The Constructed House: Ritual Creation of Domestic Space
‘Indeed, this “metaphysical aesthetics” holds that someone who views [dwells in] a yantra in its original environment, whether temple or a humble house, can know it and comprehend its inner meaning better than the person who views it in the artificial setting of a museum or gallery. The yantra exteriorizes a universal intuition, and is experienced through stages, beginning with worship and ending with reintegration.’
M. Khana, Yantra: the tantric symbol of cosmic unity
As we have just seen, whether traditional or modern, there is consistency in domestic architecture across the variety of houses built over a number of decades. Kholagaun Chhetri houses have the principal characteristics of the yantric mode of the mandala spatiality: they are four-sided polygons that create and enclose an earthly space and sacralize it; they are aligned with Hindu sacred geography, chiefly through orienting the main entrance to the southern quadrant and the worship room to the northern quadrant according to vastu rules; and there is a materially or ritually established central pillar. These features are indicative of an abiding concern with the spatial auspiciousness of houses as a condition for well-being and prosperity. In this sense, domestic architecture is a template for a favourable compatibility between person, action and place in a house, that is, between: the house owner (ghar dhani) and his household group (pariwar); the purposes and characters of domestic activities; and their locations within domestic space whose natures are imbued with the character of the cardinal directions and the reigning deities towards which they are aligned. I now turn to explaining how, in the process of construction, Kholagaun Chhetris configure their houses as a yantra and build such spatial auspiciousness into them.
Domestic architecture and construction is an interweaving of three processes.1 The first is the material construction of the house which has a number of stages: selecting the site, preparing the site, positioning the house on the site, laying the foundation and building the external structure, and finally inhabiting the house. The second is linking these stages of material construction to the flow of cosmic time so that they take place at auspicious times calculated by the household priest to be compatible with the horoscope of the owner. Each stage begins when there is a harmonious temporal conjunction of the building process and the life-trajectory of the building owner. This is determined according to the position of the astral bodies at the time of his birth and at the time of the proposed commencement of each phase of material construction. As mentioned in the previous chapter, one effect of this constant calculation of temporal auspiciousness for each stage of construction is to associate the house owner with the house so that they are consubstantial, that is, their qualities and fates are in harmony and they become so closely intertwined that they are refractions of each other.2 The third process is making the house an auspicious place for domestic activities, portending prosperity for the owner and his household group. This involves creating an harmonious spatial conjunction between the house and the space in which it is built, a space that is created in the act of building. Spatial auspiciousness entails ensuring compatibility between the physical structure and the spatial milieu in which the house is erected and removing any evil or harmful presences from the land and the house itself. It is built into houses through astrological calculations and the performance of rituals accompanying each auspiciously-timed stage of material construction.
In the following, I concentrate on the last of these construction processes, the rituals of spatial auspiciousness. I only briefly describe the stages of material construction and mention the propitious timing of them. The mere timing of stages of construction and associated rituals so that they are temporally compatible with the horoscope of the owner does not necessitate analysing the performance of the rituals which are for Kholagaun Chhetris explicitly aimed at harmonising each major structural element of the house with its spatial milieu. A consistent aspect of the performance of these rituals is the use of the yantric configuration to achieve two effects: first, to create the space—site and structure—that constitutes the domestic compound and transforms it into a sacred place; second, to construct an auspicious place in which there is a favourable conjuncture of architectural form and cosmic space by aligning the site and the house with the cardinal directions, pleasing the deities associated with them and cleansing them of inauspicious presences. Before analysing these rituals of spatial auspiciousness, I need to describe the nature of ritual as carried out and understood by Kholagaun Chhetris.
Worship and Blessing
The quintessential ritual act among Hindus in Nepal is puja. For Kholagaun Chhetris there are three aspects to their understanding of its meaning and performance. First, puja means ‘worship’; it consists of a series of actions through which a person expresses love and devotion to a deity. Second, in expressing one’s love and devotion through performing puja, a worshipper ‘pleases the Gods’ (deota [bhagwān] khusi lagyo). Thirdly, performing puja that pleases the gods ‘bears fruit’ (phal), that is, brings benefits for the worshipper. When I asked Kholagaun Chhetris about the purposes, meanings or motivations for performing their pujas, in most cases and for most pujas they answered by identifying a mixture of benefits ranging from the spiritual to the material: from the merit (punya) gained by simply expressing love and devotion to a deity with no thought of worldly benefit other than the god’s blessing; to the accomplishment of transition as in a boy’s initiation rite or marriage; to the well-being, long life and deliverance from evil of the worshipper’s household group; and to such worldly benefits as material wealth, success in business, renown and sons who will continue the patriline. Pujas performed for primarily worldly benefits are both productive and expressive of the enigmatic lifeworld of the Householder. They are called ‘kāmya pūjā’. ‘Kamya’ in Nepali means ‘desirable’ or ‘an object of desire’. Performing a kamya puja is one of those acts of attachment to the world that in its very performance to a particular deity for a particular benefit reproduces the diversity of deities and things in the world as well as the desire for them and the consequent illusion that they are the essential reality of the cosmos entrapping the performers in the round of death and rebirth.3
Kholagaun Chhetris explain the performance and effects of puja as worship that pleases the gods and bears fruit through the metaphor of entertaining an important guest. As one villager put it in everyday language: āunos, basnos, khānos, jānos’ (the respectful form of saying “Please come, please sit, please eat, and please go’). When puja is done in its fullest and most elaborate form, there are sixteen named steps (solāh-so-upachār), each consisting of gestures, chanting sacred mantras, and making offerings in leaf or brass vessels of varying sizes to images, objects or idols (murti) of the deity. (The specific thing that is a murti of a deity should not be interpreted as a symbol or representation of a deity; instead it is a concrete physical form which the deity inhabits and becomes materialized for the ritual. During the ritual, then, the murti is the materialized deity.) These sixteen steps enact the entertaining of an honoured guest from invoking and greeting the deity (āvāhān), offering a seat (āsan), bathings (pādhya, argha, panchāmrt), offering clothing (bastra) and a sacred thread (janai), honouring with coloured pastes (tikā), adorning with flowers (phul), burning incense (dhup) and waving an oil lamp (bati), offering pure food (nāibhedya) and gifts of money (bheti), displaying respect by touching the guest’s feet (dhog), auspiciously circumambulating the deity (pradakṣinā) and finally bidding farewell (namaskāra). Only in the most formal and solemn rituals are all sixteen steps actually performed. Puja is often shortened to five steps: invoking, bathing, giving tika and flowers, offering food, and bidding farewell. It may also be shorted to one step, the gesture of namaskara, in which all other steps are implied in the mind of the worshipper.4 Puja is followed and completed by prasād or blessing from the deity to the worshipper so that together puja-prasad form a single rite. Prasad involves at least two actions directly on the body the worshipper. First, the worshipper (or the Brahmin household priest who performs the puja on behalf of the Householder) applies the same pastes used to give tika of worship to the deity to put a tika of the deity’s blessing on his or her own forehead. Second, the worshipper eats some of the same pure foods (naibhedya) offered to the deity in the puja. Prasad as blessing portends the merit or material benefit or fruit—whether spiritual or material or a mixture of both—that the worshipper has in mind when performing the puja.
All rituals, no matter how simple or complex, are built around performing puja to a deity. The simplest puja is, as mentioned above, the gesture of namaskara; the most complex and elaborate rituals consist of a series of pujas to a principal deity as well as to other supporting deities. These pujas are surrounded by a large number of preparatory and subsidiary rites. The more important the ritual, the greater the number of offerings to the principal and supporting deities and the greater number of preparatory and subsidiary rites. One of these preparatory rites is always performed before the worship of the principal deity to ensure the success of the ritual and the bearing of fruit for the worshipper. It consists of doing puja to three divinities: Dio, the god of light, whose murti is a lighted wick upon a leaf plate of rice; Ganesh, the god of obstacles, whose murti is whole betel nut and sometimes also a janai (the sacred thread worn by members of the twice-born castes) upon a leaf plate of rice; and kalas, a sacred water vessel placed upon a leaf plate of rice.5
One of the striking characteristics of important and major rituals—here I am including rites of passage such as naming (Nwāran), first rice eating (Annaprāsan), boys’ initiation (Bartaman), and marriage (Bibāhā) described in Chapter 5 and Rudri Puja performed on the first habitation of a new house discussed below—is their elaborateness and complexity in terms of both the objects Figure 3.1 and actions performed. There are a large number of leaf vessels (tapari, duna, bota) of various sizes; some are filled with rice and specific objects as murti materialising the main and supporting deities that are worshiped; others contain offerings or gifts to the deities (bheti, naibedhya) and to the officiating priest (gaudān, dakshinā). There are several metal vessels of pure and sacred water (kalash, karam patra, Pancha Patro) into which are placed purifying grasses (khus, dubo) for bathing the deities and purifying the place and participants. One of these, the kalash, is for Nepalis a ubiquitous sign and means of auspiciousness. It contains pure and propitious ingredients, such as five sacred leaves (panchapalab), five pure metals (panchratna), flowers and pure unbroken rice grains. There are one or more brass yoni-shaped vessels (argha) with sacred nectar (panchāmrit) for washing and offering to the deities; and there are various other objects, such as sacred grasses (khus and dubo) associated with longevity, a bell (bati), an incense (dhup) burner, a conch shell (Shankar), providing pleasing smells and sounds for the deities, and a small brass plate (pujā thāli) containing the basic offerings of worship: yellow powder (kesari), red powder (abir), unbroken rice grains (achhetā), barley seeds (jau), black sesame seeds (til) and flowers.6
Compounding the elaborate array of objects are intricate bodily actions that are repeatedly performed with these objects by the worshipper and the attending household priest. Some examples of these ritual actions are: sprinkling water from various metal vessels with sacred grass or flowers; smearing red and yellow pastes on various objects with the right hand; touching objects with water and/or sacred grass and/or flowers and/or rice in the closed right hand; touching objects with flowers and rice in the right hand or flowers in praying hands; offering leaf vessels of coins, fruits, or clothing, by touching them to the image of the deity or sliding them close to the deity; pouring liquids over objects from oval-shaped brass vessels; and waving burning incense and ringing a bell. Combinations of these acts form distinctive and nameable (by the presiding household priest) ritual procedures, for example: achman garnu (sipping water from a sacred water vessel for purification), arpan (offering a ring of sacred grass to the principal deity), asan (establishing the principal deity by touching its seat with a hand filled with flowers, unbroken rice grains and sacred water), sankalpa (dedicating the self and the ritual to the deity by touching the deity with a hand filled with sacred grass and water from the karam patra vessel), puja (with the right ring finger or thumb smearing yellow (kesari) and red pastes (abir), offering barley (jau), sesame seeds (til), unbroken rice grains (achheta) and flowers (phul) as well as the other acts making up a sixteen step worship rite), prāthana (praying with flowers and unbroken rice in praying hands which are then placed on the deity), gaudan (a set of actions involving puja to a coin, placing it a leaf vessel filled with unbroken rice grains, sprinkling water over the vessel, putting tika on a Brahmin and offering gaudan vessel by sliding it in front of the priest7), and dhup-bati (waving incense around the deity while ringing a bell). The longer and more elaborate the ritual, the greater the repetition of these individual acts and iteration of the nameable ritual procedures.
However simple or elaborate the performance, pleasing the gods is a consistent theme in Kholagaun Chhetris’ and their household priests’ understanding of the effects of puja. There were numerous occasions when I was observing pujas that the presiding priest turned to the worshippers and to me and said: ‘bhagwān khusi bhaya’ (‘the god is happy now’). The meaning conveyed by this phrase is that as a result of expressing the worshippers’ love and devotion through the puja offerings, the god or goddess is satisfied and content and will be well disposed to grant their wishes as blessing [prasad]. This is achieved by offerings that are in harmony with the character of the deity being worshipped, or as Kholagaun Chhetris put it: ‘Shiva likes yellow, so we offer him yellow cloth; Ganesh likes sweets (laddhu) so we offer him sweets’. ‘Pleasing’ in this sense describes a propitious relation of harmony between the worshipper and the deity. In the context of rituals that accompany and punctuate the stages of house construction, the purpose and effect of performing them is to produce harmony between the house owner, the house s/he is building and the space in which it is being built. They range from the simple offering of flowers accompanied by a respectful greeting of the deity, to Rudri Puja, a long and complex ceremony involving priest and household owner in elaborate offerings of worship to mark the acts of dwelling in a house.
Building a House: Structure, Time and Place
Kholagaun Chhetri construct their houses in a complex spatial milieu consisting of the worldly space manifest by the cardinal directions and the reigning deities enclosing and defining it, the physical site for the house, the vital force (bhūmi) of the ground upon which it is built, serpent deities (nag) that lie beneath it, impurities of lower caste construction workers and lingering presences of other beings occupying the site. In building a house in such a space, there are five stages of construction: assessing the site, preparing it for construction, positioning the house on the site, building the house, beginning with the foundation, and inhabiting the house. The aim of each of these stages is not just to erect the material structure but also to ensure it is auspicious, that is, to build a harmonious conjuncture of person and house with time and space.
To oversee the process of material construction, the owner employs contractors responsible for building the four main structural features of a house: foundation, walls, roof and fittings (i.e. windows, doors, etc). Each contractor organizes the delivery of materials, hires the workmen (who, from the perspective of high caste Kholagaun Chhetris, are usually of lower and impure castes) and supervises the construction. To ensure the temporal auspiciousness of the house, the house owner engages his household priest to determine the timing of each stage of material construction so that it and its associated ritual can start on a day and time (sayat) that is compatible with the life trajectory of the house owner. To bring about the spatial auspiciousness of the house, the house owner consults with two specialists. One is an astrologer—either his household priest or a specialist (jyotisi)—who assesses the compatibility of the site with the owner, determines the favourable spatial location and orientation of the house on the site and identifies any unfavourable presences. The other is his household priest who conducts the rituals that harmonize the structure with its spatial milieu.
An outcome of the tripartite construction process (material, temporal and spatial) is that the primordial conditions of a Householder’s life-in-the-world—person, time and place—are in a favourable relation. The house becomes an auspicious place for dwelling that is conducive to the owner and his household group prospering (samriddhi) in the fullest sense of an abundance of children, health, peace, harmonious relations, longevity, renown, material wealth and lack of suffering and evil.
Stage 1: Assessing the Site
The concern with the spatial auspiciousness of the house begins even before the actual building process starts. As mentioned in the previous chapter, most new houses in Kholagaun have been built by younger men who, as part of the cycle of growth of joint household groups, separate from their fathers and brothers to establish their own household groups. In most cases, the joint household’s agricultural land is apportioned and sons build separate houses nearby the main house [mul ghar]. The sites for their new houses have usually been carved out of vacant portions of the existing domestic compounds or garden land adjacent to them. In these circumstances, the sites are considered ‘new’ in the sense that a house has not previously been built upon them.8
Before deciding to build the house on a new site, the vacant land is assessed to see if it is compatible with the house owner (and his household group) and if there are any inauspicious presences occupying it. The assessment begins with the owner collecting samples of soil (māto) from the four corners and centre of the site. In doing so, he creates the space for the house and configures it as a yantra. As one man told me: ‘the land (jamin) and a house must have four corners (kunā) because they [the corners] define the site and make a separate space as a whole; the four corners are for the four directions (diśā) and they should be compatible with (milyo) the directions.’9
To assess the soil, the household priest, using the current astrological digest, prepares a horoscope (kundali) of the house owner based upon the position of the planets at the time of his birth. A kundali is an astrological chart combining space and time by spatializing the flow of cosmic time as manifest in the movement of the planets. It consist of a square—a four-cornered polygon that, as we have just seen, is the geometric expression of the constitution of worldly space—oriented to the four cardinal directions with six diagonal lines intersecting to form twelve numbered spaces (‘houses’) associated with the rāsi (zodiac, i.e. the astrological bodies whose movement manifest the flow of cosmic time) (see Figure 3.1). The priest instructs the house owner to put some of the soil he collected on the kundali. There is no specific ‘house’ on the kundali where the owner ought to place the soil; rather he puts it ‘anywhere he pleases’ in an act of conjunction between his temporally-determined character as manifest in the kundali and the spatially-determined character of the house plot as manifest in the soil he has collected from its corners and centre.
Figure 3.1 Kundali
Interpreting the placement of the soil on the kundali, the priest/astologer makes two types of assessment of the site. The first is relational and concerns the character of the intersection of person and place: the priest calculates from the position of the soil on the kundali the compatibility between the site and the owner. If the site is auspicious, he then determines ‘where the house and land are compatible’ (‘jamin milyo’), that is, the direction that is the most auspicious location for the house on the site. If the site is not auspicious, he may suggest that an alternative use for the land should be considered.10 The second type of assessment is substantive and concerns the nature of the site itself: the priest/astrologer determines whether there are any dangerous or inauspicious presences (dos) in the site—such as serpents (nag ko dos), disembodied ghosts (bhut-pret-pichas ko dos), and ghosts from burial grounds (masan ko dos)—which might be disturbed by the construction and, in retaliation, bring misfortune to those living in the house. If there are such presences, steps are taken throughout the rest of the construction process to avoid them or remove them from the site.
Stage 2: Preparing the Site
The earth (bhumi) is not inert but in infused with a vital force that the people of Kholagaun personify as a deity called Bhumi Rāj (King of the Earth) or Bhumi Deotā (Deity of the Earth). They explained that humans disturb the earth and its vital force through their actions of planting and harvesting rice as well as building houses. On these occasions, they ‘ask the permission’ of Bhumi Raj and seek his blessing of prosperity by performing Bhumi Pujā.
Bhumi puja is often a simple ritual. When performed before planting and harvesting rice, its purpose is ‘to please the deity and obtain a good harvest’. A stone, which is the idol of Bhumi Deota, is placed in the north-east corner of the field in which people will work and disturb the earth. As we saw in Chapter 1, the north-east is the direction of purity and this is the location in a yantra compatible with performing rituals. By placing the stone idol of Bhumi Rāj in the north-east corner, the ritual spatializes the field into a yantric configuration. The owner or senior male of the work party offers puja to the deity by sprinkling rice, red powder and flowers onto the stone and burning incense followed by a food offering of fresh fruits and boiled potatoes in a leaf bowl. The food offering is then consumed by the owner and workers as the blessing (prasad) of good harvest from the deity.
Kholagaun Chhetris perform Bhumi Puja to the earth of a new house site for the same explicit reasons: to please the deity, ask his permission to disturb the earth where the house will be built and seek his blessing of prosperity. The performances of Bhumi Puja that I observed in Kholagaun were similar those I saw carried out in the fields for planting and harvesting. Others were reduced to the house owner standing in the north-east corner of the site—by this act orienting the site as a whole to the cardinal directions—offering a handful of flowers and pure rice to the ground and saluting the deity by saying ‘Bhumi namā’.11
Stage 3: Positioning the House on the Site
Once the site is formed into a yantric configuration through the collection of soil for assessment and harmony is established with the vital force of the earth in Bhumi Puja, the next step is to position the house on the site so that it is compatible with other beings, particularly snakes with supernatural powers (nag) already dwelling in it. As one Brahmin said, ‘there are always nag in a house site’. I mentioned in the last chapter that nag have the power to affect the prosperity of the house in two opposite ways. As deities of rainfall and water (manifest as terrestrial snakes), they bring affluence in the forms of fertility and material wealth to the house through agricultural production; but as beings that live underground, their movement can cause the house to crack and collapse, destroying its prosperity. As already described, one of the important components of assessing the site is to locate the house structure within the site so that it does not disturb the nag.
However, there are circumstances in which, because of the design of the house and the shape of the site, it impossible to find a harmonious spatial conjunction of house and site that avoids disturbing the snake inhabiting it. In these cases, there are three ways dealing with the nag on the site. The first way is to put holes in the house for terrestrial nags. As one highly respected woman explained:
Sometimes when a Brahmin determines that there is a nag on/in the land, the layout of the site makes it impossible to re-position the house so as to avoid disturbing the nag. In such cases, you put two holes in the house and the holes are positioned on opposite sides of the house. One hole is for the nag to enter the house and the other hole allows the nag to exit the house. This enables the nag to pass through the house without disturbing the inhabitants.
A second way is to build an altar dedicated to the nag (nāg stān) outside the footprint of the house but within the house site. The altar is a place where the house owner worships the nag living on the site. A priest explained to me why this was effective: ‘the worship entices the nag [he did not differentiate between the terrestrial and subterranean] to the altar so that they live outside the boundaries of the house. But, once you begin worshipping the nag, you have to continue, otherwise they will get angry and cause harm.’ In exemplifying this method of establishing harmony with nags on a site, I was told of cases of existing houses in Kholagaun that had ongoing problems with cracking. In one, a house developed cracking; the cracks were fixed only to appear the following year. Again the cracks were fixed but to no avail as the cracking again appeared a year later. The household head then consulted a Newar priest (Gubbāju)12 who diagnosed a nag under the house. He recommended that a small altar be established to the nag so that it could be worshipped every year. The cracking ceased. A third way, more prevalent in the construction of traditional houses, was to position the house on the site so that the main pillar in the centre of the structure lay directly over the subterranean place inhabited by the nag. When the house was built, the main pillar was thought to rest on the nag preventing it from wriggling and causing damage to the house.
In the written clan genealogy and history (Baṇgśawāli) of the Kholagaun Chhetris, there is a story which highlights the effects of such positioning of the main pillar upon the fortunes of the family living in the house and provides an explanation for worshipping it as part of the household’s daily puja. The Bangshawali traces the origin of the clan of which the Kholagaun Chhetris form one major lineage to two Brahmins of the Silwal clan who were skilled priests and astrologers in Almora, Uttar Pradesh. During their travels, they became royal priests to a newly-crowned king who wanted to ensure the continuity of his reign. The account continues as follows:
The Rajput King said, ‘I have such wise Royal Priests, can you devise a plan so that my descendents will continue to be Kings?’ The two Brahmins told the King he would have to build a new palace. They chose an auspicious site and time for its construction. At that place they buried a [central] pillar. The two Brahmins told the King that he was not to try to remove the pillar since it was resting on a nag. They said, ‘As long as this pillar remains in place, your kingship will endure’. The King became suspicious and did not believe that the pillar rested on a nag as the Brahmins had said. He wanted to see for himself and removed the pillar. At once blood gushed forth from the hole where the pillar had been buried. The King called the Brahmins and showed them how he had spoiled their plan. The Brahmins told him that the place for the palace was now inauspicious and that he should not live there anymore.
The story highlights the relation between a house, a house owner and his agnatic descendants who will live in it and benefit from its auspiciousness. Like the King’s palace, a house incarnates the owner’s and his lineage’s longevity—a form of prosperity [samriddhi]—as well as being the dwelling place in which it is achieved. This is but another dimension of the consubstantial relation of dwelling between house and owner that is reiterated each time the construction phases of the house are auspiciously timed in relation to the horoscope of the owner. And again like the palace, the continued existence of a house and its prosperity as realized in the longevity of the owner embodied in his agnatic descendants depends upon its harmonious relations with the underground nags whose movement can cause the cracking and collapse of the structure.
Stage 4: Digging and Laying the Foundation
Once the position of the house within the yantric space of the site has been determined, the foundation trenches are marked out with string attached to stakes in the four corners. The contractor hires workmen who start digging the trenches in the auspicious north-east corner where the owner says a brief prayer. After the trenches have been dug, the site is ready for laying the foundation either of stone or concrete.
Figure 3.2 Rectangular house (left) and square temple (right)
This demarcation of the foundation trenches re-iterates the space-creating act of defining four corners that I earlier described as central to assessing the auspiciousness of the site as a whole (Stage 1). The spaces created for new houses were always rectangular as were the ground plans of all existing traditional houses. While no Kholagaun Chhetri explicitly commented on the meaning of the ground plan shapes of buildings, Figure 3.2 illustrates the pattern: the rectangular shape of houses (large building on the left), the dwelling places of humans, is juxtaposed spatially and geometrically to the generally square shape of temples (the small building on the right), the dwelling places of deities.13 This largely tacit differentiation accords with the Vastu Shastras in which there is an explicit association of the square with the abode of deities: ‘The shape of the Vastu [dwelling space] for gods … is prescribed as square’ (Kramrisch 1976:22) and the rectangle with residences (Shukla 1998:322). Also, by highlighting the north-east corner of the rectangular space marked for the foundations, the owner and the workmen form the ground plan of the house into a yantric space, again in the much same way as in the assessment of the site.
For Kholagaun Chhetris, digging and laying the foundation of a house is one of the most significant stages of construction. It is the time when, as several Kholagaun Chhetris said, ‘the house is born’ or ‘it is the first beginning of a house’. As with the birth of humans, the exact time of the birth of a house determines its character and compatibility with the owner and his household group, so Kholagaun Chhetris always consult a household priest to ensure that the foundations are laid and the house is born at an auspicious conjuncture with the owner’s life trajectory. It is also the stage of construction when offerings of appeasement are made to any dangerous or inauspicious presences on the site that may bring harm and misfortune to the inhabitants.
A ritual called Jag Puja consecrates the birth of the house and makes its foundation into an auspicious yantra. ‘Jag’ in Nepali means ‘base’ or ‘foundation’ in both an architectural and cosmological sense. Jag Puja consists of worshipping five kalash (sacred water vessels) and then burying them in the four corners of the foundation trenches and in the middle of the house plot. As I describe earlier, a kalash is minimally a metal vessel filled with sacred water and other auspicious items, but its contents can vary to suit the specific ritual or event in which it is being used. For Jag Puja, two items with particular significance for the auspicious birth of the house are placed in each of the five kalash. One is mercury (pāro) which Kholagaun Chhetris told me ‘keeps away the nag and avoids their inauspicious presence’ (‘nag ko dos’).14 The other is mustard seed (rāyo sarsiu) which ‘keeps away inauspicious evil presences (bhut-pret-pichas ko dos’). In Nepali, ‘dos’ literally means ‘blame’ but in the context of house-building it is used to refer to dangerous and inauspicious presences on the site that could bring harm. As one villager explained: by putting mercury and sesame in the five kalash and worshiping them, ‘the house owner is saying to the snakes and disembodied ghosts lingering on the house site, “we are going to disturb you by building a house here and we are doing puja to you, so please don’t blame us [for the disturbance] and bring us trouble’”.
On top of each kalash is a copper plate inscribed with coloured powder in the form of an astadal, an eight-pointed yantra made of two superimposed squares. In the middle of this complex yantra is a pure gold disk (pratimā). Because gold is the purest of metals, pratima can serve as idols [murti] in a number of rituals as an icon in which a deity is materially manifest to humans to receive their worship. In the case of Jag Puja, Kholagaun Chhetris said that the four kalash are for the cardinal directions and the pratima are for the reigning deities. A bundle of stones wrapped in yellow cloth is also placed next to the pratima. In addition to the five kalash, there are five leaf plates containing all the essential ingredients of a meal (kichare); these are offerings for the disembodied ghosts lurking in and around the house site.
The individual rites, paraphernalia and performance of Jag Puja are dominated by the repetition of the number five and the placement of the kalash in the four corners and a centre point of the foundation—the basic elements of a yantra consisting of the four corners that define and orient the space harmoniously with the cardinal directions and a centre point within it. There are five kalash filled with five sacred leaves and five types of metal; there are five offerings of food to the inauspicious disembodied ghosts who may be inhabiting the site; puja is performed five times to each of the five kalash before they are buried. As part of Jag Puja, a distinct rite of worship, called silanath pujā, is done to the bundle of stones on each of the five kalash. The theme of birth recurs here: the word ‘silanath’ means ‘a beginning’ and, as one villager explained, ‘silapuja [short form of silanath puja] is the beginning of the house’. One of the aims of Jag Puja is to cleanse the site of inauspicious and dangerous presences. This is achieved by performing puja to each of the five leaf plates of food, the first four plates are to placate disembodied ghosts in all directions around the site and the fifth is placed outside the site to entice the ghosts to remain there.
The principal rite of Jag Puja is burying a kalash in each of the four corners of the foundation trenches that create the polygonic space of the house oriented to the cardinal directions. The fifth kalash is buried in the centre of the house plot, called the ādhār silā. In Nepali adhar means ‘middle’ or ‘main space’ and sila means ‘sacred stone’. Kholagaun Chhetris told me that the place marked by the adhar sila is where the main pillar for the house rests and it must be pure. In saying this they made no distinction between traditional and modern houses. (While this is literally true for traditional houses, it is only virtually true for modern houses because, as we saw in the last chapter, they have no physical main pillar. Yet, some Kholagaun Chhetris, like Bala Ram who is living in modern a house, create a virtual main pillar by designating a place in the house as the main pillar and worshiping it in their daily puja.) There is also a bundle of stones on each kalash, the same material as the foundation, so that when the foundation is laid, kalash are encased in and merged with it forever.
At this point in the construction process, the base upon which the main house structure will be built is a layering of yantras: the site itself is created as distinct space in the form of a yantra by the collection of soil for assessment and in the performance of Bhumi Puja; the foundation is configured as a yantra in Jag Puja. Such a progressive layering suggests that the building process is a reiteration of the layering of geometric designs that characterize the construction of pictographic yantras, such as the process of superimposing triangles that forms the best known yantra in Nepal, the Sri Yantra (see Figure 3.3). Such layering is a pictographic expression and mechanism for the stages of revelation that is central to yantras as machines for religious knowledge in which the creator—whether artist or builder—and the practitioner—whether viewer or dweller—sensually and progressively experiences the cosmos (see Hoens 1979:114-5).
Figure 3.3 Sri yantra
Stage 5: Inhabiting the House
No further rituals are performed until the external structure, roof, doors and windows are finished and the house is whole in the sense that it can be closed off to entry from the outside. The final stage of construction is considered to be the house owner and his household group taking up residence in the new house, making the house a dwelling space. On an auspicious day, Rudri Puja and three other supporting rites are performed to inaugurate the now habitable and secured house, purge it of impure or dangerous presences and make it auspicious. An essential component of Rudri Puja is, again, configuring the structure with further layering of yantras.
Auspicious Circumambulation and First Entry
The opening rite of a house’s inauguration day prefigures its prosperity and deliverance from evil. One of the themes of launching a house is first-ness. In Nepal, something that is done or happens first in a recognized time period or place portends the character of the whole. The first day of the solar month is a good example.15 The Nepali word ‘sankrānti’ refers to the first day of the month as a transitional period when the sun passes from one sign of the zodiac to another signalling a transition between periods of cosmic time marked by movement of astrological bodies in cosmic space. What happens during sankranti is an indication of what the entire month will be like.16 So, during one of my first periods of fieldwork in Kholagaun, on a cold and rainy day in January that happened to be the first day of the month of Māgh in the Nepali Bikram Sambat calendar, the main thing people wanted to talk about was the weather. I was curious about why the weather was a more noticeable topic of conversation on that day. One Kholagaun Chhetri told me: ‘Today is Magh Sankranti and because it’s raining on this first day of the month, there will be frequent rain throughout the rest of the month’.17 Similarly, if people do or perform something good on the sankranti of any month, it will be a ‘good [auspicious] month (rāmro mahina)’. Events, happenings or acts occurring on the first day of each month portend the auspiciousness or inauspiciousness of the whole month. Likewise, the first being to enter a house foreshadows its auspiciousness or inauspiciousness for those who will live in it.
The first being to enter a new house is a female calf. This is the culmination of a rite in which a procession circumambulates the new house three times in the favourable clockwise direction. The procession is led by beings embodying divinity, purity and auspiciousness. First is a female calf which is an incarnation of Laxshmi, the goddess whose blessing brings prosperity; next are virgin girls (kanya keti) whose ascetic detachment from sexuality personifies purity and who Kholagaun Chhetris understand as bearing auspiciousness and being auspicious; following them is the household priest who blows a conch shell, an incarnation of Vishnu; and last in the procession are the house owner and members of his household group. The circumambulation led by these pure and auspicious beings accompanied by the divine sound of the conch ‘drives away evil spirits from the house and attracts deities to the house’. At exactly the auspicious time for the owner to formally cross the threshold and dwell in the new house, the procession enters through the main door with the calf in the lead. As the first being to enter the house, the calf as Laxshmi portends the prosperity that will continue to flow over the threshold into the house.
Rudri Puja
Once in the new house, Rudri Puja is performed to consecrate it. Kholagaun Chhetris told me they do Rudri Puja ‘for the welfare of the house and its members … to guard the household group [pariwar] against evil and sickness…to bring good luck and peace in the house…to bring prosperity to the house and relief from hardship and poverty.’
Figure 3.4 Shiva linga
Rudri is a form of Shiva, one of the three main deities of the Hindu pantheon with numerous names and multiple aspects. The forms that are most well-known in Kholagaun are: the benign Shiva, husband of Parvati and father of the playful Ganesh (the remover of obstacles); the fierce form of Shiva, Bhairab, associated with terror, death and destruction, placated with offerings of meat and blood; the Shiva lingam, embodying asceticism and detachment in the form of the ever-erect phallus, representing both generative, procreative passion and, because there is never the release of the passion, ascetic detachment from it (see Figure 3.4); and Mahādev, the Supreme Lord who, because of his multiple aspects, incarnates all dimensions of the cosmos.
Figure 3.5 Rudri puja
Rudri Puja takes place in and around three nested or layered yantras (see Figure 3.5).18 The first of these is the house structure itself, already configured as a yantra in Jag Puja, with the Rudri Puja set-up forming its centre. The second is the sacred space in which Rudri Puja is performed. It is created by four kalash defining the corners of a square—the shape for the abode of deities—and, as a priest told me, ‘they are for giving devotion (samjhara) to the gods of the four directions’. In the centre is a mandap (sacred pavilion) drawn on the floor with a double line consisting of white rice flour and red powder. The third of the layered yantras is the mandap itself. It consists of two superimposed triangles, one pointing upward and the other pointing downward. This geometric design represents the primordial tantric dualism of, respectively, static male (Shiva) and dynamic female (shakti) principles whose conjunction, represented by their superimposition, is the force of creation and source of worldly diversity. As pointed out previously, this figure of superimposed inverted triangles is repeated in a large number of yantras and reaches its most elaborate form in the Sri Yantra (Figure 3.3). The mandap is the simplest form of this design. In the centre of the mandap is the idol of/for Rudri. It consists of a pile of unhusked rice, on top of which is a copper plate for a stone murti of Rudri/Shiva.19 The stone sits within the legs of a tripod supporting an offering vessel with a small hole positioned directly over it. Arrayed around the mandap are Dio, kalash and Ganesh and other vessels containing sacred water and nectar, gifts of clothes and raw fruit.
After preliminary rites of establishing the sacred space, purifying the worshippers, dedicating the offering, offering puja to Dio, Kalash and Ganesh, and worshipping the four kalash of gods of the four directions, the main puja to Rudri is performed. This consists of the house owner making offerings of a mixture of water and milk repeated at least thirty to forty times, each repetition coordinated with the priest’s saying of the word ‘nama’ (a reverential saluation and adoration of the deity; ‘honour to thee’) as he chants chapters of Sanskrit sacred texts (pat) associated with Rudri Puja. Following the offerings to Rudri is the receipt of his blessing. It consists of the presiding priest putting a tika of red and yellow paste on each household member’s forehead and tying on each household member’s wrist a doro or raksa-bandhan, a cotton string coloured yellow with turmeric. The raksa-bandhan (literally a bond [bandhan] of protection [raksa]) is the manifestation and mechanism of the beneficent and harmonious bond the worshipper has established with the deity as a result the puja. It protects him or her from dangerous beings, such as disembodied ghosts. In explaining how the amulet works, Kholagaun Chhetris told me that the colour yellow is a ‘favourite of Mahadev’ and that turmeric ‘protects you from evil spirits’, one of the reasons that they explicitly mentioned for performing Rudri Puja.
Toran Banne
Following the blessing, the household priest performs a rite called Toran banne in which he encircles the entire house with a toran by draping it over nails protruding from each corner of the house about the same height off the ground as the top of the main door (see the main entrance of a modern house in Figure 2.7). A toran is a festoon used on at least two major occasions—marriage and inaugurating a house. It consists of a long rope made of twined purifying dubo grass in which are placed dried leaves of five sacred trees: Pipal (Pipal, Ficus religiosa) has its roots in heaven and its branches on earth; Badar (Banyan, Ficus bengalensis) is associated with Vishnu who sleeps on a banyan leaf at the end of each Hindu era (yuga); Dumri (Cluster Fig, Ficus glomerata) is said to blossom when a Buddha is born; Āp (Mango, Magnifera indica), a fruit-bearing tree, and Chap (Magnolia, Michelia champaca).20 By encircling the house with the toran, the rite replicates for the house the raksa-bandhan prasad just completed for each household member. One house owner told me: ‘the toran is a raksa bandhan for the house protecting it from the entry of evil spirits’. Another said: ‘putting the toran around the house makes a boundary so that evil spirits cannot come into the house’. It is wrapped around the house just like the cotton thread is wrapped around the wrists of the household members; and just like the raksa-bandhan, it protects the house and its inhabitants from evil.
Dhuri
The final rite is one of bathing and purification of the household group before they live in the house. The priest combines into a single kalash the sacred and purifying water from the four kalash of the just-completed Rudri Puja; he goes up on the roof and from a location overlooking the main door, unfurls a long piece of 700-900mm wide cotton cloth from the roof down to the house owner who stands on the ground in front of the main door facing east, the auspicious direction and the realm of the deities. The owner puts the end of the cloth over his head and the priest pours the water from the kalash onto the cloth so that it courses down and falls over the head and body of the house owner. This is repeated for all members of the household group. ‘It’s like taking a bath. Now the people are pure.’ Flowing water not only bathes but purifies by absorbing impurity and taking it away as it runs off the body. One priest explained: ‘This is an abhisekh (sprinkling performed in a religious ceremony); it makes people pure. They have had so many troubles during the building of the house, the water flowing over their head makes them feel calm (santi ko lagne).’
The inauguration of the house is completed by the household group cooking and eating their first meal together in the kitchen and sleeping in it on this first night of habitation.21 By doing this on the house’s inauguration day, they bring to fruition the construction of the house by engaging in the archetypal acts of everyday dwelling in a house.
Conclusion
In concluding this chapter, I can do no better in bringing together its main themes—the temporal and spatial forms of auspiciousness, the cleansing of evil from the house and the ritual process of constructing an auspicious house—than by quoting the following reflections of a man who had recently performed Rudri Puja for his new house:
During the construction of the house, it was vulnerable to evil spirits and other inauspicious things; all kinds of things and people can enter the house so we have to clean it of various presences, like bhut-pret-pichas. Construction workers were from lower castes and brought impurity to the house. Before the windows and doors are installed, the house is open all the time to evil and inauspicious things from the outside. But after doing all these pujas during the construction, all the bad things that may have been on the land and could affect the house and its inhabitants have been cleared off
Upon the completion of Rudri Puja, the family can formally enter the house because it is now a fully auspicious place, cleansed of evil and inauspiciousness that would be an obstacle to the family living prosperously in the house.
All the rituals make the house auspicious. All the obstacles (bādhā archan) [to a prosperous life in the house]—impurity, evil, and inauspiciousness—have been removed. The family can now enter [live in] the house. You should only first enter a new house at an auspicious time; and you should only enter a new house that is auspicious, that has had impurity, evil and inauspiciousness removed by the rituals.
After doing the all rituals during construction, the house is compatible with nature and god. The aim of building a house and doing all the rituals is that the house and the activities of humans living in it should not disturb the natural world but be related harmoniously to the world and not disturb it. This is what is meant by an auspicious house, and an auspicious house is a place for prosperity (samriddhi) in the full sense—health, wealth, well-being, and happiness.
Notes
1 See Levy for a description of the Newar house as also an interweaving of the material and the symbolic (1990:186-192).
2 This may be one of the reasons why few houses come up for sale and why there is a very small real estate market in Nepal in the sense that relatively few existing houses are sold. Once this consubstantial-like relation between house owner and house is established in the construction process, he and his descendants tend to remain living in the house and do not become sellers of the house. Likewise, people would rather build a new house during which time they establish a consubstantial-like relation with it rather than become buyers of existing houses which already have a relation to a particular person—a relation that a new owner would have to dissolve to establish a new one for himself.
3 Kamya is associated with the Nepali word ‘kām’ which encompasses at least two homonyms (see Turner 1931:87-88 and Schmidt 1993:98-99): one means ‘wish’ or ‘desire’, which is the root of the word kamya; the other means ‘work’, that is, an activity that produces practical results or consequences in the world. Both homonyms appear to contribute to the meaning of kamya puja as the phrase is used by Kholagaun Chhetris.
4 This is the way Kholagaun Chhetris worship the gods—a namaskara gesture of putting the hands together in a praying position in front of the face and inwardly saying ‘namaskār’—when passing a shrine or image of a deity while walking along village paths.
5 Daryn (2002:129) found in Thamghar that Dio and Kalash were forms of Shiva and Vishnu respectively.
6 The daily worship performed in each household involves the same ritual objects and offerings but fewer in number and smaller in scale.
7 Gaudan is literally ‘the gift of the cow’. The cow is the most sacred and pure being in the world and is represented by coin in a leaf vessel to which puja has been done. The offering is made by sliding the vessel in front of the priest rather than offering it in the palm of the hands because ‘a man cannot lift a cow’.
8 There are a few cases in Kholagaun in which the original house was demolished and a new one built in its place. In such instances, the assessment of the site and the rituals accompanying site preparation, Bhumi Puja, are not done.
9 This same constitutive act creating worldly space is referred to by Kramrisch: ‘The earth is round. The Brāhmanas repeatedly say that the whole earth, once floating and mobile remained in this condition until the cardinal points, becoming fixed themselves, also fixed the earth. It its fixed position, it is spoken of as four-cornered’ (1976:29).
10 If a person is purchasing the land, this assessment is usually carried out before the purchase is finalised.
11 Some Kholagaun Chhetris told me that ‘in the past’ they recall seeing much more elaborate performances of Bhumi Puja. All they could remember about the performance is that a grid diagram (this sounds something like the vastu purusha mandala) was drawn in one corner (I suspect the north-east) of the site with coloured powders, idols of deities were installed and worshipped, and a hole was dug in one corner (again, probably the north-eastern one). Note this more elaborate Bhumi Puja includes the use of the grid pattern of the vastu parusha mandala to sacralize the site in the yantric configuration and, just as in the simpler version performed by Kholagaun Chhetris, the site is oriented to the cardinal directions through highlighting the north-east corner.
12 Gubhaju literally means a Newar Buddhist Vajracharya household priest; but Kholagaun Chhetris used it more generally to refer to any Newar ritual specialist or astrologer.
13 Pashupatinath, the most sacred temple in Nepal, is also square.
14 A household priest provided a more abstract explanation of the meaning of mercury: moisture or liquid is the quintessential substance (rasa) of all matter; moisture is a part of all matter and all distinct and diverse forms of matter are dissolvable in liquid in the same way that, according to Hindu cosmology, worldly diversity is dissolvable into a transcendent unity. Mercury is the most fundamental form of rasa. It looks like metal but is a liquid, suggesting that its form simultaneously encompasses all matter and its dissolution into a formless liquid.
15 The Nepali calendar has twelve months marked by the movement of the sun through the heavens in relation to the position of other astronomical bodies. Such cosmic divisions created by the relations between astronomical bodies are identified by signs of the zodiac so that each solar month in the Nepali calendar is associate with a zodiac sign that suffuses it with the character of the cosmic zone through which the sun passes. The logic here is similar to the way in which a child has certain characteristics and life trajectory according to the position of the planets at the time of birth (see Chapter 2).
16 This reasoning also holds for the first day of the year, e.g., what happens on the first day of the year is a foreshadowing of what the coming year holds for people.
17 People in Kholagaun told me: ‘When it rains in Māgh, it gets very cold, so frequent rain in Magh is troublesome because people can’t move around and do their chores, the sun doesn’t shine much and it’s especially bad for livestock. Whereas humans can sit in front of a fire to get warm, livestock cannot do this. Even the water is too cold for the live stock to drink, thus they must be given warm water for drinking.’
18 Singularly and collectively, they exhibit the diacritical features of a yantra—a centre point surrounded by a concentric polygonic girdle oriented to Hindu sacred geography—so that the house becomes a reiteration of the cosmos.
19 In some more elaborate Rudri Puja set-ups, I have seen a brass water vessel placed on the copper plate which supports another copper plate for the stone.
20 A toran is also used in marriage. As we will see in the next chapter, for marriage ceremonies a sacred diagram, jagya, is drawn in the bride’s and groom’s courtyard. The jagya is a yantra, measuring two metres per side, marked out by coloured powder lines on the ground and with tree branches stuck in the ground at the four corners and on the eastern side; in the centre is a sacrificial fire pit surrounded by an octagon, again drawn with coloured powder. A toran connects the five tree branches about 1.5 metres off the ground encircling the jagya and transforming it into a three-dimensional mandala. If jag puja transforms the house plot into a two-dimensional mandala, then wrapping the toran around the external structure house transforms the two-dimensional mandala formed by the foundation into a three-dimensional mandala.
21 This is done even if the house is not fully ready for habitation.
