (Saya, Gai Jatra), this “cutting of the animal” was performed by the Suryavinayak neighborhood and was sponsored by Tejeswar Babu Gongah (figure 6.1). Goat sacrifices are not unique in the Kathmandu Valley. In fact, they are a prosaic occurrence, especially during the festival season, with many thousands being sacrificed during the holiday of Dasain alone. What made this particular event stand out, however, was that it was nakali. As indicated earlier by Madhu’s description of paint quality, nakali is a Nepali word, often borrowed by Newars, which is usually glossed as “imitated” or “fake.” However, when asked for a definition of nakali, people in Bhaktapur tend to give the example of a forged banknote or commodity good. With this in mind, I use the English word “forged” to translate nakali in order to theorize the act of creating an imitation, or of modifying an authentic object, so that it can be used as if it were the original. I use “forged” not to deny the authenticity of the sacrifice, but to articulate the performers’ creative and improvisational use of “religious performance” (Underwood 2000). But what made this sacrifice forged? Although the sacrifice was nakali, the goat was still killed. Its throat was cut, and its blood was splattered on the image of Ganesh. In fact, once underway, there was little apparent difference between this “forged” celebration and an “authentic” festival: it had a procession, a sacrifice, and even a ritual feast—all key elements of “authentic” worship. Therefore, in what is key for the entire argument, I describe the sacrifice as forged not because I thought it was forged, but because the people participating in the sacrifice described it as such. Still, why celebrate a forged sacrifice? The time and expense of the forged sacrifice indicates that such religious performances are more than mere entertainment, more than didactic lessons or ideogical formulations, and

Bringing a Forged Mandala to Life

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Figure 6.1 Forged goat sacrifice in front of the god-image of Suryavinayak. (photograph: Sanjeev Gongah, 1995 [from the author’s collection]).

more than cathartic eruptions (MacAloon 1984). Instead, as I have argued, in Bhaktapur, religious practices operate as cadastral generative matrixes— fields of discourses, practices, institutions, and technologies for using mandalic social logics to make lived worlds. What is provocative about the fake sacrifice is that the creative and improvisational nature of the performance shows that traditional practices cannot be reduced to blind imitation of timeless rules (Grieve and Weiss, 2005). The ceremony was not an eternal repetition of the same. It was not a “dance of symbols” performed out of the unconscious replication of an existing cultural structure. Instead, it was a conscious manipulation of available “traditional” cultural logics that were strategically utilized to solve a contemporary problem. The problem that the people of Suryavinayak faced was how to forge a new lived reality beyond the traditional cultic borders of Bhaktapur.

The Cow Procession Celebrated in the waning fortnight of Gunlaga (August), Bhaktapur’s Cow Procession is an intimate mix of death and carnival that commemorates

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those who have died in Bhaktapur during the previous year with a procession of “cow floats” and a series of satirical performances (khygla:). The Cow (ggi or sg) Procession (jgtra or yg [derived from the Sanskrit ygtrg]) has been recorded as being called Saparu. This may derive from Parewa—the name given to the first day of the lunar fortnight. Others suggests that it derives from sgpg, or cow mask (Levy 1990, 442). There is no official report on the Cow Procession’s meaning. No published account or completely codified oral account exists.1 Yet the various versions all point to the procession of real and symbolic cows that give the festival its name and to the “cow goddess” who leads the spirits of those who died in Bhaktapur during the preceding year across the Vaitarani river to the realm of the dead. Vaitarani is both the name of the river that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead and also the term used for the cow presented to a priest during funeral rites (Stutley and Stutley 2003, 318). Other ceremonies such as Matati Aunsi and Bahyakhwa Soegu are performed for those who have been dead for longer than a year. The Cow Procession is only for those who have passed away in the preceding year. The farmer and drumming instructor Hari Govinda Ranjitkar and his daughter reiterated the following story. Having heard that Cow Procession (Newar Saya) means cow (sa) and procession(ya), I asked the reason for celebrating the festival. Mr. Ranjitkar said, “The Cow Procession makes the Cow Goddess happy, and if she is happy she will lead the dead person to heaven. The soul grasps onto the cow’s tail. If a family does not do this, the dead person won’t find his way and he will become a bhut [a mischievous wandering spirit who will cause harm to both the family and the community]” (personal communication, August 20, 1997). Beyond helping the spirits find their way, the festival is also understood to suspend or at least suppress the karmic judgment that Yama, the god of death, traditionally levies on those entering his realm (Levy 1990, 442–44). The procession’s vanquishing of death, if only temporarily, is a common carnival theme (Bakhtin 1984; Metcalf 1979).2 Uttam Jha, a practicing Brahmin and head of the local chamber of commerce, narrated a myth that explained how the cow and the death motif intertwined with the carnivalesque aspects of the festival: the Cow Procession originated during the reign of King Jagat Prakash Malla (1644–73).3 The king started the festival when, after the death of his son, he was desperately searching for a means to comfort his grieving queen. To lift his wife’s grief, Jagat Malla first sent out a procession of sacred cows to parade in the boy’s memory. Yet the queen remained despondent. After the cow parade failed, Jagat had another idea. He ordered all his citizens who had lost a family member during the preceding year to parade below the queen’s window so that she could see that she was not the only one who suffered the death of a family member.


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King Jagat Malla was about to order all of the costumed people punished when the queen began to laugh at all the carnival activities.4 In gratitude, King Jagat Malla proclaimed that every year on the day of the Cow Procession people would have complete freedom to do whatever they wanted. Like the crowd proceeding below the queen’s window, the festival takes the form of a procession that circumambulates the city along the city’s procession route.5 Along this route (often simply called the “Cow Road”), all families who have suffered the death of a member in the preceding year decorate either a cow float or a real cow and, together with a troupe of musicians and a convivial crowd of costumed revelers, dance and drink their way around the city. The procession route is filled with many hundreds of these troupes, each of which represents a particular deceased person.6 Because each group enters the procession route at the point nearest their home and at convenient times for themselves, the social order of the procession is more or less random.7 Each float is constructed by the individual’s extended family and friends and is personalized with photographs and other household articles to indicate gender, age and personal tastes. Before each troupe enters the procession, the cow floats are worshiped as the Cow Goddess, and, in a process called “crossing the river,” she is asked to lead the deceased to heaven (Levy 1990, 445). An ideal “cow float” can be broken down into five sections. First, each float is led by a group of young children arranged in pairs doing the Stick Dance. Behind the stick dancers comes the second part of the troupe, which consists of costumed pairs of young men who often perform sexually explicit gestures. This dance is often called ghentan ghesin mhetegu, a name that refers onomatopoeically to the special Cow Procession beat described further. During the dance, some men dress up as demons or as monsters and animals under mangy hides, some wear ludicrous masks or cover their faces with white cloth, while others paint their cheeks and foreheads in colored streaks and designs. Moreover, men cross-dress or dress out of their caste. Third comes a group of musicians and other people directly involved in the procession. Next comes the cow float itself, and, finally, come the family members, consisting of the chief mourner, his brothers, and the extended family, as well as friends and neighbors. This group also includes a fringe of women and girls following at the end of some of the larger processions. Most of the troupes’ members are higher-caste men, but there is no concrete rule on who will participate, and a flexible strategy guides their actions. Recent festivals have witnessed the participation of more women, members of lower castes, and even foreigners. In addition, the cow floats vary depending on the age, caste, and gender of the deceased. The cows may

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either be long (for adults) or short (for children). The long cows consist of a cow mask mounted toward the top end of an elaborately decorated long pole and requires four men to carry it. For upper castes, the cow float is carried by people who farm portions of the family’s land, whereas for middle and lower castes, the float is carried by members of the extended family. The short cows, on the other hand, are baskets with a mask attached to them and are usually worn by a male child of the family; however, if a male child is not available, other male family members will wear it. Other features of the float’s decorations indicate whether the deceased was male or female, what caste they came from, and what activities or foods they preferred. These decorations may include photographs, pieces of clothing, prepared food, personal items, and, for children, toys or schoolbooks displaying their favorite subject. Crucial to these processions is the practice of “ghentan ghesin twa,” which indicates a special cymbal “Cow Procession beat.” In fact, this beat (mata)—seven beats followed by a rest—defined the festival for most people. When I asked people to describe the Cow Procession, not only did I usually get a verbal explanation, I was taught how to beat out this rhythm and do the accompanying dance. According to various Bhaktapurians, “Ghentan Ghesin twa” not only refers to the special musical beat that is played only during the Cow Procession, but also has several sexual connotations as well, the main one referring to the insertion of the penis into the vagina during coitus. As a “prosaic tantric practice,” public expression of such a “vulgar” utterance occurs only under circumstances that differ radically from people’s usual discourse. To publicly speak of coitus outside of the carnival would lead to social chastisement. This beat centers all the procession’s carnivalesque occurrences. In the Stick Dance, as the “twa” of ghentan ghesin twa is chanted during the rest at the end of the rhythm, the boys hit their sticks together in unison. Similarly, the young men who perform the sexually explicit gestures momentarily pause on the quarter rest to emphasize a particular gesture. In the weeks leading up to the Gai Jatra, this rhythm can be heard more and more often throughout the city, until, on the day of the actual event, the entire city is filled with the sound of drumming. There is a final element of the procession that is key for understanding the “fake” goat sacrifice: these are the khyalah, comic performances, which satirize dominant figures or voice political views that would be unutterable in other situations (Anderson 1971, 103). On August 19, 1995, a man dressed as Yama (the god of death) rode backwards on a water buffalo. Surrounding the buffalo was a swarm of demon-costumed men menacingly waving long spears while simultaneously rubber-stamping piles of bureaucratic paperwork. The Yama procession probably was meant to represent the then-current Communist government, which had recently suspended


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parliament. And these “traditional” figures were probably led by members of the local Progressive Nepal Workers and Peasants Party. In 1997, these parodic performances also included cartoons satirizing the parliament’s submission of an antiterrorism bill. People also acted out skits lampooning members and leaders of parliament who were involved in misusing medical allowances. Besides these entertainments, the Cow Procession’s skits have opposed the American support of Israel, the infighting of the big Nepali political parties, corruption, lack of sanitation, financial irregularities and the “the war on terror.” Brahmins are also parodied; people engage in absurd and overly complex rituals or tell obscene versions of traditional stories. Tourists and other Westerners are also made fun of; revelers carry absurdly large replicas of cameras and hand out meaningless “funny money” to the crowd. Beyond the actual day of the procession, the carnivalesque air continues during gunhipunhi, which denotes the full moon day of the month of Gunla, but is often referred to in Bhaktapur as “time of good features” (“guna” described as good features). Gunhipunhi is a time of jokes, satire, and social commentary. It starts the day before the Cow Procession on Kwati Purni, when a troop of musicians plays in Bhaktapur’s Durbar Square to announce to the public the opening of the Cow Procession, and lasts nine days, until the god Krishna’s birthday. It comes to a head the evening before the god Krishna’s birthday, when the city again engages in another long night of carnival. During this time, like in the khyalahs, people wear costumes and engage in political and social commentary. Like the fake goat sacrifice, much of this satire takes the form of forged ceremonies and processions.

A Festive Juggernaut: The Cow Procession’s Minimally Structured Generative Cultural Matrix When asked why they celebrated a forged sacrifice, Mr. Gongah’s son Sanjeev shrugged and said, “It’s fun, isn’t it?” (personal communication, August 19, 1995). When Mr. Gongah was asked the same question he answered, “it’s a way for the neighborhood to celebrate together” (personal communication, August 19, 1995). What connects Mr. Gongah and his son’s seemingly unrelated responses is “religious agency.” By agency I am referring to people’s ability to act effectively upon their world, to act purposively and creatively, in more or less complex interrelationships (Inden 1990, 23). As illustrated in the study’s introduction, in Bhaktapur, religion

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(dharma) glosses two chief meanings. On one hand, it means living a certain type of ethically bounded lifestyle; on the other, religious practice focuses on the worship of god-images (p˚jg). Accordingly, as we saw in chapters 3, 4, and 5, prosaic religious agency theorizes how people in Bhaktapur use gods in tangible practices that structure daily existence. In Bhaktapur, festivals play a crucial role in the construction of lived worlds (Anderson 1971; Gutschow 1980; Levy 1990; and Vergati 1995). As the college teacher Yogesh Raj told me, “Because Bhaktapur is my [abstract] world (loka), when I participate in festivals I feel part of that [created] world (sa®sara). Otherwise, I feel lonely” (personal communication, February 6, 1999). Such world construction can be theorized through the notion of generative matrixes, which are cultural “forges” that play a part in the construction of society. Generative matrixes emerge out of, and simultaneously generate, a group’s goals, strategies, and the resources available to a given social field. As such, generative matrixes are defined by people’s access to what is at stake—cultural goods, housing, intellectual distinction, employment, land, power, social status, and prestige. Not everyone feels the same entitlement to participate in festivals’ generative matrixes. While Mr. Raj was a male Brahmin, women and lower-caste individuals often felt alienated from participating. As the female college student Sangeeta Chitrakar said, “Which festivals do I participate in? Which festivals may women be part of? Can we participate in the Cow Procession? Can we not pull the chariot during Biskah? [laughter and the hand gesture for ‘what is to be done?’]” (personal communication, May 11, 1999; Parish 1994, 1996). Yet, while no religious agency is completely free of asymmetrical power relations, some are more flexible than others. In Bhaktapur, because the Cow Procession is the most minimally structured public celebration, marginalized social groups have the greatest access to its generative cultural matrix. During the Cow Procession there is a noticeable difference in the city: strict hierarchical boundaries and the city’s normally reserved nature soften under the weight of carnival. Transvestitism, the grotesque, the obscene, and the nonsensical are celebrated. Those in power are derided.8 Peoples’ laughter overcomes fear and allows the city to face up to its biggest fears—“death” being just the most evident. Hence, more than the mere cessation of productive labor, more than a ludic undermining of all norms, more than just “antistructure,” the Cow Procession’s fun allows for the creation of new and the transformation of traditional social structures so as to forge innovative social worlds (Bakhtin 1984; Stam 1989).9 To comprehend how the Cow Procession creates the possibilities for new realities different from conventional rules and restrictions, let me turn to the participants. As I stated earlier, when asked why they celebrated a forged sacrifice, Mr. Gongah’s son Sanjeev shrugged and said, “It’s fun, isn’t it?”


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(personal communication, August 19, 1995). Yet, why is the Cow Procession fun? The obvious answer is that carnivals are entertaining because one can dance and drink and “wear” personalities that one cannot at other times. During carnival there is a temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers and there is an inversion of the standard themes of societal makeup (Bakhtin 1984, 15). As numerous Bhaktapurians told me, during the Cow Procession people can be whatever they want: anyone can be king for a day. This of course is not true in the strictest sense. In the past, both women and the lowest castes have been denied access to the festival’s merriments. A farmer who dresses as a king may feel himself empowered (and probably will enjoy himself), but he does not actually get to rule the city. What makes the festival fun then is not an overthrow of the normative system, but its temporary loosening. Not only is this loosening enjoyable, it is key for understanding religious agency.10 For if maximally structured religious agency can be seen as ritualized, then the forged carnivalesque sacrifice can be understood as minimally structured.11 Such minimally structured social practices allow for greater change and improvisation. Accordingly, carnivals are fun for the very reason they are useful for understanding agency. They extend the narrow frame of life so that people can experiment with social configurations that lie beyond the existing social forms (Bakhtin 1984, 17, 280). Yet how is it that the Cow Procession became the place for working out new social modes? As is shown by the forged sacrifice, rather than reenacting a symbolic structure, people manipulate cultural logics to improvise a new social structure. As suggested by chapter 3, however, all social practice—even that which is enjoyable and minimally structured—is socially mediated action. During the carnival one cannot do whatever one wants. Instead, as indicated by the study’s theorization of generative matrixes, the carnival emerges in a tug-of-war between needs, desires, and goals and the social logic of the festival. As such, the new realities are forged in the generative cultural matrix that stems from the interaction between the festival’s social field and emergent collective action.

From Abstract Symbols to Strategically Maximizing the Cow Procession’s Generative Matrix Each different type of generative matrix, by virtue of its defining content, has a different logic and assumed structure of necessity and relevance, which

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is both the product and producer of the practices that are appropriate to it. In Bhaktapur’s Cow Procession three resources are at stake: honoring gods through ceremony, enjoying oneself, and gaining prestige. First and foremost, like the worship discussed in chapter 3, festivals are understood as a way of honoring gods through ceremony (puja). As Mr. Hada put it, festivals are “huge ceremonies for gods and goddesses . . . they create religious power (∂akti)” (personal communication, May 5, 1999). Second, festivals are simply fun. As thirty-year-old Krishna Pradhananga said, “Festivals refill the gods’ religious power, and also they are fun for people” (personal communication, June 6, 1999). In the elementary school principal Himalayaswar Mool’s words, “People work hard and they need a way to enjoy themselves. After fourteen hours of hard work, everyone gets tired. So that’s why we need festivals” (personal communication, August 15, 1999). Finally, festivals are a way to gain prestige. As Uttam Jha said, “The reasons for having festivals could be to respect gods, or it could be to show off in front of others” (personal communication, August 4, 1999). As analyzed in the preceding chapter, one necessary component of religious practice is an animating sentiment. How is such sentiment generated? While the Cow Procession may not have codified “rules,” it does have definite “strategies” (Bourdieu 1986). This ability to strategically manipulate the festival is a ritual mastery that does not follow a codified set of rules, but is a flexible social sense for what is possible and effective; it is the art of necessary improvisation (Bourdieu 1990). This necessary improvisation can be seen in the choice of cow floats. Recently, real living cows, which go undecorated except for a garland around their neck and a red tika on their forehead, have been introduced into the festival. These real cows are used more by lower classes (as money-saving devices, to save the expense of making an image) and are usually led around the procession route by a senior male, while a small boy holds onto their tails. Other family members follow close behind, collecting material offerings as they dance around the procession route. Besides the modest substitution of real cows, other changes have been introduced. A group of low-caste participants manipulating the Cow Procession’s social field have recently entered the festival. Various people indicated that this was the first time that outcasts had directly participated in the festival and that religion dictated that they should not. Although the higher castes seemed aghast, because of the carnival nature of the day and the democratic atmosphere created by the recent restoration of multiparty democracy, they seemed unable to counter the untouchables’ deft strategic move. The strategic manipulation of the festival field can also be seen in the ghentan ghesin mhetegu. Through the logic of inversion, participants used their costumes to display the particular concerns of their peer group. Young men of the middle to higher castes used symbolic gestures to mock dominant


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social positions such as government officials, tourists, and religious authorities. The young men also reversed their mocking hierarchically downward toward women and members of the lower castes. They also took on pop-culture roles of Western rock stars and Hindi movie actors. In various sorts of sexual display, men dressed as heterosexual couples would embrace and move their hips as if engaging in coitus. Other pairs rhythmically banged together large models of penises and vaginas, whacking them together at the “twa” beat. Still other men simply added mock genitalia, such as bananas or cucumbers, to their normal clothes. A group of cross-dressers danced gracefully by themselves. Yet while there is “play” in the festival field’s limits, not just anything goes. The are definite patterns. The symbolic gesture displayed depends on the costume of the dancer. A young man dressed as a woman may repeatedly bring a baby doll to his breast, a man dressed as a bureaucrat may endlessly rubber-stamp a pile of papers as another man repeatedly hands him a bribe, and, in the most prevalent example, a man dressed as a farmer’s wife repeatedly serves her “husband” alcohol. The revelers’ dress can be divided into seven types: (1) people of all ages costumed as various deities; (2) young boys dressed as holy men and other ascetics; (3) numerous other small boys costumed as Moghul Maharaja in orange cloth and turbans, a mustache penned above their upper lips; (4) dancers dressed as either photo-snapping tourists or American rock stars and Hindi movie actors; (5) people dressed as farmers who repeatedly hoe at the ground in time to the music; (6) people dressed as animals and demons; and (7) various obscene costumes (Levy 1990, 446–47). The strategic manipulation of the festival’s generative matrix is clear in the ghentan ghesin twa beat described above. There are different songs involved (Widdess 1990). A quick ghentan ghesin twa, a long ghentan ghesin twa, and dhalhaegu (a song that invokes the gods). The drum instructor Ranjitkar described dhalhaegu as a telephone’s bell, a way of getting a god’s attention so you could talk with him or her. The slow version is used most of the time, but when the dancers want to be especially impressive, such as when passing in front of a major temple, through one of the large open squares, or past the Nepali television film crew, the fast version is played, and the troupe concentrates on the rhythm, complexity, and style of its dance moves. Dhalhaegu generally was saved for the most important temples, although during the procession, the drummers held an ongoing discussion over which temples were important enough to deserve this song. To illustrate a Cow Procession troupe, let us turn to an example from the 1997 celebration that memorialized the Bhaktapur resident Bal Ram. As stated earlier, an ideal float can be broken down into five elements. Bal Ram’s troupe, while based on the ideal form, varied from it considerably. In

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the troupe there were 150 people or more, making it the largest troupe of the day, as it stretched about two hundred meters. At the front was a huge picture of Bal Ram, towering above Bhaktapur and with the mountain peak Langtang at his back. The picture had an umbrella over it. It was followed by a group of girls doing the Stick Dance. The girls were followed by people costumed as the ten incarnations of Vishnu. These were followed by the “international” Ghentan Ghesin group—twenty American Peace Corps workers, twenty-five students from England, and some German volunteers from the homeopathic clinic. These were followed by the music instructors from the university and finally five girls dressed in farmer’s black saris sprinkling baji-rice—that is cooked in oil and then beaten to flatten its shape. Behind this was the cow or, in this case, a bull. Behind the bull was a musical group playing devotional songs. Taking up the rear were all the other mourners. For various and diverse reasons, Kathmandu University’s Music Department, Mr. Gongah, a group of Peace Corps workers, and Bal Ram’s family all found it beneficial to cooperate on forming a very distinctive float. Distinction, in the simplest sense, is social status, which involves cultural displays of dress, speech, and outlook (Bourdieu 1984; 1988). Yet during the procession there are no calcified rules for making distinction. For example, although not part of traditional practice, the Peace Corps workers were a hot commodity in the 1997 festival.

Using a Festival to Forge a Mandala Suryavinayak is a new neighborhood which is about a five-minute walk from the south of Bhaktapur proper. It is part of a second wave of urbanization that has sprung up in the past fifteen years near the terminus of a now broken trolley bus line that once connected Bhaktapur with Kathmandu. However, the neighborhood did not blossom until about 1990, when building restrictions were eased and money from tourism and other sources started to pour into the city. In 1995 the neighborhood was populated almost exclusively by Bhaktapurians from the other twenty-four wards of the city. Being transplants posed a problem both for peoples’ identities and for their placement in the social hierarchy. Accordingly, it posed a problem for the ritual structure of the city. The people who live in Suryavinayak are usually upper caste and tend to be better off economically (they have to be able to afford a new home). In a sense, they are Bhaktapur’s nouveau riche. However, in the mandalic cultic structure of the city, because they live outside the pale, they are literally outcasts.12


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The festival’s flexible minimal structure is so important to people from Suryavinayak because most of Bhaktapur’s major festivals do not have any strategy for the Suryavinayak neighborhood to participate as a group. The religious strategy usually used by most people in the neighborhood to deal with this “out-caste” status is to celebrate the major festivals in their ancestral wards. During most festivals, the Gongah family returns to Bhaktapur’s Khauma ward. However, the Cow Procession, within a minimally structured generative matrix, created the perfect opportunity for the inhabitants of Suryavinayak to work together as a community. Accordingly, Suryavinayak entered one of the largest, best decorated, and most costly of the Ghunipuni festival processions. This procession marched loudly and triumphantly around Bhaktapur’s circumambulatory route and asserted that Suryavinayak was part of the city, thus forcing itself into the city’s cultic structure. Can a forged sacrifice still create a mandala? If what is important is mechanical reproduction of structure, then no. If, however, what is important is the strategic use of cadastral generative matrixes, then yes. While the 1995 “forged” goat sacrifice was an improvisation, it was patterned on “authentic” practices. Before the actual forged sacrifice was done, a troupe of Cow Procession dancers first led the goat around Bhaktapur’s festival route and then to the temple. The troupe then worshipped the victim and affixed colored pigments and flowers to its body and head. They then made gestures of respect and chanted a special beast mantra. People waited for the sign of the goat’s consent to be the victim—a shaking of its body. At first, the goat seemed to be reluctant, so sacred water, kigah (kiga:)—purified uncooked husked rice grains—and flowers were thrown on its body. Still, it would not give its consent, so sacred water was splashed in its ears. Finally, the goat shook its assent (making the same head-to-tail movement that a dog will make to dry itself off ). The actual “cutting” took place, and, after the obligatory photographs, there was a feast. So how was the sacrifice forged? During the sacrifice, when I asked Mr. Gongah what we were doing, I was told that we were performing a Dewali feast for the Cow Procession. Hearing this, I was confused, as Dewali feasts are usually performed in the spring as a way of cementing the relations of an extended family group (Phuki) through the worship of a lineage deity. Our “forged” Dewali goat sacrifice was held neither in the spring nor for an extended family group by an extended family group, but rather in August, by the neighborhood of Suryavinayak, for the Cow Procession. At the time of the sacrifice, I asked Mr. Gongah’s son Sanjeev why the neighborhood was celebrating a Dewali celebration when it wasn’t spring and when we weren’t an extended family group. He smiled and said, “Because we feel like it.” Later that night, still confused, I brought up the question

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again with Mr. Gongah. At that time, we were watching a program on professional wrestling. He wanted to know if the wrestling was real, and I told him that it was fake. The fake wrestling got us talking about the sacrifice. He said that the sacrifice at Suryavinayak was real, and that the feast was real but at the wrong time; therefore, they were forged. Moreover, he said that they had had the feast because it was the only time the neighborhood could come together. He added that the feast was held at his house as a kind of honor, since it should have been held somewhere else, such as a mother goddess shrine. He had become the nayah (ngyg:), or head of this ad hoc forged religious organization (guthi). The goat sacrifice was considered to be forged not because the victim was spared or because the ritual was faulty, but because it was the right festival at the wrong time. But why was it important to celebrate the right festival at the wrong time? The Suryavinayak festival goat sacrifice was a ceremony that occurred during the Cow Procession’s gunhipunhi. During the last evening of these nine full days, people celebrate whatever they want: some create brand-new festivals, others undergo fictive rites of passage (sa®skara) and marriages, and still others celebrate festivals that should be conducted at other times of the year. In a giant cacophony, the many different festivals bump and intertwine their way around the procession route. The music and dance alternate between that which is proper for each forged procession and the ever-present beat of ghentan ghesin twa. Again, men dress in costume, the satirical element being much more prevalent than during the Cow Procession proper. But, come midnight and the ringing of the bell that marks the start of Krishna’s birthday, the period of carnival ends and the city returns to normal. The expense and effort of the forged sacrifice was a way for the neighborhood to claim its right to Bhaktapur’s mandalic territory. As argued in the preceding chapter, the goat sacrifice makes the mandala real by supplying the nirvanic element. Yet for the cadastral projection to be effective, other samsaric practices also had to be “forged.” The neighborhood’s mandalic value was also heightened by the strategic use of the goat sacrifice and the Dewali feast. Each of Bhaktapur’s twenty-four wards has a Ganesha temple at its center where most ritual activity for the area takes place. The Suryavinayak neighborhood lacked such a temple and, instead, appropriated the Suryavinayak temple as its neighborhood center. (During 1996, a new Ganesha shrine was built in the center of the vicinity.) The Suryavinayak temple is traditionally not associated with any particular ward or even with Bhaktapur itself, but instead is one of four Ganesha shrines that circle the greater Kathmandu Valley. By doing the sacrifice at this temple, the members of the neighborhood strategically borrowed the deity and used it to give their own neighborhood a mandalic center.


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The Cow Procession’s festival practices were also used to spread their version of reality throughout a larger samsaric territory. A clear expression of this is through the use of material offerings. During the Cow Procession people along the procession route hand out ritualized uncooked rice to the troupe. As the troupe proceeds around the city, its members are also offered material offerings of fruit, water, rice, sugar, and alcohol spirits. Simple refreshments are offered by many households, and more complicated offerings are given by people in mourning, as well as by the neighborhood and other charitable associations. Beyond the creation of a center, material offerings were used in the forged Dewali feast to impose a social structure modeled on an extended family hierarchy. A Dewali feast is usually a way of cementing the relations of an extended family group through the worship of a lineage deity. By appropriating the Ganesha image and contextualizing it in the ritual structure of a Dewali ritual (a ritual normally undertaken for the extended family), the neighborhood in effect imposed this extended family structure onto the neighborhood. This contextualization included the creation of a hierarchy through the disruption of the siu, the eight parts of the goat’s shakti-filled head. As described earlier, after the sacrifice, the goat’s head was cut off and placed on a metal offering plate that also contained other food items. This plate was then set in front of the Ganesha image as food. After the mandatory photos, members of the troupe then took the head, flowers, and rice back as material offerings. These material offerings were then brought back to the Gongah home for the feast that followed. Toward the end of the feast, as everyone was sharing in the sacrificial meal of goat meat, the head was divided into eight parts, and these were distributed in a hierarchical fashion to the eight highest ranking social members of the group. These portions are hierarchically arranged in descending importance: right eye, left eye, right ear, left ear, nose, tongue, right mandible, and left mandible. Thus, the shakti created by the forged goat sacrifice, and transmitted through the material offerings, was used to make an imagined world real.

Conclusion: Forging Mandalic Realities with Prosaic Generative Matrixes At first, the forged goat sacrifice may have seemed an enigma. Why would anyone go to the time and expense of partaking in forged religious practice? What could one hope to gain? Yet, as we have seen, Cow Procession troupes

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do not fall from the air fully formed. Rather, they are shaped by a loose cooperation among kith and kin, neighborhood groups, and citywide and national institutions. While traditional, the outcome of the festival’s generative matrix is not mechanical reproduction of prior rules. Nor is it created wholly by the pure intentional fabrication of individuals. Instead, now that we have, at least in theory, danced and drunk our way around Bhaktapur’s procession route, we find that cadastral generative matrixes can also be improvisational and creative. The Cow Procession is a highly politicized generative matrix in which various groups attempt to improvise with the traditional cultural logics to create a society most in conformity with their interests. If we situate the forged sacrifice in the Cow Procession’s generative matrix, we find that the people of Suryavinayak performed the sacrifice to “stretch” the traditional space of the city by “forging” a new mandala. The forged sacrifice is significant, then, because it demonstrates that traditional religious cultural logics, like mandalization, are not static essences that move unchanged across time and space. Moreover, while in Bhaktapur the roots of some of these religious practices, such as the Cow Procession, can be traced to premodern times, they are archaic neither in the Enlightenment sense of being outmoded nor in the Romantic sense of being static and timeless. While traditional, they are adaptive and improvisational, being shaped and reshaped in response to changing circumstances and new situations (Engler and Grieve 2005).

Conclusion Detailing the Material: A Strategy for Mediating Religion (Dharma) beside the Book

God is in the details. —Mies van der Rohe, “On Restraint in Design” [R]eligions are like technology in that respect: ever present and influential to people’s ability to solve life’s problems day by day. —Vernon Reynolds and Ralph Tanner cited in Lewis, Tuladhar, and Tuladhar, Popular Buddhist Teats

Let us return to Bhairava’s god-image with which the study began. As depicted in the introduction, enthroned on the front of the rectangular three-story major Bhairava temple, this god-image is a “horrifying” six-inch-tall metal figure of the god Shiva that takes the public offerings for the large image of Sky Bhairava ensconced on the second floor. When a statue is given life, it is said that its eyes have been opened, and once the image’s eyes are opened, it gazes back at the worshipers during darshan (dar∂an). Up until now, we have been looking at the god. What happens when the stone-god looks back at us? In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas writes that “everything that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relation represents not the superior form but the forever primitive form of religion” (Levinas 1969, 79). In a sense, Bhairava’s god-image supports and transgresses Levinas’s understanding of the divine. Similarly, my encounter

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with the stone-god—initially humiliating or, at best, frustrating—turned out to be serendipitous. In a skewed Levinasian sense, facing up to the godimage contextualized in his prosaic social practices calls into question many of the scriptural assumptions by which the field of religious studies has operated. As Levinas writes, “[The face-to-face] involves a calling into question of oneself, a critical attitude which is itself produced in the face of the other and under his authority” (1969, 161). What Bhairava’s gaze transgresses is the bookish bias of religious studies that assumes that all religious worlds can be, to coin a phrase, “exegesized” away in print (Graham 1987; Kittler 1999). Religious studies’ preoccupation with reading and writing books has reified scripture; the discipline tends to treat a humanly constructed category as the universal essence of all religions. The mystification of the printed book has lead to scripturalism, a pattern of mediation in which all religious phenomena must pass through the needle’s eye of printed text, which then reifies these texts as both ancient and ahistorical. Rather then basing an analysis on the reading of books, I have argued that to articulate Bhaktapur’s prosaic religious practices one needs to analyze the making of mandalas (ma“πalas). A mandala is a Hindu or Buddhist graphic cosmological image depicted in the form of a circle divided into four separate sections that are usually conceptualized as an arrangement of deities. The difficulty with writing about mandalas in print is the mediating effect, which argues that the media in which we communicate plays a fundamental role in producing the message. When depicted in a book, mandalas lose their generative matrixes, those fields of discourses, practices, institutions, and technologies for making lived worlds. As illustrated in chapter 2, a mandala gains authority because it acts as a ceremonial device that organizes a lived world. Not only symbols of, but models for mandalas are “blueprints” on which reality is based. Their significance is not conventional, but constructive (Mus 1998). My goal here is not to argue that some forms of religious media are more authentic. Rather, my concern is that scholars rarely examine the compatibility of media as a means of acquiring knowledge about those they study. For the field of religious studies, such resignification has both epistemological and political ramifications. Epistemologically, print media perpetuate the assumption that scripture is the legitimate and authoritative essence of religion and thus obscure other cultural practices. Politically, print media tend to cast all other religions as distorted reflections of Christianity and also to reify transcendental religious complexes that perpetuate fundamentalist agendas. If the very medium of print both distorts the making of mandalas and perpetuates a dominating practice, then one needs to address mandalas not as finished products, but rather through the process by which they are

Detailing the Material

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made. For this reason one cannot adopt the aesthetically conservative position of presenting radically different contents by means of traditional academic style. Instead, one needs to take a dialexical stance, which argues that scholarship ought to be a dialog not just at the level of conceptual content, but a discussion at the level of style (lexis). Consequently, Retheorizing Religion in Nepal has addressed the making of mandalas along two lines. First, it has looked to sources other than scripture. Second, rather than forcing these objects to fit within the social logic of the printed book, it has allowed other forms of media and practices to interrupt the field of religious studies: god-images, copybooks, mandala paintings, worship, dance performances, and festivals.

Figure C.1 Sketch illustrating the need for tension in a mandala between center and margin (by Madhu Chitrakar and G. Grieve, 1999 [from author’s collection]).

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Like a magnetic field that disrupts iron filings, or a subatomic particle that leaves a trail in a cloud chamber, the study has traced the making of a mandala by the way its generative matrix interrupts the field of religious studies’ assumptions. The goal of Retheorizing Religion in Nepal has been to produce a creative tension between the printed book and the making of mandalas that itself produces knowledge by expanding how the field writes. To be effective, the strategy taken has been to allow Bhaktapur’s prosaic religion’s generative matrixes to interrupt the writing—both at the level of content and media—of the very book you hold in your hand. This approach grew out of discussions with Mr. Chitrakar. I had asked him which was more important, a mandala’s center or its periphery. Using both spoken words and sketched diagrams, Mr. Chitrakar made it clear that a mandala cannot be reduced to either—it is the tension between these two that gives the image its power (figure C.1). Besides giving a more accurate illustration of Bhaktapur’s religious practices, utilizing the making of mandalas as an analytical model is important because it acts as a meta-model by which to structure the writing itself. This works along two lines. First, the organization of the study is structured on the process by which mandalas are made (figure I.3). Second, each of the book’s chapters has placed a local prosaic religious artifact or practice in dialog with a religious theory, those second-order discourses by which the discipline makes sense of its object of study— namely, religion (table I.1).

Detailing Prosaic Relgion: The Politics and Praxis of Making Mandalic Space Maintaining the dialexical tension, I finish the book by modeling it one last time on the making of mandalas. The final step in the painting of paubha (paubhg) images is the adding of ornaments. Similarly, the final step in Retheorizing Religion in Nepal is the addition of one last story by which I detail the material. In 1987, to mark twelve years of heritage conservation by the German funded Bhaktapur Development Project (BDP), Chancellor Helmut Kohl traveled to Bhaktapur. To commemorate this visit, the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) and the Nepali Department of Archaeology began the reconstruction of Bhaktapur’s Cyasi Mandap. However, in 1989, because of contention over an earthquake-resistant steel frame, the work on the pavilion (mg“πapa) came to a halt. The Germans wanted to leave the frame visible “to mark a ‘contemporary stamp’ on everything that is not authentic,” while Bhaktapur artisans, for aesthetic, traditional, and religious reasons, did not want the frame at all and


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argued that it should at least be covered with carved wooden ornament (Gutschow and Hagmüller 1991, 7). Whose (re)construction of the Cyasi Mandap was more traditional, the GTZ’s or the local artisans’? In a sense, this question is both confusing and devious. It is confusing because it is impossible to say whether the German or the Bhaktapurian view of the pavilion was closest to the original. Not only is little textual or pictorial evidence available, but the pavilion’s original structure was destroyed in the earthquake of 1934. Therefore, as the architects Gutschow and Hagmüller themselves write, the reconstructed pavilion is “basically a copy based largely on ‘creative design’ . . . pure invention” (1991, 5–6). The contention surrounding the Cyasi Mandap reconstruction then cannot be reduced to which side was more correct in its reconstruction of tradition, but to a difference in how the city’s traditional space was imagined. The German side was concerned about the romantic notions of “authenticity” and “development” because it saw the Cyasi Mandap as a piece of tradition to be preserved, while Bhaktapur’s artisans wanted something prosaically effective, because they saw the pavilion as part of their living city. As Madhu Krishna Chitrakar, stated, “[it] did not have religious power (shakti [∂akti]). It is beautiful on the outside, but dead on the inside” (personal communication, May 5, 1999). As my conversation with Madhu fleshed out, it was dead because it no longer played a part in the prosaic religious life of the city. As described in the introduction, and expanded throughout the study, prosaic practices are a pragmatic ritual repertoire that includes ceremonies, rites of passage, and religious processions. They are creative mediated action performed in relation to a specific problem by which people use the sacred to create a social world most in their interest. The pavilion was “dead” according to Madhu, then, because it had been transformed from a working piece of prosaic religious technology that generated a mandalic cosmology into a historical monument that perpetuated the tourist and government agendas. The question of the pavilion’s authenticity is devious then because it obscures a whole history of the use of space, which at the same time would be a history of power and politics. To understand how power and politics functions in “traditional” cities such as Bhaktapur, however, one needs to analyze one last term, namely “religion.”

The Politics of Mediation: Illustrating Religion (Dharma) beside the Book Madhu’s position that the pavilion is “not-effective,” also forces one to retheorize the category of religion (dharma). What Bhaktapur’s prosaic

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religious practices indicate is that the theoretical category of religion is not an essential term of either an ideological or theological nature. Nor is it simply what the scholar imagines it to be (Smith 1992). Religion draws its significance from it social uses, and thus implies relations of power. This power relation is clearest in what is right before our eyes; that is, the material graphic marks ( “( )” ) that separate and transform “dharma” into “religion.” This silent but significant material detail conceals the politics of mediation by which Hinduism has been stripped of its prosaic parasites. Often unwittingly paired with its shadow, magic, religion tends to be reserved for pious understanding, while magic deals with superstitious things. Such dichotomies do not work for analyzing Bhaktapur’s prosaic religion. In short, the graphic brackets printed at the top of the paragraph cause dharma to be appropriated by the category of religion and thus perpetuate a long history of colonial and modern categories for overcoding what is other than European Enlightenment thought. Because the term dharma developed in a different culture and history, however, it glosses a different referent than does religion (Creel 1972; Koller 1972). In Hinduism, “dharma” can mean law, moral obligations, duty or even life style. Two additional differences are that each person’s dharma differs depending on their social context (caste, stage of life, gender, geographic location, family custom, etc.), and that the lived exercise of dharma is more orthopraxic than orthodoxic, more practice than belief. Beyond these differences a more fundamental divergence emerges when one analyzes Bhaktapur’s prosaic practices. While the discipline of religious studies tends to interpret religious phenomena as reflections of an unseen reality—from ideology to the sacred, in Bhaktapur dharma is used to describe world generating acts. That is, rather than asking the elite question “what is religion,” people in Bhaktapur tend to ask the more pragmatic question of “what can religion do.” There are politics involved in such mediation. By covering up details, one masks prosaic practices. A similar postcolonial structural strategy underlies both the GTZ’s reconstruction of the Cyasi Mandap and religious studies’ mediation of Hinduism. In both instances there tends to be a romantic search for “authentic origins” that trivializes the use of material objects by contemporary people. By maintaining a creative tension between “religion” and “dharma,” Retheorizing Religion in Nepal has sought to illustrate the process by which people use prosaic religious practices to construct lived worlds. At the most rudimentary level, then, what this book has illustrated, is that while people make their own reality, they do not make it just as they please. And they make it not under circumstances they themselves have chosen, but under circumstances found, given, and historically transmitted. People do have a choice in what they do and imagine. Yet these


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choices are not completely random or unencumbered. In the tug-of-war between goals and possibilities, one of the most important forms of tradition are the religious practices that I have defined as prosaic. Illustrating religion beside the book, then, is not merely a matter of problematizing academic categories. It is a way to recover the agency of the people who live in Bhaktapur. Prosaic religious agency solves the seeming paradox of how Bhaktapur can both be traditional and house one of the strongest politically radical municipalities in Nepal. Among all the municipalities in Nepal, Bhaktapur has been one of the most effective at negotiating the obstacle course of progressive politics, tourism, development, and tradition. Using traditional practices does not imply a dichotomy with modernity, the holding of radically different views, or even overt conflict and struggle. It does imply, however, that by compiling worlds, people can improvise so as to fashion new lived realities based upon traditional models. While the city has definitely changed, rather than diminishing the importance of tradition and religion, modernity in the last forty years has, if anything, intensified the practices that surround them. Prosaic religious practices have been one of the chief ways that modernity has been domesticated. As phenomena such as the pavilion’s ornament shows, while prosaic religious practices can be called traditional, they are not merely the remnants of the past—ornament added to what is really real. Prosaic religious practices are a crucial element of a contemporary space— the contemporary lived world of Bhaktapur. Moreover, while Bhaktapur is an ancient city with a deep and rich heritage, it is not a city that has proceeded unchanging since the Middle Ages. Bhaktapur’s heritage is not a lingering social fossil, but a “compiling” of modern transnational forces with prosaic religious practices. A traditional city then should be distinguished not by its authenticity, but by the style in which it is imagined. In fact, phenomena such as the pavilion show that, in the Kathmandu Valley, modernity does not always destroy tradition (and, by proxy, religion), but that, often, tradition is an effective tool by which people compile modern objects and practices for their own traditional pragmatic uses. On a general level then, it is my contention that scholars of religion ought to approach the people they study as purposeful agents actively engaged in a world they themselves create. More specifically, Bhaktapur’s prosaic worlds are not “superstitions” that can be explained away as lingering romantic fossils, but are rather lived realities that must be taken seriously as possible alternative social formations.


Notes

INTRODUCTION: PREPARING THE MATERIALS: PROLEGOMENON FOR A STUDY OF PROSAIC RELIGION 1. The graphic brackets—e.g. the physical marks “( )” upon the page—that separate but at the same time bring together the terms “dharma” and “religion” hide a whole host of orientalist power relations. At this point, there is neither the space nor the necessary theoretical apparatus to analyze the ramifications of translating dharma as religion. For this reason, I leave this for the book’s conclusion (page 135–137). 2. In this study, I am concerned with writing religion and tradition in Bhaktapur and hence do not have the space to effectively trace the vein of scripturalism through religious studies. However, I would suggest that it can be found in Emile Durkheim’s notion of religion as society, which is expressed through collective representations (1965, 22, 29, 462–75); Ludwig Feuerbach’s conception of God as the image of Man (1957, 12–14, 17–20, 25–26, 29–31); Sigmund Freud’s notion of religion as wish fulfillment (1964, 21–28, 34–35, 47–50, 81–82); Carl Jung’s notion of archetype (1972, 148, 171, 223); Mircea Eliade’s modalities of the sacred (1958, 1–2, 11, 13, 29, 38–40, 154–63, 367–86, 445–47), to mine just a small amount of this rich ore. 3. Following Dipesh Chakrabarty, by “Western” I do not mean the region of the world we call the West. Instead, “I seek to provincialize and decenter an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thought that invariably subtend attempts in the social sciences to address questions of political modernity in South Asia” (2000, 3–4). 4. I borrow the concept of a transcendental complex from David Mandelbaum, who has proposed that two quite distinct complexes of belief and practice coexist in South Asian religions (1966; cf. Babb 1975). On the one hand is the transcendental complex, which is concerned with universal or ultimate problems. This complex tends to lie in the jurisdiction of religious experts and centers on deities and concepts derived from texts. On the other is the “pragmatic complex,” which has to do with the exigencies of prosaic life. It tends to be the jurisdiction of the nonpriestly specialist and mainly involves the lesser deities of local tradition. The difference between the transcendental and pragmatic complexes

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

Notes should not be seen as a dichotomy between “great” and “little” or between “standard” and “folk” religion (Singer 1972; Ramanujan 1973). To be clear, my argument is not that Hinduism is more prosaic than other religions. I do not claim that Hinduism is somehow more magical. Rather, because of the scripturalist bias against “low” forms of religion, the prosaic element has tended to be ignored generally by the discipline of religious studies. In fact, such de facto pragmatism goes not just for Hinduism and Buddhism, and not just for Bhaktapur. If one looks at almost all religious practices—from tape-recorded sermons in contemporary Egypt and the use of medieval manuscripts in Europe, to late classical symbolism in the Roman Empire and the “Jesus fish” found on many contemporary American bumpers—most people most of the time are concerned with religion’s pragmatic material worldly aspect (Goodenough 1937; Hamburger 1990; Hirschkind 2001; McDannell 1996). I’ve placed quotes around “Hindu” because the Hindu myth of the of the earth being supported by turtles seems to be more a myth about Hindu epistemology as seen by Europeans than an actual myth stemming from within the context of Hinduism. I have found this myth as being told by an Asian woman to Joseph Campbell; by an elderly lady to William James (personal communication, Wendy Doniger, September 2004); and by a Balinese man to Clifford Geertz (1973).The trail seems to go cold in the year 1690 in John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (book 1, chap. 8, p. 19; and chap. 23, p. 2; cited in Halbfass 1988, 62 [personal communication, Richard King, December 2005]). On the relationship between ekphrasis and representation see (Heffeman 1991). Because Sullivan fails to foreground the agency and creativity of these other knowledges, he ignores power and often ends up reproducing asymmetrical power relations. For instance, in his essay “Sacred Music and Sacred Time,” he describes the initiation of Shipibo girls (1984). For him, the girls’ initiation rite is just another example of sacred time, and he fails to take account of the girls’ own “experience” of clitorectomy at the end of the ceremony. Similarly, in Icanchu’s Drum, by abstracting sacred time he fails to see the patriarchal power relations inherent in the symbolism he is describing (1988, 261–64). For the patriarchal power of menstruation rites, see Bruce Lincoln (1981). The notion that paubhas are pragmatic remedies is not outside their in situ use. Many contemporary nontourist paubha images are used as medicines. I have seen images painted to heal diseases ranging from shingles (herpes zoster) to postpartum depression and spider bites. “Cadastral logic” is defined below on pages 16–19. “Dialexis” is defined below on pages 20–21. Considering that Nepal was never officially colonized, “postcolonial” in the narrow sense—as the time following the establishment of independence in a colony—may not seem to accurately describe Bhaktapur’s interstate relations. However, if one understands postcolonial more broadly—as the way Europe and the United States maintained their global dominance by misrepresenting

Notes

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

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other cultures after the decolonization that followed World War II—then it is an apt description (Bhabha 1994). I did not fall comfortably into a sense that my work could be a “tool of the dominance,” but was rather pushed into it by the historic and geographic circumstances of my research. This became especially apparent on a local and very personal level when I was helping a local pundit man his general store. He turned and explained why he did not like to be tape-recorded: “[Another Western scholar] had come over to our house for four hours a day for five months, my family had fed him, and shown all types of courtesies; but [that scholar] hadn’t even sent me a book afterwards” (personal communication, August 7, 1997). He went on to say that this looked bad for Americans. He said that if he goes to the toilet, and it is messy, then he flushes it and makes sure it is clean. Even if he did not make the mess, because since he was the last one there, he will be held accountable. Obviously, he was implying me. In Bhaktapur, both Buddhist and Hindu practices intermingle, and most people tended not to talk about these traditions by name, but rather to talk about “religion.” This was not true, however, for the forty Muslim families with whom I spoke. Muslims tended to see their religion as essentially different and did not participate in the festivals of the city. The clearest definition Levy gives of Hinduism is as follows: “When contrasted with Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (other than its Vajrayana and Tantric varieties), Hinduism is a peculiar contemporary religion. Ahistorical (without a heroic, that is, transcending, founder, and without a future to be obtained through some progressive struggle of faith, wisdom, or rectitude); rooted in local space, local population, and a local inheritance; distributive of its godhead into a pantheon of meaningful and immanent gods—essential resources for organization of space, time, and community; insisting on the inclusion of social order and social behavior with the sacred realm; insisting on the presence of the sacred in the here and now, and not restricted and banished to the eschatological beginnings and endings and distant heavens—Hinduism is in many of its features, which contrast with the ‘world historical religions,’ a system for and of what we have called ‘archaic urban order’ “ (1990, 27–28). Cf. Dutt 1977; Gellner 1985, 1992; Levy 1990; Kramrish 1964; Shepard 1985; Slusser 1982; Wheatley 1971. Levy never directly attributes the notion of mesocosm to Mus. He does, however, refer to Mus’s articles “Symbolism á Ankor Thom” (1936) and “Angkor in the Time of Jayavaruman Vii” (1937) with which he was acquainted through Wheatley (1971) (cf. Levy 1990, 268). Levy was also exposed to Mus’s Barabudur (Mus 1998 [1935]) through Zimmer (1951) (Levy 1990, 406). Levy hints at the difference between a generative image and a representative image (cf. 1990, 757, fn. 2), yet his analysis of Bhaktapur operates as if religious practices are logocentric symbols that represent an underlying structure and not models that generate the sacred social world of the city (cf. Levy 1990, 15, 499–500, 600–601). Mus 1998; cf. http://www.skidmore.edu/academics/asianstudies/new2/linrothe/ Mangyu [accessed March 14, 2005].

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Notes

20. See cf., Apffel-Marglin 1990; Aronowitz 1988; Ashcroft et al. 1989; Babb 1995; Briggs 1986; Fabian 1983; Ginzburg 1980; King 1980; Le Goff 1977; Tyler 1986.

1

FRAMING THE STUDY: THEORIZING THE HISTORIES OF TRADITION IN BHAKTAPUR, NEPAL

1. There are other important notions of “tradition,” such as the Nepali nationalistic use of the term. However, at the present time in Bhaktapur, the romantichistoricist and prosaic tradition (parampara) notions are not only the most significant ones, but are often used to resist the “Nepali” understanding (Burghart 1984; Caplan 1975; Kothari 1984). 2. Nepal National Archives Catalogue ms. 1.1314, Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project, Reel no. B 18/23 (cf. Vajracarya and Malla 1985). 3. I worked with a facsimile copy of the manuscript compiled, with commentaries, by Dhanavajra Vajracarya and Kamal P. Malla (1985). The manuscript is a palm-leaf document, measuring twenty-eight by five centimeters and consisting of forty-eight folios. The script is fly-headed (bhuji(n) mola) and was copied by a single hand (except for folio 46b). A few pages are moth-eaten or faded from age. The chronicle, by matter of convention, has been divided by scholars into three sections (V1, V2, and V3). V1 and V2 are loosely related. Starting with the end of the Kali Yuga and the emergence of Pashupatinath’s fiery phallus in the Valley and ending with the Muslim invasions and Jayasthitirajaamalla’s reign, V2 and V3 are basically the same narrative but were separated because of a slight break where a double // da“da occurs, bringing the events up to the reign of Jayasthitirajaamalla. 4. While based on oral accounts, I was worried that the information may incriminate people, especially with the change in Nepal’s political climate. Accordingly, when it comes to discussion of politics, I do not use the names of the sources from whom I received the material and have instead compiled it as a narrative.

2

LAYING DOWN THE GRID: COSMOLOGY AND THE PLACE OF TRADITION IN BHAKTAPUR, NEPAL

1. Myth operates as a form of “language robbery” that lays down a second order of meaning onto ordinary first-order language objects (Barthes 1972, 111–17, 131–37). Barthes gives an example of a language object, a Paris-Match cover

Notes

2.

3.

4. 5.

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which shows “a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting” (1972, 116). On a first order, “a black soldier is simply giving the French salute” (Barthes 1972, 116, italics in original). On the second level of myth, the image signifies “that France is a great empire, that all her sons, without any color discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors” (Barthes 1972, 116). With Barthes’ model of myth as “language robbery” in mind, by “space” I refer to “a first-order abstract territory”—such as that of an aerial photograph—that exists before it is mediated by ideology. However, as the postfeminist debate over “sex” and “gender” suggests (or for that matter debates about photography itself ), such a pure unmediated reality cannot exist (cf. Barthes 1974). Accordingly, much as Ash and Chagnon used their film rushes from The Ax Fight (1975), their documentary about the Yanomamo, as a benchmark against which to measure mediation, I use the concept of “raw space” as a compass point by which to evaluate Bhaktapur’s cosmologies today. Moreover, so as not to fall naïvely into a trope of pure space-in-itself, my use of ideology stems from the work of Louis Althusser (1971). Because of human beings’ reliance on language, Althusser felt it was impossible to access our real conditions of existence, and thus he moved away from the earlier Marxist understanding of ideology as simply “false consciousness.” Instead, for Althusser, ideology represents the material practices by which subjects interact with their imagined conditions of existence. Of crucial importance for him is that ideology is not an outside “object” that happens to a “subject.” Instead, according to Althusser, the main purpose of ideology is in “constituting concrete individual subjects” (1971, 116). So pervasive is ideology in its constitution of subjects that it forms our very frame and thus appears as not only undeniably “true” but overwhelmingly “obvious.” “[I]deology never says, ‘I am ideological’ ” (1971, 118). Such interpellation is usually addressed in the second person, “you.” For that reason, this chapter consciously uses the second-person address as a style to frame the three maps. I attempt to give an experience of how such interpellative apparati embed the different cosmologies into the landscape (cf. Fludernik 1993). My strategy stems from Walter Benjamin’s space projects and his understanding of “literary montage” (1978, 1996c, 1999a; cf. Buck-Morss 1989). My use of the second person also stems from the work of the Situationists and their notion of “psycho-geography” (Debord 1987). Cf. Dutt 1977; Gellner 1985, 1992; Kramrisch 1964; Levy 1990; Shepard 1985; Slusser 1982; Wheatley 1971. While there are many cosmographic images of Bhaktapur (cf. Slusser 1982) I concentrate on the mandala map for two reasons. First, during my ethnography, it was referred to by numerous informants (Grieve 2002). Second, this image has been referenced frequently in scholarly literature. For instance, J. B. Harley and David Woodward mention a 1925 copy based on an older model (1992, 456). And Bernard Klöver published a similar image, in “A Ritual Map from Nepal,” owned by a resident of Bhaktapur, Ratnaraj Sharma (Klöver 1976, 70). Anne Vergati submitted a paper entitled “The Representation of Newar

144

6.

7.

8.

9.

Notes

Towns in Paintings” on this subject in a conference, which was held on June 19–22, 2003, at the Institute of Indology and Central Asian Studies, University of Leipzig. The scholarly information is important because much information about Bhaktapur’s religion is secret, and thus while I know religious practices are important for configuring space, I do not wish to give examples from my own fieldwork. For reasons indicated in footnote 5, I concentrate on the mother goddesses because they have been detailed by other scholars. Other gods marked by the map are the eight Ganeshas, ten Mahavidyas, and eight Bhairavas, which also play a part in Bhaktapur’s ritual structure. However, because of the secret nature of tantric knowledge, I have found it unethical to report upon them. By relying on this already public account, I can express pertinent information without divulging secrets. Barthes originally introduced the “awkward” neologism governmentality to describe those discourses that make the government seem like an effective agent (1972). Foucault builds upon this understanding, and posits governmentality as a form of power that is exercised through an ensemble of institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, which results in the formation of specific governmental apparatuses and of a whole complex of power. According to Edward Said, orientalism refers to three intertwined phenomena (1978). First, an orientalist is anyone who claims to have expert knowledge or a special understanding of oriental cultures. Second, orientalism is a style of discourse based upon the assumption that there is an ontological and epistemological distinction between the “East” and “West.” And third, “Orientalism can be discussed . . . as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1978, 2–3). Cf. Boorstin 1964; Cohen 1982; Coppock 1978; Debord 1987; Eco 1986; Kunwar 1997; MacCannell 1973, 1989; Toffler 1971.

3 SKETCHING THE CENTRAL POINT: CADASTRAL GOD-IMAGES AND THE POLITICS OF SCRIPTURAL MEDIATION 1. Ironically, while scholars were engaged in scripturalism, the government of the Raj and other English institutions actually partook of a dialog of ritualism and material culture (Waghorne 1985). 2. “Iatrogenic” is a medical term that describes an illness or symptoms that are induced in a patient as the result of a physician’s words or action. It is also used in the field of social welfare to describe a problem induced by the means of treating a problem. I borrow this usage for theorizing in religious studies from Richard King (1999). 3. For instance, Bruce Lincoln, in “Revolutionary Exhumations in Spain,” describes “profanophanies,” instances in which the church was shown to be not eternal but “in full temporal reality: a human institution, not one divine”

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(Lincoln 1989, 125). While appearing to be the opposite of symbolism, such idolic reduction—to coin a phrase—also operates through scriptural revelatory terms, because, as Lincoln writes, the exhumations reveal not an “assault on religion per se, but rather on one specific religious institution” (Lincoln 1989, 127). 4. This missive, posted by “Chadan,” is based on an article by Dr. David Frawley (also known as Vamadeva Shastri), of the American Institute of Vedic Studies (http://www.vedanet.com/ accessed February 26, 2005). “Redactions” of this article are found across the Web. 5. These were collected by David White; the source is the Bhaktapur historian Dr. Purushottam Lochann Shrestha. The list can be found in Grieve 2002.

4

ILLUSTRATING SAMSARA: RELIGIOUS “RECIPES” FOR MAKING A PROSAIC LIVED WORLD 1. Mr. Chitrakar’s use of “yama” and “niyama” comes from the yogic concepts of ethical commands and prohibitions, the first two limbs of Patanjali’s Astangayoga as outlined in the Yoga Sutra. These should not be confused with the Nepali “Yam,” god of the underworld, or the word “yam,” which indicates a period of time of around three hours. 2. The most vital material is pure unbroken husked rice (kigah). Some of the other chief elements of worship are three kinds of pure water (na:ng, ning, and ga(n)gg jal), pigments (sinha[n], mhgsusinha[n], bhuisinha[n] etc.), rice (wg, jgki, gkhye, wgkijgki, jg, matgki, etc.), samae baji (a mixture of beaten rice, popped rice [tge(n)], dried fish, roasted meat, eggs, soybeans, and ginger), and swaga(n) (a mixture of kigah, tge[n], curds, and abir [a red pigment]). Beyond these most basic substances, Rajopadhyaya Brahmins list over two hundred materials that are necessary for more complex worship—cleaning materials, leaves and grasses, flowers, other foodstuffs, alcohol, sacrificial animals, products of the cow, threads, oil lamp wicks, cosmetics kits, and unglazed dishes to name just a few.

5

PERFORMING PROSAIC TANTRA: JHINJAN MINJAN DANIGU’S ANIMATING AFFECT AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 1. One could further argue that this vertical axis is also created through both Newar Hindu and Buddhist esoteric tantric practices which directly use mandala worship. However, for reasons detailed in footnote five of chapter 2, I hold that is unethical to report such practices.

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2. This ceremony is known as pratisha karma puja; much has been written on this process. I am concerned here with how once the eyes are opened, they continue to stay open. 3. Following Erving Goffman, I define “performance” broadly as “all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some effect on the observers”(1959, 22; cf. Artaud 1958; Bénamou and Caramello 1977; Blau 1996; Carlson 1996; Carr 1993; Kaye 1994; Sayre 1989; Tambiah 1979). Milton Singer argues that the phrase “cultural performance” accurately maps a category recognized by and salient to people in South Asia (1955). 4. In the simplest terms, tantra stands for a collection of practices and symbols of ritualistic, sometimes magical, character, which form an esoteric religious tradition founded on practice (Brooks 1990, 20–25, 85). In any case, tantra is used as a blanket term by South Asians as well as Western scholars to designate a body of practices and theory that, from the sixth century C.E. on, was a mainstream Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina practice (Brooks 1990, 48–55). Yet, in the end, tantra is a complex historical current, and its varied and complicated nature renders a single definition almost impossible (Goudriaan and Gupta 1981, 5). Still, while a “fuzzy” referent, when applied in context, tantra serves to gloss certain esoteric ritual discourses and practices (cf. Sanderson 1986, 660; Smith 1994). 5. I would like to thank Gary L. Ebersole (University of Missouri-Kansas City) for his insight into the role of emotional discourses in religion. 6. As such, nirvana is not merely an empty space, but a nowhere, a not-yet, a noncreated space (Mus 1998, 316). As Mus writes, “The nirvana is neither existence nor non-existence, neither one and the other, nor the negation of the two” (Mus 1998, 272). In a nutshell, as Stephan Beyer has translated Nagarjuna’s definition of nirvana, it “isn’t is, (isn’t isn’t) isn’t is, and isn’t isn’t isn’t is and isn’t” (1974, 214). To push this definition one further step, it is “nothing.” 7. In the history of religions, the sentiment of the sublime comes to rest firmly on the notion of religious experience. For William James, religious experience was the total reaction to the divine, the blooming, buzzing confusion that individuals feel in connection with the transcendent (1990). In the twentieth century, especially for the history of religions, the sentiment of the sublime has become an important means for describing religiosity. This is most apparent in the work of Rudolf Otto, for whom the numinous can only be suggested by that feeling (mysterium tremendum) of being overwhelmed by the totally other (1958). For example, as Otto writes in Idea of the Holy, “So that the idea of the sublime is closely similar to that of the numinous and is well adapted to excite and to be excited by it” (1958, 42). This is “a proof that there exists a hidden kinship between the numinous and the sublime which is something more than a merely accidental analogy, and to which Kant’s Critique of Judgment bears distant witness” (1958, 63).

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6

BRINGING A FORGED MANDALA TO LIFE: THE COW PROCESSION AND THE IMPROVISATION OF CADASTRAL GENERATIVE MATRIXES 1. See Levy 1990, 442–542. For non-Bhaktapurian versions, see Anderson 1971, and Nepali 1965. 2. The most obvious example for North America is Halloween and the Day of the Dead (Dia de Los Muertos) (Beezley 1994; Carmichael and Sayer 1992). The Dominican carnival in Santo Domingo has a figure who wears the classic skeleton and skull attire, always seeking to frighten others. Holding a scythe, Death grabs children by their feet so that they can be hit by the Diablos with their air-filled bladders. This figure is popularly known as “La Muerte en Yipe” (Death Driving a Jeep) (Aching 2002). In Russia funeral ceremonies like those of “Burying the Carnival” and “Carrying out Death” are celebrated under the names, not of Death or The Carnival, but of certain mythic figures, Kostrubonko, Kostroma, Kupalo, Lada, and Yarilo (Bueno-Román 1990). It can also be seen in the English “Dance of Death” (Boughton 1913). At Tabor in Bohemia, Death is also vanquished. 3. With the help of others sitting around the table, he supplied the following historical legend. In what I would call a classic example of collective agency, the story here was fleshed out not only by Mr. Jha, but by all those at the table. It would be hard to pin it down to a specific person, and it would be better in effect to cite it at the level of conversation. 4. This tale is related to the Buddhist story of the mustard seed and Hindu folk tales of the laughing queen, except in the case of the Cow Procession the populace, outraged at this indignity, dressed up instead in garish costumes to taunt the king (Wendy Doniger, personal communication, June 2002). 5. Bhaktapur’s procession route moves within the city as a meandering oval. Dutt (1977, 33) shows that in an ideal Hindu city, the Pradaksinapatha should circumambulate the outside wall. Slusser (1982, 1, 93) argues that this was the case of Kathmandu. Barré et al. (1981, 40f ) argues that for places such as the Newar village of Panauti, the processional route acts as a boundary of purity. It runs through all the city’s neighborhoods but one and proceeds past all the most important temples and public spaces (Gutschow 1980). 6. It was said that during the Malla period, officials would count the cows so as to tell the number and type of people who died during the preceeding year. More recently, in 1988, five hundred were counted (Gert Wagner, personal communication, August 1997). 7. There is an exception to this with the Lakulachen (sub)twah. As a climax to the festival, they enter themselves as group along with anyone else who wants to join in the festivities. They carry a tall image of a cow float dressed as the god Bhairava (Levy 1990, 445–46).

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8. Such derision is not merely symbolic—the Cow Procession is seen as a time of intensified political strife. The most obvious example, as touched upon in chapter 1, is the Hyonju incident, in which Mr. Hyonju—who was seen as a “turncoat” by many locals—was beaten into unconsciousness and later died in the hospital after been dragged around the procession route close to the time of the Cow Procession (cf. Grieve 2002, 51–52; Calise 1994). 9. Aaron Gurevich (1985) problematizes Bakhtin’s understanding of medieval carnival. Gurevich argues that we need to be grounded in the “world picture” of the Middle Ages to understand their festivals. As such, we need to adjust our interpretive efforts—rather than arguing for the structural reversal and absurdity of festivals, we need to rethink such basic categories as time and space in lieu of medieval reality. While I agree that Gurevich is correct, his observations do not necessarily affect my use of Bakhtin’s notion of carnival as a heuristic interpretative category. 10. One needs to theoretically differentiate between such concepts as Victor Turner’s “anti-structure,” and the minimally structured generative matrixes that are being analyzed here (cf. 1967, 1969, 1974, 1985; also see Levy 1990, 451). The fake sacrifice is more than just a liminal creation of communitas—it is the generation of a new social world. Moreover, while the Cow Procession may call into question certain economic and political structures, it is not “liminoid” in the sense of existing outside of them (Turner 1974). 11. For instance, Levy defines it as a “anti-structural local festival” (1990, 451). 12. This has changed since 1995. Currently, because of the influx of carpet factories and other small-scale industry, many lower-income low-pay wage earners have come to live in the area. These people are usually not Newar and come from India and from the lowlands of Nepal.

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Index

agency, 121–3 Americans, 31–2, 38; tourists as, 32–3 aniconic, 18, 84–6, 95 apparatus, interpellative, see interpellative apparatus artifact, cartographic, see cartographic artifact authoritative lexicon, 51, 53–5, 56–8, 60–1 authority, 14, 54, 58; of the book, 6

Bhavacakra see “Wheel of Life” painting book, 4–8, 19, 132–3; authority of, 6; scripturalism and, 132; strategy for mediating knowledge, 72–4 Brahmin, 2, 12, 14, 57, 63, 77–8, 97, 104, 109 Buddha, 18, 38, 79 Buddhism, 61; and mutually dependent origination, 98–9; and samsara (sa®sgra), 97

Bhairava, 2, 23, 40, 43, 44, 56, 89–90; and Biskah festival, 43, 78, 80, 81, 95, 122; dance of, 110–12; fecundity of, 82–3; god-image of, 69–72, 79–86, 94–5, 131–2; as a murti (m˚rti), 72; names and forms of, 79–82; origin myth of, 82–3; and sacrifice, 105–7, 110–12; Sky, 2, 28, 80–1, 131; as stone-god, 94–5 Bhaktapur, xvii, xix, 4, 12, 14, 20, 30–4; architecture of, 1, 77; and Bhairava, 69–72; Cow Procession in, 117–30; festivals in, 122–3; geography of, 1, 38–9, 53; history of, 22; mandala (ma“πala) of, 53–6; otherness of, 44–5; politics in, 52, 58–9; prosaic religious practice of, 79–80, 136–7; religion of, 12–13, 24, 121–2; Suryavinayak neighborhood of, 126–30; and tourism, 40, 42–5, 49–52; tradition of, 62–5; as traditional city, 23, 27–8, 40, 45–7, 50; worship in, 87–101 Bhaktapur Development Project (BDP), 27, 30, 34–7, 41, 47, 64, 66, 134

cadastral, 18–19; authoritative lexicon, 4, 53; deities, 23; generative matrix, 79–80, 86, 99–100, 103, 107, 115–30; historiography, 31; lived world, 87–101; mandala (ma“πala), 52; practice, 24, 54–5, 110; sign object, 18–19, 54–5; social logic and practices, 72, 97, 101; tradition, 45; worship, 86 cartographic artifact, 51, 53, 56, 60 caste, 5, 12, 17, 52, 63, 78, 112–13, 119–20, 122–3, 126, 136 chronicle, 31, 38–40; see also Gopalarajavamshavali; Nepalko Prajatantrik Andolanma Bhaktapurko Bhumika copybook (hgkusaphu), 9, 37–8, 45, 69, 133 cosmology, 9, 22–3, 50, 63; government as, 47; mandala (ma“πala) as, 4, 23, 47, 66; as myth about space, 51; tourism as, 47 Cow Procession, 9, 15, 24, 115, 117–30; as generative matrix, 123–6;

170

Index

Cow Procession––continued gunhipunhi, 121, 128; history of, 118–19 Cyasi Mandapa, 9, 24, 134–5 darshan (dar∂an), 24, 85–6, 104, 131 democracy, 39, 41, 124 development, 42, 50, 56–9, 135, 137; bikas, 58; ideology of, 44, 57–8; myth of, 52, 58, 66 dharma, 2, 12, 135–7; as duty, 109; as religion, 2, 85 dialexis, 11, 19, 20–1, 133 discourse, 5, 22, 36–7, 51; and development, 58; of gaze darshan (dar∂an), 24, 104; tourist, 27, 60–1; see also interpellative apparatus divine, 18–19, 23, 54, 55, 89–90; “eyes and ears” of, 103; and god-image, 74, 131–2; see also cadastral effect, mediating, see mediating effect English (language), xviii, xix, 30, 45 ethnography, 10–11, 23, 86 “eyes and ears”, 23–4, 95–7; worship giving the divine, 103 festival, 117–30; Biskah, 43, 78, 80, 81, 95, 122; Cow Procession, 115, 117–30 forged, see nakali, sacrifice Ganesh, 62, 63, 79, 90, 109, 116, 128, 129 gender, 122–3, 136 generative matrix, 6, 11, 19, 20–1; Bhaktapur as, 101; cadastral, 79–80, 86, 92, 99–100, 103, 107, 115–30; mandala (ma“πala) as, 132, 134; Mr. Chitrakar as, 20; prosaic, 34, 134; of scripturalism, 72–4; worship as, 23, 88 ghentan ghesin twa, 120, 124–5, 128 globalization, 32, 66 god, 77–9 god-image, 2, 9, 12, 18, 23, 35, 53, 74–9, 94, 133; as alive, 84–6, 104; of Bhairava, 69–72, 79–86, 94–5, 131–2; non-scriptural view of, 72–4; and shakti

(∂akti), 109; worship of, 122; see also lohandyah (Loha[n]dya:), murti (m˚rti), puja (p˚jg) Gopalarajavamshavali, 31, 38–40 government, 23; map, 51–2, 56–9, 66; His Majesty’s Government of Nepal (HMG), 34 hakusaphu (hgkusaphu), see copybook hierarchy, 21, 63; of knowledge, 14–15 Hinduism, 2, 5, 13–16, 24, 25; 61, 86, 136; and mutually dependent origination, 98–9; scriptural conception of, 13, 15, 65; and samsara (sa®sgra), 97; and scripturalism, 72–4, 75–7; Upanishadic interpretation of, 17, 54 historiography, 22, 29–31, 37, 43, 45–7 Hitopadesha, 99–100 human, 18–19, 54, 89–90; see also cadastral Hyonju incident, 42 icon, 76, 77, 84–6 idolatry, 23, 71; as mediating strategy, 74–7 interpellative apparatus, 4, 51, 55–6, 58–9, 61–2 jhijnjan minjan, 24, 55, 103–14; as religious sentiment, 112–13 Kant, Immanuel, 110–14 karma, 11, 97–8, 101, 110; radical materialism of, 98 Kathmandu, 1, 41, 42, 43, 56, 126 Kathmandu Valley, 1, 16, 37, 42, 80, 83, 100, 128, 137 Khwopa, see Bhaktapur kigah (kiga:) (ritualized polished rice), 90–1, 96, 100, 127, 145n2 Krishna, 121, 128 Levy, Robert, 5, 13–16, 17, 30, 77, 107, 140n17; see also mesocosm

Index lexicon, authoritative, see authoritative lexicon lexis (style), 31; see also dialexis lived world, 11; see also cadastral, samsara (sa®sgra) lohandyah (loha[n]dya:), 9, 69–72, 85 mandala (ma“πala), 3–5, 7, 15, 18–24, 83, 90–2, 115, 133; as authoritative lexicon, 51, 53–5; Bhairava as hub of, 83; as cartographic artifact, 51–2; as cosmology, 4, 23, 47, 132; forged, 24, 116, 127–9, 130; as generative matrix, 132, 134; as interpellative apparatus, 51, 55–6; making of, 7–10, 11, 16–19, 132–4; map, 4, 18–19; as “metamodel”, 7, 9, 21–4; nakali and sakali, 115; as object of worship, 95, 145n1; as prototypical god, 18; as tantric “magical” diagram, 4, 17, 54; sacrifice and, 116, 127–9; and yantra, 69; Yantrakara Khwopa Dey, 17, 51, 53–6 mantra, 91, 94 map, 9, 51–64; as authoritative lexicon, 51, 53–5, 56–8, 60–1, as cartographic artifact, 51, 53, 56, 60; government, 51, 56–9; as interpellative apparatus, 51, 55–6, 58–9, 61–2; mandala (ma“πala) as, 4, 51, 52–6; tourist, 23, 51, 59–62 matrix, generative, see generative matrix media, 4, 6, 19–21, 132 mediating effect, 11, 19–20 mediating strategy, 86, 131–7; book as, 72–4; idolatry as, 74–7; symbolism as, 74–7 mediation, 2, 5, 9, 19–21, 71; religion as, 3; scripturalism and, 23, 72–4; see also mediating effect, mediating strategy mesocosm, 53–5, 140n17; Mesocosm, 5, 13–16, 17–18, 77; see also Levy, Robert; Mus, Paul mha, 85–6, 88; see also Mha Puja Mha Puja, 23, 88, 90–2, 100–1 modernity, 24, 27, 32–4, 38, 58, 137; as pollution, 30; and tradition, 28–9, 30, 45, 63–4

171

money, 32, 33, 62, 65 murti (m˚rti), 2, 71–2, 94–5; see also god-image Mus, Paul, 17–19, 25, 53–5, 101, 103, 110, 116, 140n17; see also mesocosm myth, 27, 50–1, 142–3n1, 143n2; and development, 52, 58, 66 nakali, 115–16; and imitation, 116 Navadurga, 9, 70, 79, 105–6, 110–11, 112–13 Nepali, 4, 45 Nepalko Prajatantrik Andolanma Bhaktapurko Bhumika, 31, 39–40 Nepal Workers and Peasants Party (NWPP), 1, 28, 39–40, 41–4, 46, 56, 59, 121 Newar, xix, 10, 16, 38, 60, 77, 85–6, 93, 109 nirvana, 10, 19, 54, 55, 101, 110, 116, 146n6 NWPP, see Nepal Workers and Peasants Party orientalism, 2–3, 13, 16, 21, 30, 34, 52, 65–6, 144n8; pragmatic, 51, 52, 60–1; and scripturalism, 72–4 Panchayat, 39, 41–2, 56 parampara (para®parg), 29, 30, 38, 63, 142n1 paubha, 7, 9, 21–2, 69, 99, 133, 140n9 politics, 41, 56, 58–9, 137; rajniti, 59 postcolonialism, 12, 14–16, 52, 140n12 practices, religious, 6, 9–10, 19, 51, 53, 88 prana (prg“a), 104 prasada (prasgda), 92, 101, 106 Procession, Cow, see Cow Procession prosaic, 3, 6–7, 9, 17, 20, 22, 34; praxis, 45; religion, xix, 3, 6–7, 23, 84–6; religious practice, 9, 22, 23, 24, 55–6, 79–80, 83, 88, 103–4, 135–7; social practices, 115, 132, 135; stone-god, 77–8; tantra, 24, 103–14, 120; theorizing prosaic religious practices, 12, 24; tradition, 22–3, 31, 38, 63 provincialism, 21, 24

172

Index

puja (p˚jg), 9, 21, 86, 90–2, 95–7, 109; doing, 95–7; giving the divine “eyes and ears,” 103; as “recipe”, 96, 100–1; see also worship religion, 12, 50, 61, 74, 110, 121–2, 136–7; cadastral, 18, 25, 82–3; as a commodity, 62; and Marxism, 78; as mediation, 3; prosaic, xix, 3, 6–7, 84–6, 135–7; “recipes” for, 23, 87–101; role of prosaic, 10; and shakti (∂akti), 108–9; scripturalist approaches to, 12; as society, 139n2; see also dharma religious agency see agency religious studies, 71, 74–5, 132 resignification, 5–6, 19 romanticism, 30, 41; see also tradition sacred, 18–19, 54, 89–90; see also cadastral sacrifice, 24, 53, 55, 104–5, 111; forged (nakali), 114, 116–17, 121, 127–30; and mandala (ma“πala), 116, 127–9; as symbolism, 105; and tantra, 107 salvation, 2, 3, 17 samsara (sa®sgra), 10–11, 18–19, 23, 54, 87–90, 92–5, 97–101, 103; as “lived world”, 11, 116; samsaric signification, 98–100; and “Wheel of Life” painting, 89, 98–100 Sanskrit, xix, 4, 54, 58, 110 scripturalism, 2, 4, 11, 17, 28, 36, 65, 139n2; and the book, 132; as pattern of mediation, 2, 23, 71–2; and tradition, 43 shakti (∂akti), 10, 24, 28, 50, 55, 69, 72, 78, 80, 87, 116; aspects of, 108–9, 112; of god-image, 84–6, 101; jhijnjan minjan as, 104; as religious aesthetic sentiment, 108; sacrifice and, 105, 129; and tantra, 107 Shiva, 2, 79, 95; Bhairava as form of, 70, 80, 83, 131

stone-god, 24, 77–8, 84–6, 94–7, 132; prosaic, 77 sublime, 110–14, 146n7 Suryavinayak, 116, 126–30 symbol, 13, 17 symbolism, 23, 51; and mandala (ma“πala), 29; as mediating strategy, 74–7; of sacrifice, 105 tantra, 24, 146n4; and dance, 86; and knowledge, 37; and power, 84; prosaic, 103–14, 120; and religious practice, 82; and sacrifice, 107; and shakti (∂akti), 107 thangka, see paubha tourism, 27–8, 32–4, 40, 42–5, 50, 64–5, 126; and Americans, 32–3; as cultural pollution, 32, 62; discourse and, 27, 60–1; and maps, 23, 51–2, 59–62 tradition, 22–3, 41, 42–4, 46–7, 62–6, 137; cadastral, 45; as commodity, 42–3, 46, 63, 64; hybrid, 22, 46; and modernity, 28–9, 30, 34, 45, 136–7; parampara (para®parg), 29, 63, 142n1; and practices, 117; prosaic, 22–3, 31, 38; religious, 50; romantic, 22, 30–4, 35–7, 41; and space, 50; as underdevelopment, 63–4 Upanishads, 17, 54, 73 Vishnu, 79, 84, 95, 104, 126 West, 21, 23, 27, 43, 61; versus East, 72–5; as modern, 34 “Wheel of Life” painting (Bhavacakra), 98–100 worship, 3, 9, 75–9, 90–2, 116, 133; cadastral, 86; as generative matrix 23, 88, 95–7; of god-image, 122; mandala (ma“πala) as object of, 95, 145n1; as “recipe”, 23; see also puja (p˚jg) yantra, 17, 54, 69, 95, 110

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