Public Festivals

The most spectacular side of Newar religion is its public festivals. These form an intermediate category between the obligatory and the optional: they must take place, and for those directly involved in organising them there is no choice; but everyone else takes part for the fun and religious merit of it.

One type of public festival involves visiting every shrine of a particular deity within the city. In Lalitpur the most popular

Buddhism and Hinduism in the Nepal Valley festival of this sort is called ‘The procession of [offering] light’: thousands of worshippers circulate without stopping and without eating on a route laid out beforehand, visiting and making offerings to every caitya in the city, which takes from 5 am to about 8 pm to complete. Ten different sections of the city take it in turn to organise the festival. In the same way there are processions to every Bhimasena shrine, to every Ganesa, to every Krsna and so on at different times of the year, events in which hundreds of people participate.

In chariot and palanquin festivals it is the god who circulates for the benefit of worshippers on a prescribed route around the town. The most famous of these is the chariot festival of the god called Matsyendranath by Hindus, Karunamaya by Buddhists and Bumgadyah by most ordinary Newars. It is also the festival with the tallest chariot and lasts longer than any other. All sections of the population observe the festival with great enthusiasm but it is perhaps the farmers who show the greatest devo­tion since Matsyendranatha is believed to bring the rain on which their crops depend. Chariots with huge wooden wheels are expensive and time­consuming to make so most deities circulate on a palanquin carried on the shoulders of four or more men. In these festivals different tasks are laid down by tradition for different castes. These duties are usually jealously guarded privileges, a source of pride to the groups and individuals concerned.

In most public festivals the king plays a significant role. Before 1768 each of the three major cities of the Valley, Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Lalitpur, had its own king and he would be present as principal sponsor of the festival and guarantor of the material and spiritual well-being of the kingdom. In smaller settlements the local headman, as representative of the royal power, played and often still plays the role of ‘king’. When the present dynasty established its capital in Kathmandu the kings continued to be present at some rituals and kept up the rituals associated with royalty in the other two cities, Bhaktapur and Lalitpur. Nowadays, though he is rarely present himself, the sword of the king must always be brought along. Some of the festivals centre around the royal palace of each city, in particular the autumn festival known as Dasaitn in Nepali, Mohani in Newari, Durga Puja or Navaratri in Sanskrit. This is at the same time an archetypal family ritual, observed in every house in the country: all offices close and absent relatives return home. Theologically the festival celebrates the victory of Durga over the buffalo demon; this myth is given vivid expression by the sacrifice of hundreds of buffaloes to the king’s tutelary deity, Taleju, a form of Durga, who is at the same time a Tantric deity and whose mantra is believed to guarantee the king’s power. Thus while this is a nation-wide, indeed the nation-wide and state festival, it is also above all the festival of the ruling and warfaring (Ksatriya) class. Other festivals in which the king has an important role are Ghode (horse) Jatra and Indra Jatra in Kathmandu (the presence of the Vedic god Indra is another sign of the

antiquity of the Newars’ religion), Bisket Jatra in Bhaktapur and the Mat- syendra Jatra in Lalitpur.

In many festivals dancers impersonate gods; when they put on their masks they begin to tremble as a sign that the god has entered them. The most famous of these are the Nine Durgas from Bhak­tapur who dance for nine months of every year, visiting twenty-one quarters of the city and the nineteen towns and villages which used to comprise the kingdom of Bhaktapur. There are many other such dance groups: the Eight Mothers of Lalitpur (danced unusually by Buddhists); a similar group from the village of Theco nearby; the dancers attached to the Naradevi temple in Kathmandu; and many more. Lakhe (demon) dancers circulate in association with many festivals. There is a special set of dances in Lalitpur over many nights during the month of Kartik. These include farces and devotional dances, culminating on the final night in the dance of the half-man half-lion Narasimha (an incarnation of Visnu with royal connections) who is acted nowadays by a Brahmin, destroying the demon Hiranyakasipu, acted by a man of the painter caste. In the old days, people say, the painter was really killed; now he merely becomes unconscious and is revived with holy water.