Clarifying terms

Before delving into the historical and comparative material, I would like to make clear distinctions among a handful of useful terms for talking about the sorts of political entity and associated cults one finds at this time in South and Central Asia. There were no nations in anything like the modern sense of the word, but across South and Central Asia there was a bewildering diversity of patterns for the relations between a political authority and its religious legitimation. South of the Kathmandu Valley in the Indian subcontinent, there were monarchies of greater and smaller extent, which when they subsumed other smaller monarchies are called empires. Thus one speaks of the Pāla empire, although in extent it was relatively small compared to the Abbasid Caliphate or the Mongol empire. Far to the north, the Mongol empire extended over diverse regions and polities, ranging from nomads to the highly bureaucratized Chinese state, with no clear model of its own, although the various ‘hordes’ of the Mongol empire adopted Chinese or Islamic models as it broke up. Closer, yet still across the Himalayan ridge, the various Tibetan polities left after the Tibetan empire of the 7^th to 10^th centuries had fragmented were contending for supremacy. Sa.sKya in the 13^th century established a particular priest-patron relationship with the Mongol Khan which, although it drew on Indic Vajrayāna models of royal consecration and patronage, was the founding gesture of a new politico-religious configuration that has acted as a model for Tibetan politics until the present day.⁹ Along the length of the Himalayas there was a transition underway, with Islamic, Tibetan, Sanskritic Vajrayāna, brahminical Indic and Theravāda models all available as contrasting models for polities (and their understanding in a religious context) as they emerged into self-definition.

In the century before Jayasthiti, there was a complex four-way relationship, as yet only partly understood,¹⁰ between the Vajrayāna Buddhist state of Ya.’rtse, the

’Bri.gung.pas—an early Tibetan monastic polity, the Nepalese courts and the Sa.sKya.pas, who won their struggles with ’Brig.gung in part because of their successful appeal to the Mongols. It is still unclear what direct contact there was between the Nepalese kings and the two Tibetan monastic states, but subsequently we find evidence that the Chinese (at that time still under the dominion of the Mongols) had opened diplomatic relations with one of the Nepalese dynasties, the Rāmavarddhanas, who were the greatest rivals within Nepal to the nascent Bhaktapur court of Jayasthiti. Vanaratna, for his part, appears to have come from an eastern Bengali principality which may have had links to Pagan, and trained for several years in Sri Lanka. While he was not himself a political agent he was a bone of contention for several Himalayan polities.

In Nepal, the notion of ‘national’ does not properly apply until the development of the Gorkha state in the 18^th century. However, there is a strong sense of deśa, which is neither simply a topologically definable region nor a unified polity. Within the GKV we find the idea of foreigners (anyatraja) and in contemporary inscriptions the term or nepāladeśa, yet there is no well defined border to Nepāl aside from the valley rim itself. That rim is a minimum; the Kathmandu Valley has almost always been the centre of extension for the actual scope of Nepal, which reached out to include at least to the northwest, Pharping to the southwest and the next valleys eastward, where Banepa, Dhulikel, Panauti and eventually

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Dolakhā are found. At the same time, within this deśa there were several contending rulers and even types of government; Lalitpur in the mediæval period was an oligarchy, while Banepa and Bhaktapur were monarchies. At least in the case of Nepal, then, and possibly for other similar tightly integrated regions, we have a problematic term, deśa or

which cannot be accurately rendered by nation, state or country.

Recently Newar intellectuals have insisted that foreigners (now the less welcoming videśi is the term used) refrain from attempts to translate the native toponym and simply call it Nepāl but while this cheerfully reflects the unanalyzed nature of the thing under inspection, it doesn’t give us a generic term to use when talking about other similar entities. The Sanskritic term can be referred back to its exhaustive treatment in the Arthaśāstra of There, it does refer to a unified polity, usually under a monarchy, which has unambiguous diplomatic relations with similarly organized states round about. It may expand to include sub-polities, just as the Pālas did, becoming a wheel containing other wheels. While the ideal of a single polity encompassing the various Newar cities and districts recurs in the ambitions of various dynasties, there is no single centre. Between 1200 and 1800, Lalitpur, Banepa, Bhaktapur and eventually Kathmandu all contended for dominance, and the question was only finally settled when an outside power, the Gorkhas, absorbed the entire valley as part of the formation of the modern Nepalese state. Thus the term as it is used by modern Newar intellectuals (and their apologists, such as Mary Slusser) reflects rather more the sentimental desire to have been united around a centre than it does any historical reality.

Following Burghart (1996a), however, we can resolve this tension by seeing that kings were responsible for the maintenance of at least two rather different sort of domain, a sphere of political control and a sphere of ritual activity. Each of the different centres in the Kathmandu Valley deployed a ritual map of their proper domain that was, on the one hand, bounded by the natural limits of the Valley and the major shrine tetrads, and on the other hand centred with respect to their particular polity. In fact there were usually three concentric versions of this ritual map: one at the scale of the city, one at the scale of the Valley, and one which extended rather beyond the Valley to include major ritual sites such as Śilu In the first instance, then, the term

refers to the middle-sized ritual sphere held in common by all the political centres of the Valley. Thus Gutschow and Bajracharya (1977) documents the ritual sphere of the Kathmandu city-state in terms of three concentric centred on Kathmandu city, the largest of which is only equal to the edge of the Valley. This set of is subtly different from that which a Lalitpur or Bhaktapur royal priest would have prescribed for his king’s ritual activity.¹¹ These two spheres of real control and ritual activity were neither congruent nor independent of each other. What factors actually determine the relation between them (in Burghart’s model) is not entirely clear—for example, one might posit a further economic sphere, determined by the limits of tax collecting and tribute. As we shall see at 4.4.4 on page 154, the situation in the Kathmandu Valley in the 15^th century was such that the ritual control of Lalitpur carried with it some tangible authority, such as the right to dispose of monasteries, even where the overarching political control may have been largely ceded.

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It would seem that geography does in fact have a lot to do with the cultural coherence of the comparable Himalayan entities—Mustang, Ladakh and so forth, all in or centred around compact and fertile valleys with significant trans-Himalayan trade routes; and moving further afield, valleys and islands again seem to offer the best comparisons: Sri Lanka and Java come to mind, although these are considerably larger in area. The similarly coherent city-state, a remarkably persistent political form, is defined in part by a unitary political authority, whether bureaucracy (modern Singapore, Hong Kong), restricted democracy (classical Athens), oligarchy (mediæval Genoa) or monarchy (mediæal Śrīvijaya, modern Brunei). Returning again to Burghart, it may well be that it is just such valley or island landscapes where the articulation between ritual authority and real political control can be performed most successfully Against this, though, is the evidence from Kulke (2001), which shows a very similar construction of the ritual space of kingship through the in late mediæval Orissa. At least for monsoon South and Southeast Asia, it may well be time—that is, the inescapable relation between the calendar and agricultural production—that glues the spheres of ritual and political control together.

What we do find is dynasties. Petech frames much of his history of the Valley after 1200 as a struggle between rival dynasties hoping to consolidate control over all of The dynastic model does hold good for some of the Himalayas and all of Northern India at this time. These dynasties are not so much continuous descent lines with royal prerogative as they are the continuously constructed fiction of a traditional royal line intimately tied to a specific locality. Thus in Ya.’rtse, in Western Nepal, we find the long history of the Khāśiya dynasty carefully outlined in the Dullu inscription, which Petech himself has shown to be a fraudulent reconstruction intended to legitimate the incumbents. The dynastic pattern also holds in and for the purposes of this study we will assume the existence of at least one royal court with ministers, royal appointments and the possibility of royal patronage. This is borne out by the evidence we have from inscriptions and Vanaratna’s account. It was not, however, an absolute monarchy. The throne was frequently shared among siblings or between father and son(s), and while the queen was never given the throne on her own, some women did wield considerable power.¹²

Moreover, just as we must qualify dynasties to mean the continuously managed image of dynastic continuity, so too it may also be the case that these hereditary lineages of authority do not invest themselves in kings at all. In Lalitpur there was a cluster of families, the mahāpātras, who formed a durable oligarchy; at certain times—when Jayasthiti Malla or was negotiating for control of the whole Valley—they gave their explicit consent to an external ruler,¹³ but otherwise they ran Lalitpur themselves or supported an indigenous Malla king. This autonomy is manifest in Vanaratna’s biography; as we will see, he gets his office from the Bhaktapur rāja, but his dwelling courtesy of the Mahāpātras. Even they assert their potency by claiming to be descended from the ancient Licchavi dynasty of Nepal.

The Bhaktapur court takes on a different, less qualified, model of kingship from its Maithili origins, backed up by Maithili Brahmins. One way to read the reforms propagated by Jayasthiti is as an attempt to centralize authority in a typically North Indian fashion, suppressing the indigenous monarchy-with-consent form which is found

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elsewhere in the Himalayas. The attempt fails in itself, but it does mark the successful introduction of a fundamentally alien Brahminical ideology which is picked up by various contenders for absolute authority in the Valley until who is both sufficiently powerful to impose his will and brings with him a Brahminical model of kingship. He is able to draw on this pre-existent, albeit imported, ideology to justify his actions; and subsequent composed as part of legal battles between Newar and Gorkha interests also return to this ideology without questioning it.

To sum up, then, there are numerous different types of governance available as models in the wider Himalayan region. Monarchy, sometimes qualified by shared rule or the consent of locally powerful family heads, is the norm in Nepal during the Malla period.

However, it is not possible to speak of the entire valley as a single political entity except insofar as that reflects the ambitions of various expansionist rulers. The term

strongly preferred by modern Newar historians, does express a cultural and geographical unity that comprised a shared ritual space within which the courts acted. Unlike the classical use of the term as found in the Arthaśāstra, there were multiple contending centres of authority, multiple structures of authority and multiple mechanisms for its religious legitimation; moreover, these same patterns were evolving during the period 1200–1600. Although in what follows we will be comparing the court in Nepal to that in Ya.’rtse, Mithila and other places, the complex nature of the Newar polities requires that we be cautious in drawing conclusions.