by Ed Douglas
Grueber’s onward journey south to Kathmandu took him towards Shigatse and the monastery of Tashilhunpo, seat of another great Buddhist lineage, the Panchen Lamas. He was not the first Jesuit to visit. The Portuguese João Cabral, who entered Tibet from Bengal with Estêvão Cacella, escaped imprisonment in Bhutan and fled to Shigatse in 1628. There he sought permission from the ‘petty kings’ to the south of the Himalaya to enter Nepal. Sadly, Cabral’s letter to his superiors in Rome about his experiences in Kathmandu is lost, so Grueber’s accounts are the first European perspective we have on the city. Their experiences would later feed into a monumental effort to collate knowledge about China and its environs by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, among the most famous European intellectuals of his day. Thus it was a Jesuit perspective that coloured Europe’s first view of the Himalaya’s greatest city.
Grueber and d’Orville reached the Kathmandu valley early in 1662. Before them was a territory half the size of New York City containing three competing kingdoms: on the north side of the Bagmati river, Kathmandu itself, known also as Kantipur, kanti meaning ‘lustrous’; Patan, also known as Lalitpur, ‘the beautiful city’; and Bhaktapur on the eastern side of the valley, the ‘city of devotees’, known also as Bhadgaon. Each of these three towns had – and has – names in Newari, the Tibeto-Burmese language of the valley’s original urban dwellers: Yambu for Kathmandu, Yala for Patan and Khwopa for Bhaktapur. Despite recent decades of mass migration, Newars still form almost a third of the wider urban population of modern Kathmandu.
Siddhi Narasimha Malla, the Patan king who had instituted the Kartik dances twenty years earlier, had only just died and Grueber, as he wrote in a letter to his superiors in Austria, discovered the valley of ‘Nekbal’ in a state of war. The king of Kathmandu, Pratap Malla, was testing the resolve of the new king of Patan, Srinivasa, Siddhi Narasimha’s son. The two men had a grandfather in common, the last king to rule both Kathmandu and Patan. Such Lilliputian squabbles must have baffled a veteran of the Qing court like Grueber, who was anyway more interested in Christian souls than the family quarrels of obscure Himalayan kings. To that end, he presented Pratap with an ingratiating gift: a small telescope, a slice of Europe’s emerging technological revolution that would drive the Enlightenment. Pratap put the telescope to his eye and saw the troops of Srinivasa leap into focus, apparently within touching distance. ‘Let us march against them!’ Pratap cried. He was so delighted with the telescope and other ‘mathematical instruments’ Grueber left behind that he promised to build the Austrian a house and allow him to teach the gospel if he agreed to return.
Pratap’s shift in perspective as he held the telescope to his eye is somehow emblematic of the Malla dynasty’s self-absorption, cupped in the palm of their fertile valley at 1,400 metres. The magical telescope had brought his fixation even closer, much to his delight. What happened beyond the ring of mountains was only of marginal importance: a point of view that endured long after the Malla kings fell from power. The vigorous new dynasties that replaced them would also fall under the valley’s spell. It was such a fascinating world, why go elsewhere? When Grueber did leave Kathmandu he trekked some sixty kilometres to the town of Hetauda, then on the fringes of the tiny hill kingdom of Makwanpur. In Makwanpur he saw a customhouse, evidence of the mighty Mughal Empire to the south, to which the kings of the Kathmandu valley paid tribute each year: treasure and elephants. In this way, the Malla kings kept the world at a distance, unless an alliance with rulers outside offered advantage to one of the kingdoms in the endless skirmishes with their neighbours. That habit would be at least part of their undoing. The business of the world was becoming more insistent: they couldn’t keep it out for ever.
Almost sixty years later, in 1721, the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri was ordered back to India when a rival monastic order, the Capuchins, took over the Catholic mission in Lhasa. He stopped off in Kathmandu on his way south to Goa and witnessed a similar confrontation to the one Grueber had seen:
Whether caused by compassion for all living creatures or by lack of courage, [Newari] behaviour in war is most ridiculous and fantastic. When two armies meet they launch every sort of abuse at one another, and if few shots are fired, and no one is hurt, the attacked army retires to a fortress, of which there are many, resembling our country dovecotes.
This was not altogether sneering: the dovecotes of Italian architect Andrea Palladio, which it’s reasonable to suspect he had in mind, were exquisite.
But if a man is killed or wounded, the army which has suffered begs for peace, and sends a dishevelled and half-clothed woman, who weeps, beats her breast and implores mercy, the cessation of such carnage, and such shedding of human blood. The victorious army then dictates terms to the vanquished and war ends.
Such choreographed posturing was simply another example of the Malla dynasty’s chief concern: art in all its forms. From pyakha, ritual dance-dramas like the Kartik Naach, to protracted and dramatic festivals, to the architecture of palaces and temples, to the exquisite Newari painting, metalwork and wood carving produced in the valley’s workshops, the Malla kingdoms are a good illustration of what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz termed the theatre state, where expression of power through art and spectacle is not merely a means to an end, a kind of propaganda, but the purpose of that power and the source of its renewal. This theatrical statecraft reached its zenith in the mid seventeenth century and Pratap Malla was among its most successful practitioners. Nor was he shy in saying so. He transformed both Kathmandu’s Durbar Square and the palace complex of Hanuman Dhoka. Under the icon of the monkey-faced god Hanuman outside its main entrance he commanded a new inscription to be added, identifying himself as: ‘King of Kings, Chief of Nepal, extremely clever, Chief of all Kings, Twice Illustrious Great King, Poet Laureate, Enthroned Lord Jaya Pratap Malla.’ Inside the palace is an impressive stone carving of Narasimha in the act of disembowelling the demon Hiranyakashipu, his eyes and teeth picked out in silver.
Having mocked Newars for the ineffectual theatricality of their soldiery, Desideri also condemned them for their preference for sly assassination. ‘Nearly all bear deceit written on their faces.’ He thought them ‘unstable, turbulent and traitorous’, a harsh assessment from a man born in the medieval Tuscan city of Pistoia, only a few kilometres from Florence, another city-state built on trade, finance, religion, art and brutal political feuding. Perhaps it was the introspection of the valley that left Desideri unimpressed. He had visited the former Mughal capital Agra on his way to Tibet, and seen the architectural glories of that empire. Perhaps he lacked the artistic imagination to make sense of the Kathmandu valley’s unique cultural achievement. Newars were, he admitted, ‘intelligent, and very industrious, clever at engraving and melting metal’, but his only comment on the hundreds of temples he saw was that they were ‘generally small’.
Those temples told a rich story of the deep cultural bonds between central Tibet and Kathmandu winding their way back and forth across the high mountain passes. Desideri missed it, but his predecessor João Cabral, writing a century earlier, read the architecture more carefully. In a letter to his superior Alberto Latertius, stationed on the Malabar coast of India, he described the Tibetans he encountered in Shigatse, their wealth and the ‘great fields of wheat, and I never saw land that looked more like the Alemtejo in Portugal.’ He explained also that the Tibetans ‘have the same pagodas as the kingdom of Nepal and some of Bengal. Only in the superstition of castes and eating habits, which they do not hold, are they different.’ Thus Cabral sketched out the centuries-old transmission of tantric Buddhist culture from the Pala dynasty of Bengal through Kathmandu to Tibet.
Desideri, by contrast, had little interest in material things. His focus was Tibetan Buddhism. It annoyed him that Athanasius Kircher was still peddling the idea of Tibetan Buddhism’s links to Christianity in his immense work China Illustrata. Desideri had actually been there and studied the issue: he knew Kircher was wrong. Reincarnat
ion fascinated Desideri, who referred to it as ‘metempsychosis’, a term popularised by Pythagoras, and he noticed that Newars believed in it ‘to an even greater extent than the Thibettans’. Yet while priests in Italy could also be scientists, the gurus he met in Kathmandu seemed to Desideri merely irrational. ‘They are very superstitious in all things, futile observers, and utter heathens.’
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Kircher once wrote that ‘the sun never sets on the actions of the Society of Jesus’, so wide was its geographical spread. Something similar was said of the British Empire, which arrived on the fringes of the Himalaya in the second half of the eighteenth century. The first Briton to visit Kathmandu was Captain William Kirkpatrick, not a priest but an emissary of the East India Company, who arrived in early 1793. His mission had failed before it began: Kirkpatrick was there to mediate in a trade war that had erupted between Nepal’s new Gorkha dynasty and Tibet in 1788. When Gorkhali troops crossed the mountains to loot Tibetan monasteries, including Tashilhunpo, the Dalai Lama appealed for help to the Qing dynasty and the Qianlong emperor, who sent a large Chinese army to clear them out. Having come within around thirty kilometres of Kathmandu, the Chinese, overextended and suffering heavy casualties, withdrew, signing a treaty with the Gorkhali regent that settled the affair (see Chapter Eight). Kirkpatrick was no longer required. The Gorkhalis, who had wanted military support from the East India Company, were bitter about the British sitting on their hands and weren’t disposed to greet Kirkpatrick warmly. There was little for him to do but be a tourist for a week before he went back to Calcutta.
Kirkpatrick made the most of it. Arriving at Chandragiri, on the western rim of the encircling mountains, he described the Kathmandu valley as ‘beautifully and thickly dotted with villages and abundantly chequered with rich fields’, like an English country gentleman looking down on an estate he might wish to acquire. Kirkpatrick was a gentleman but had been born illegitimate into a family with plantations in the Carolinas, a family now looking for a fresh colonial start in the wake of the American Revolutionary War. Where better to boost one’s social status than India? (His third daughter Julia would marry into the influential Strachey family, making him the great-grandfather of Lytton Strachey. His grandsons were the same Strachey brothers that explored Kailas.) Kirkpatrick had orders from his masters in Calcutta to make maps, observe military capability and take note of commercial opportunities: pashmina wool, salt, elephants and yak tails, as popular as flywhisks in the British Empire as they had been in the Roman. (They were also used as beards in Chinese opera.)
Kirkpatrick was fluent in Persian, intellectually curious but most of all practical. If the Jesuit Desideri was gripped by metaphysical concepts, Kirkpatrick admired useful things. This was how European knowledge of Nepal accreted, on the scaffold of each traveller’s particular perspective. Kirkpatrick published the first illustration of the Nepali blade known as the khukuri in the book he wrote about his journey.
[I]t is in felling small trees or shrubs, and lopping the branches of others for this purpose, that the dagger, or knife worn by every Nepaulian, called Khookheri, is chiefly employed; it is also of very great use, as I repeatedly experienced, in clearing away the road when obstructed by the low hanging boughs of trees, and other similar impediments.
Knives were of obvious appeal to a military man, but he also took a close interest in building materials, noticing the elegance and complexity of Nepali bricks:
Nepaul in general is remarkable for the excellence of its bricks and tiles, but those of Bhatgong [Bhaktapur] are commonly allowed to be very far preferable to the rest. Certain it is, they surpass any I ever met in India, but it is not equally certain from whence their excellence proceeds. Some of those whom I questioned on the subject, referred it to the nature of the earth used in making them, and some to the water in tempering them; while others affirmed it to arise purely from a particular mode of burning them.
In studying bricks, Kirkpatrick had zeroed in on one of the key architectural motifs characterising Newari architecture, something that reached to the heart of a culture Europeans were struggling to understand. He arrived at the moment when the artistic and architectural glory days of Newari craftsmen were starting their decline, with the Malla kings gone from power. His question, ‘from whence their excellence proceeds’, was profound, if unconsciously so. The immediate answer was all the factors he suggested: knowing where to find the best and different types of rich alluvial clay and the knack of firing them evenly. The city’s founding legend, as described in the Swayambhu Purana, gives a clue to this clay’s origins. It speaks of a lake that once filled the valley, teeming with naga or snakes, still a ubiquitous motif in the valley. The bodhisattva Manjushri came south from the mountains and cleft the valley’s southern rim, draining the water and leaving exposed the rich earth that gives the valley’s bricks their lustrous warmth: the architectural equivalent of a hug. There is a seamless flow between the clay of the fields and the walls of old Newari houses, harmonising with the intricately carved wooden windows and window screens, called tiki jhya, the struts, pillars and doors that complete Newari houses and temples. A signature detail of Newari building was a style of brick called dachi-apa, with the ends angled inward slightly toward the interior-facing side so that so that nothing prevents the exterior face, dipped in red clay slip before firing, from being flush with its neighbours. It’s a beautiful effect and seals the building’s façade against heavy monsoon rain, protecting the soft mortar beneath. There were no schools or manuals to follow in building such houses: just timeworn technologies, evolved over centuries. Nowadays the mortar is sticky yellow clay, but historically it was called silay and included all kinds of gloop: surkhi, or brick dust, lime and ghee (clarified butter), even molasses.
Typically this elegant exterior façade would be matched with an interior wall of more conventional bricks; the gap between them was filled with rubble and clay. A wooden frame added strength to the structure. The overall effect of the soft mortar and wooden support is a defence against the regular seismic challenge of living in a planetary crumple zone. Yet if the earthquake is big enough, this style of building will come down. The stage on which the Kartik dances take place today stands in front of the sixteenth century Char Narayan temple in Patan, or at least it did. During the earthquake that struck Kathmandu in 2015, the two-tiered pagoda-style building was reduced to rubble. More recently, the Kartik Naach has taken place against a backdrop of empty space surrounded by a high metal fence. At least the temple’s materials, including its icons and carved roof struts were recovered, and safely stored before they were looted. The temple would soon be reconstructed, which is more than can be said for many of the private Newari houses that fell in the same tragic event.
Plenty of traditional Newari houses have gone anyway, torn down and replaced with a style of house familiar all over Asia: reinforced concrete beams and pillars, shuttered with modern bricks. The contrast with traditional building methods couldn’t be more obvious. The old social networks that organised these neighbourhoods for centuries, the guthis, are the merest shadow of their former selves. Yet the modern buildings still occupy the same footprint that buildings have occupied for centuries and with the same arrangement of storeys, with the kitchen and prayer room on the top floor. When Newars speak of a house, they often mean the site it stands on, not the building itself. Families built on four sides around a courtyard, or chok, the focal point for daily life and festivals alike. The interior square is somewhere to dry grain, hang washing and look out for each other’s kids as they play. Each courtyard will have a shrine or chaitya, in its Nepali form an elegant diminutive stupa, spiritual power points along with the water supply and electricity. Every day starts before dawn with the sound of bells being rung and the smell of incense as the city wakes up and makes an offering, rice and a smear of vermilion on an icon. Doors and thresholds in particular are focal points: during the monsoon, for example, at the festival of Nag Panchami, pictures of snakes
are pasted above doorways alongside magical mantras to ward them off. These are intimate spaces; people live so close that every argument is heard, every joke shared. You could not design a more fertile environment for gossip and rumour. Seeking privacy, and a dependable water supply, wealthier families have moved out to the suburbs. And these days there are usually a couple of motorbikes parked next to the shrine. But even now the pattern of life goes on in broadly similar terms as it did when Kirkpatrick took his tour, albeit with only a tiny fraction of the squalor and disease he witnessed. ‘The hamlets and villages in these mountainous tracts exhibited, at a distance, an appearance highly romantic,’ he wrote, touching on his era’s zeitgeist, its taste for the sublime, although ‘on a nearer view this delusion vanished, and the most prominent picture that remained displayed the squalidness of poverty, and the miseries of distress.’
The religious ambition of Jesuit missionaries and the Orientalist view of Romanticism gave way eventually to proper academic study of Kathmandu’s complex but aesthetically rewarding interplay of cultural genius and Himalayan politics. Even then, European prejudice could get in the way. Born in 1841 Gustave Le Bon was an early anthropologist who read Darwin and decided there was a correlation between cranium size and intelligence, an evolutionary explanation for European ‘superiority’. The theory won him a prize from the French Academy of Sciences. He developed a portable cephalometer for measuring the skulls of different ethnic groups he met in the field and for the rest of his long and eclectic career, the idea that culture was somehow a consequence of race was never far from his thoughts.