Habilitation Project Durgā and the Kings of Nepal: The Rise of Dasaĩ as a State Festival
Overview
The period of the autumnal Navarātra has formed a culmination point for the worship the goddess Durgā by and for Nepalese kings since at least the 14th century. Mahanī, as the festival is called in the oldest Newari texts, was integral part of the ritual fabric und urban religion of the Malla city-states of the Kathmandu Valley. With the rise of the Shah dynasty and the associated processes of state building and Hinduisation during Nepal’s “long 19th century” (1768–1950) this festival, commonly known by its Nepali name Dasaĩ, grew into the state ritual par excellence.
This book project traces the history and development of the festival through texts and artefacts that shed light on the tangible and pragmatic dimensions of religion. In a bottom-up approach texts produced by and for the actors involved—such as inscriptions, ritual manuals, court diaries and historical documents on the logistics and organisation of the rituals—are brought into dialogue with each other as well as with concrete icons and places of worship. From this perspective, the rituals appear as a primarily practical matter, in which it is meaningful who is sponsored by whom to worship which particular form of the goddess where, when and how.
There is a particular focus on the dynastic break of 1768/69 when the Shahs from Gorkha overthrew the earlier Malla kings who had ruled the Kathmandu Valley since ca. 1200. The Shahs took over the earlier dynasty’s palace(s) and with it the royal goddesses and their ritual and textual traditions. Although the two royal houses in question shared broadly similar religious affiliations—their Brahmins followed the same Vedic school and their court religions centre-staged the worship of female deities according to Tantric liturgy—they promoted distinct ritual practices and relied on different ritual specialists. Two apparently opposing and yet interwoven tendencies seem to have been at work in remodeling the courtly Navarātra rituals to cope with the new political situation. Though new goddesses, specialists and rituals were introduced, the pre-existing ones were left in place in part or in whole, the two sets being linked by a recalibration of each. Apart from asking how the Shahs’ Navarātra rituals built on those of the Malla kings, the project also examines the practical and administrative steps taken to impose the celebration of Dasaĩ on all subjects and indeed to promote it as a state festival, where it contributed both to territorial and social integration as well as to segregation and hierarchical segmentation.
