Organizer: Katharine N. Rankin, Cornell University
Chair: Lauren Leve, Princeton University
Discussant: A. W. van den Hoek, Leiden University
Newars occupy a complex position in the Nepal nation, and in relation to academic scholarship on it. Though they comprise just one of the many ethnic peoples who make up the country today, Newars were once the independent rulers of the wealthy Kathmandu Valley, which is now the capital of modern Nepal. For many Western scholars and visitors, from the British Resident, Brian Hodgson, to the many tourists who visit Kathmandu each year, Newar culture is perceived to offer a precious glimpse into an archaic world that no longer exists outside of the remote Himalayas. With its many gods, goddesses, castes, and rituals, understanding the richly coherent aspects of Newar culture long proved a fascinating and rewarding task. But recent interest in the politics of representation, combined with increasing ethnic and political unrest in Nepal, have led to new moves to integrate this dominant trend in scholarship with critical questions about how these worlds have been constituted. The papers on this panel continue to draw on long-standing interests in Newar studies such as kingship, religion, ritual, and characteristically Newar guthi associations, but they are newly attuned to questions of power and historical agency, and to Newar life today as the product of a dialogue between inherited tradition and modern influences, local forms of order and the Nepal state. Together, they constitute an argument for bringing diachronic interests to the study of ritual, meaning and society in Nepal and offer a glimpse into recent scholarship on Newar culture.
Bal Gopal Shrestha, Leiden University
Sankhu is an ancient Newar town situated about twenty kilometers northeast of Kathmandu, whose people (about 10,000) mainly live from agriculture and from employment in greater Kathmandu. This study of Sankhu focuses on the ritual composition of the town as the key to its system of values. The main hypothesis of this study is that the distinct entities in this urban oriented society are not defined by socio-economic features but by their ritual composition. Royalty played the most important part in turning a settlement into a cultural center. The legendary history of Sankhu also starts with its establishment as a kingdom, comprising the town and the valley surrounding it. The foundation of that kingdom is attributed to the goddess Vajrayogini, whose shrine is located in the forest above Sankhu.
The temple of Vajrayogini is an important pilgrimage site for Buddhists and Hindus alike. The yearly festival of the goddess is also the main event in Sankhu’s ritual cycle. It can be viewed as a re-enactment of the town’s foundation. The study takes into account the complete festival cycle of the town and its connection with the network of ritual relations in the Kathmandu Valley at large. This new perspective on Sankhu’s ritual composition ultimately deals with the relation between Hinduism and Buddhism, with the interrelationships between the town’s 17 castes, and above all with the myriad of socio-religious associations (guthis) which uphold its ritual life.
Bronwen Bledsoe, University of Chicago
So rich is the cultural wealth of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley that scholarship to date has largely confined itself to documenting the traditions that live on there with a continuity unmatched elsewhere in South Asia. Such studies have, however, largely ignored history as such, looking past the ways in which real historical agents have knowingly ordered their world.
This paper examines the late medieval annexation of the territorially disjunct township of Sankhu by the kingdom of Kathmandu, a move initially impelled by economic advantage, but consistently articulated as participation in encompassing cosmo-political order. Texts from both the center and the periphery of the emergent polity construed the move in terms of a special relationship between Sankhu’s premier deity, the goddess Vajrayogini, and the king of Kathmandu.
Most notably, the Poet-King Pratap Malla celebrated Sankhu’s integration into his realm in an elaborate Sanskrit inscription of devotion and patronage, likening the local goddess to the supreme deity at the heart of his theist polity. Pratap ordered the social world on the principle of "participation"—sharing, deference, and devotion—to create the paradigmatic Hindu kingdom of his times. Vajrayogini’s liturgy was, however, in the hands of Buddhists. These religious specialists independently recorded the terms of Sankhu’s participation, royal deference to and support of their own knowledges and procedures for maintaining political and cosmic order.
Katharine N. Rankin, Cornell University
Ethnography of Newar society has commonly evoked guthis, the core Newar social institutions that regulate religious and social life, as the key mechanism through which Newar social organization has been preserved for centuries unchanged. In contrast, by examining competing representations of Newar guthis in national and local discourses and practices, this paper argues for an understanding of Newar society as constituted in articulation with national processes of state building and governance.
In the wake of neoliberal reforms, for instance, state planners have evoked guthis, among other ethnically-based "cooperative" social institutions, as paradigmatic of "Nepali" qualities of local self-reliance and community solidarity. Such representations figure directly in the state’s justifications of the recent shift from state-led to market-led approaches to development. More specifically, guthis are said to demonstrate a degree of local capacity that warrants devolution of responsibility for economic development from the state to autonomous local institutions.
Within Newari communities, the paper argues, not only do guthis on the contrary play a functional role in regulating inequality, but also their communal role within hierarchically ordered social groups has in fact been undermined by commodification and other processes associated with the new neoliberalism. In Sankhu, for instance, struggles over guthi capital endowments and the growing space for individual economic gain in guthi ideology not only belie the state’s normative claims about Nepali culture as harmonious and self-sustaining, but also demonstrate that even the most "traditional" of social institutions are constituted in relation to the national political economy.
Lauren Leve, Princeton University
What is a Theravada Buddhist in Nepal and how has this 20th-century Buddhist reform affected Newar Buddhist life? Among ethnographers of Nepal, the Newars who live in the Kathmandu Valley are famous for their rich symbolic order, and the way in which they have traditionally incorporated both Buddhism and Hinduism into a seamless web that invests social life with deep religious meaning. But since its emergence in the late 1920s, Theravada has challenged the ostensibly "Hindu" underpinnings of customary Newar Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhist thought, and actively contributed to the formation of a new, self-consciously Buddhist Newar identity.
Beginning with the question, how is Theravada different from Newar Buddhism as customarily taught in the Valley, this paper examines the impact of the Theravada reform on traditional concepts of personhood, community, religious duty and nationhood. By teaching a Buddhist ethics that locates moral agency in individual intention, as opposed to social connection, Theravada offers a new and different way of configuring relations between self and society among Newar Buddhists, and a corresponding identity shift. In a meaningful world that has been built upon the ritual and literal presence of a Hindu king, and which continues to rely on this integrating trope, this change carries political as well as spiritual consequences. This paper will explore this transformation in modern Newar ethics and identity, and its far-reaching implications at the level of the community and the state.