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Ritual Period: a Comparative Study of Three Newar Buddhist Menarche Manuals Christoph Emmricha a University of Toronto, Canada Published Online: 27 Mar 2014

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Ritual Period: a Comparative Study of Three Newar Buddhist Menarche Manuals Christoph Emmricha a University of Toronto, Canada Published Online: 27 Mar 2014 This article was downloaded by: [Christoph Emmrich] On: 14 April 2014, At: 13:57 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20 Ritual Period: A Comparative Study of Three Newar Buddhist Menarche Manuals Christoph Emmricha a University of Toronto, Canada Published online: 27 Mar 2014. To cite this article: Christoph Emmrich (2014) Ritual Period: A Comparative Study of Three Newar Buddhist Menarche Manuals, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 37:1, 80-103, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2014.873109 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2014.873109 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2014 Vol. 37, No. 1, 80–103, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2014.873109 Ritual Period: A Comparative Study of Three Newar Buddhist Menarche Manuals CHRISTOPH EMMRICH, University of Toronto, Canada Continuing further on the path laid out by Michael Allen’s pioneering work on rituals that centre on Newar Buddhist girl children in Nepal, this study analyses liturgies pertaining to a religious practice called ‘barha pikayagu’ that ends a period of seclusion undergone by Newar girls before menarche. The article looks at three ritual manuals currently used by Buddhist priests in Lalitpur, Kathmandu and Bhaktapur, respectively. In its aim to supply a textual background to Allen’s ethnography of this ritual, the study tries to place these manuals at the conjunction of other ritual textual genres, such as prescriptions for domestic rituals for women that include cosmological, demonological and pregnancy-related aspects, and attempts to explore their composition, their intention and their place within the larger ritual literature of Buddhism among the Newars. Keywords: Nepal; Newars; Buddhism; ritual; children; girl child; manuals; menarche Introduction For the Newars of Nepal, rituals for girls play anything but a minor role in the self-perception of their religious world and in the way they locate themselves in the world at large. The Kumarı, popularly known outside Nepal as the ‘Living Goddess’, a Tantricised clan goddess embodied by a Newar Buddhist girl child, is perhaps one of the most widely known representatives of Newar religion. A practice called ihi, meaning ‘marriage’, in which Newar girl children undergo a wedding involving a fruit, is a tradition that is perceived by the Newars as one of the pillars of their ethnic identity and uniqueness. And it is to Michael Allen that we owe the most ground-breaking studies of both the Kumarı and of ihi. It is no exaggeration to say that the study of the ritual culture of Newar girl children properly begins with Allen, whose work this special issue celebrates. Given the size of this sub-field in the study of Newar Downloaded by [Christoph Emmrich] at 13:57 14 April 2014 religion, to those who, unlike me, have not actually made this sub-field their own, this may sound like a rather modest claim. However, to give some idea of the impact Michael Allen’s work has had on the Newars themselves, particularly his 1982 article, ‘Girls’ Pre-Puberty First and foremost, I would like to thank my colleague in Newar Studies, Iain Sinclair. His initiative and his work as a field editor have been exceptional, and this article would not be in the shape it is were it not for Iain’s care, rigour, dedication and his meticulous critique: I could not have wished for a better reader of this work and my debt is greater than I could acknowledge in my footnotes. Further, I would like to thank all the scholars and ritual specialists who helped me in conducting my research on this particular material. They prominently include, in alphabetical order, Michael Allen, the late Minbahadur Shakya, Aishwaryadhar Sharma, Nutan Sharma, Badriratna Bajracharya, Buddharatna Bajracharya, Dharmaraja Bajracharya, Dipak Bajracharya, Gyanaratna Bajracharya and Nareshman Bajracharya, but there are many more to whom I am indebted and who I will have to thank elsewhere. Finally, I thank Srilata Raman for constant advice, crucial comments and a shared ongoing conversation. Ó 2014 South Asian Studies Association of Australia Ritual Period 81 Rites among the Newars of Kathmandu Valley’,1 a single concrete example may suffice: an elaborately designed invitation card I received on one of my stays in Nepal. The English text runs: Mr. Birendra and Mrs. Sharmila Shrestha request the pleasure at the Dinner on the auspicious occasion of Surya Darshan (Pre-Puberty Rites) of our daughters Elisa and Pritty Shrestha on the 25th Jan. 2005 (12th Magh) ‘Pre-puberty rites’ was a generic term introduced by Allen in the title of his pioneering study to denote two gender-specific religious practices that Newar girls undergo before puberty, of which one is ihi. The invitation’s text shows us that the term has been taken up by the Newars themselves to denote a ritual that would have traditionally been known only by its name in Sanskrit, suryadarsana (the [reciprocal] viewing of the sun [god and the worshipper]), or in Newar,2 barha pikayagu (the taking out of barha, a term that will be discussed below).3 It is this very ritual that will stand at the centre of this article. The main aim of this article is to direct our attention to the ‘textualisation’ of barha.I use the term here in the sense Catherine Bell does when she writes that ‘“textualization” refers to the generation of textual objects that structure social interactions around their use and transmission’.4 It is Allen himself who only recently gave us a first glimpse of how a priest would describe barha, including the liturgy and the texts recited.5 While barha-specific liturgical texts may not necessarily fall within the range of interest of ethnographers such as 1 Michael Allen, ‘Girls’ Pre-Puberty Rites among the Newars of Kathmandu Valley’, in Michael Allen and S.N. Mukherjee (eds), Women in India and Nepal (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982), pp. 179–210. The most recent revised version of this article can be found as Chapter 6 in Michael Allen, The Cult of Kumari. Virgin Worship in Nepal (Kathmandu: Mandala Book Point, 3rd rev. and enl. ed., 1996), pp. 100–32. 2 My decision in favour of using ‘Newar’ (New.) to designate the language spoken and written by the Newars follows the proposal of two relatively recent monographs on Newar linguistics. See Austin Hale and KedarP. Shrestha, Newar (Nepal Bhasa) (Munchen:€ Lincom Europa, 2006); and Carol Genetti, A Grammar of Dolakha Newar (Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007). They distance themselves from the indigenous ‘Nepal Bhasạ’ and ‘Nevah ̣Bhay’, the more academic ‘Newari’ (viz. ‘Newarı’) or the Indological ‘Nevarı’. The difference that Niels Gutschow and Axel Michaels draw in Growing Up. Hindu and Buddhist Initiation Rituals among Newar Children in Bhaktapur, Nepal (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008), between written ‘Nevarı’ Downloaded by [Christoph Emmrich] at 13:57 14 April 2014 and spoken ‘Nevah’,̣ is, in my eyes, artificial and is backed neither by indigenous Newar discourse nor academic linguistic evidence (p. 3). 3 In this article, Newar words are transliterated following the conventions laid out by the two standard dictionaries, Kamal P. Malla et al. (eds), A Dictionary of Classical Newari Compiled from Manuscript Sources (Kathmandu: Nepal Bhasa Dictionary Committee, 2000), p. 326: and Ulrike Kolver€ and Iswarananda Shresthacarya, with the assistance of Daya Ratna Sakya and Nirmal Man Tuladhar, A Dictionary of Contemporary Newari, Newari–English (Bonn: VGH Wissenschaftsverlag, 1994). Hence, the text has -m-̣to represent nasals where others may use superscribed and features -m_̆- to orthographically distinguish the short from the long nasal sound. Generally, -va- / -va- is used instead of -o- and -ya- / -ya- instead of -e-. In quotes, however, the transliteration follows the orthography of the original. I have chosen to retain the sometimes highly idiosyncratic, often simply miswritten original form in order not to formally complicate the representation of the texts, which in most cases would have required intensive annotation. Where the spelling is so deviant as to obscure the meaning, emendations are proposed. 4 Catherine Bell, ‘Ritualization of Texts and Textualization of Ritual in the Codification of Taoist Liturgy’, in History of Religions, Vol. 27, no. 4 (1998), p. 390. 5 Asha Kaji and Pandit Vaidya (Ganesh Raj Vajracharya) (trans. N.B.
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