The Return of the Kumari

[Guest guest]

Return of the goddess

Saturday August 11, 2007

Andrew Buncombe

New Zealand Herald

 

In Nepal, she has been worshipped as a deity since she was 2. But

when 10-year-old Sajani took a trip to the United States, Nepali

religious officials threatened to strip her of her exalted status. Is

life for a goddess as divine as it sounds?

 

The goddess is sleeping, her head resting against the window of the

plane. Far beneath the clouds outside lie the mountains of her native

country to which she is returning. Soon she will be stepping on to

the tarmac, the broadest of happy smiles beaming across her young

face. But for now the goddess is quiet and calm. Tranquil. The plane

banks and dips.

 

This is no ordinary homecoming, just as her trip away from Nepal was

no ordinary departure. Indeed, for centuries no living goddess had

ever left the country. Her journey abroad was both fuelled by

exhilaration and beset with problems. Now, at least, those problems

are behind her.

 

Ten-year-old Sajani Shakya is a kumari, a child goddess worshipped by

the Newari, an ethnic minority who live in Nepal's green and

luxuriant Kathmandu Valley. For centuries Buddhists and Hindus alike

have come to prostrate themselves at the feet of these pre-pubescent

girls believed to bear the spirit of the goddess Kali and to ask for

their help. At the first sign of menstruation the spirit is believed

to depart from the girls bodies and they lose their deity status.

 

And so might it have gone with Sajani but for her clash with

modernity. A pair of British film-makers who spent two years making a

documentary about the kumaris invited Sajani to attend the US

premiere of their film, Living Goddess, and with her parents

agreement she gladly accepted.

 

Her trip was a complete success, the goddess charming adults and

children alike in Washington DC and eliciting the sort of positive

coverage for a film one is certain to receive when you bring a

goddess to the opening night. At least, it would have been a complete

success but for modernity's clash with tradition while Sajani was

still in the US.

 

Concerned that she had broken the code of etiquette by leaving Nepal,

the guild of officials who oversee the kumaris told her family she

was to be stripped of her deity status. Frantic days of negotiation

followed with the film-makers and family seeking to reason with the

guild. Eventually, the officials agreed: Sajani stays a kumari.

 

 

The glass doors of the airport's arrivals lounge slide open and

immediately there is a frantic scramble. A small scrum of Nepalese

photographers tipped off about Sajani's return are fighting for

position. Flashes go off. There is the sound of what appears to be a

thousand shutters snapping open and shut. Dozens of relatives are

waving and cheering.

 

A band playing Buddhist devotional music strikes up what sounds like

a jazz tune. Sajani, dressed in her ceremonial clothes, is hoisted

upon the shoulders of her father, Nyuchhe. Her mother Rukmimi reaches

out to hug her, grinning wildly. " I'm very happy. I'm overjoyed to

have her back, " her father says later. Her mother adds: " I had tears

in my eyes. " Someone is carrying a huge black-and-white toy panda, a

souvenir from Washington. Such is the melee, it seems the goddess

will never get out of the airport.

 

Somehow the party makes it on to crowded buses and then to Bhaktapur,

the medieval timber city in which Sajani lives and of which she is

the official goddess. The group marches through the narrow streets as

people lean from their carved windows, smiling. Someone is carrying

sticks of fragrant incense and the band has barely paused. Even now

they are leading the way, drumming and chiming. Through this

remarkable city that director Bernardo Bertolucci used for the set of

his movie Little Buddha, the throng twists its way in a very public

demonstration of the goddess return to her people.

 

Soon Sajani has arrived at the narrow, three-storey building that is

her home. Bedecked with flowers and scarves, she steps inside and

takes her place upon a throne set in a specially constructed shrine.

A Buddhist priest steps forward to perform a lengthy purification

ritual designed both to cleanse Sajani and to seek pardon for any

transgression that may have occurred.

 

Relatives and neighbours come and pray and bring gifts and offerings.

People tear strips of red cloths. Someone places bowls of curd at the

feet of the goddess. Sajani looks distracted and blows bubbles with a

piece of green gum. This process is incredibly important for her and

for her family, says Ishbel Whitaker, the director of the documentary

and who for two weeks led negotiations with the religious guild. Its

important for them to see she is still the kumari.

 

As evening quietly falls in Bhaktapur and cooking fires are lit

across the city, the men of Sajanis family gather on the rooftop to

celebrate with a cloudy homemade rice wine called rakshi and a

supercharged spirit also distilled from fermented rice.

 

Sajanis drama has not taken place in a vacuum. Nepal is a rapidly

changing country, confronting an assault from the outside world that

its remote Himalayan location kept at bay for hundreds of years. All

but shut-off to foreigners until the 1950s, the country has in the

past 10 years been overwhelmed by upheaval in the form of a Maoist

uprising against the Government and a people-power revolution that

saw the monarchy reverse its decision to suspend parliament.

 

At many levels a struggle is being fought between modernity,

represented by the hordes of backpackers and tourists who throng

Kathmandu's streets and the interest of people such as Whitaker and

fellow film-maker Marc Hawker, and unyeilding tradition represented

by Sajani and the strict rules that govern her and Nepal's dozen or

so other kumaris.

 

There are certainly those who believe the kumari tradition needs to

change and that this ancient practice is an affront to the rights of

those children who, to a greater or lesser extent, lose their

childhood for the sake of tradition. In 2005, Kathmandu-based human

rights lawyer Pundevi Maharjan filed a lawsuit claiming the

children's rights were being abused and demanding a reform of the

practice. The Government ordered a commission to investigate and the

publication of its findings is imminent.

 

" I said exploitation and discrimination has been going on. This

should be eliminated, " says Maharjan, herself a member of the Newari,

and who asked for a kumari's blessing before filing her lawsuit. " We

don't want to end the tradition but we have to change for the

protection of the culture. If we don't change the culture, maybe one

day it will collapse. "

 

Maharjan says that the most egregious abuse concerned the Kathmandu

or Royal Kumari, the most senior of the goddesses who lives a life of

isolation cut off from her friends, forced to stay inside her palace

and wave to tourists. She is carried everywhere, her feet not being

permitted to touch the ground. Evidence suggests many kumari and

their families live in considerable poverty and former kumari face

severe challenges in their adult lives, struggling to relate to other

people and their reduced status. In some cities, there is a shortage

of candidates for kumari as families seek to avoid the poverty and

problems associated with the honour.

 

Sajani's life appears to have a better balance. Five days a week she

goes to school with her friends, she lives at home with her two

sisters and brother, and other than for special ceremonies she wears

her normal clothes. Were you to see her playing with her siblings on

any normal day you would presume she was just any child from a poor

family living in a very poor country.

 

Yet such a perception would be wrong. Not only is there the regular

worship from neighbours seeking her help or blessing, but during the

autumnal festival of Dashain, Sajani's participation is required for

15 consecutive days, culminating with her spending the final day

alone in the temple surrounded by the severed heads of hundreds of

sacrificed buffalo, goats and other animals. It is not, by any means,

a normal childhood.

 

The day after her homecoming and purification, the goddess is sitting

on her bed, playing with the panda. She seems distinctly bored by the

latest in what has been a series of interrogators. One wonders

whether Sajani has a bit of goddess attitude.

 

Yes, she enjoyed her visit the US. She enjoyed meeting the children

at Lafayette Elementary School. " The cars there don't emit smoke like

they do in Nepal. The cars don't use their horns, " she says. She was

also struck by the scorching summer weather. " It was 47C, " she

claims. " It was very hot. In Nepal it is 27C. " She enjoyed drinking

extra-large glasses of milk and seeing a stretch limousine. At the

airport she was dazzled by the moving walkway.

 

Sajani has been a kumari since the age of 2, picked from the

goldsmiths' caste according to a traditional checklist of 32 various

attributes. Almost ever since she has been conscious that people have

treated her differently. The 10-year-old says her friends treat her

normally and that at school she studies the same subjects - maths,

science, Nepali, social studies - as everyone else. And yet if

someone in the community is taken ill, Sajani will be collected from

school and asked to use her shakti, or powers, to try to heal

them. " There was an old man and an old woman and their son had taken

all their money and belongings. Everything, " she recalls. " I believe

they got it back after getting my blessing. "

 

On another occasion one of the many foreign tourists who make their

way to Bhaktapur was taken ill and Sajani was taken to visit him in

hospital. " My mother told me to bless them and let them get better.

He got better and went away, " she says. Another woman who came

seeking help clung on to Sajani's limbs. " How could I help her when

she was pulling it out of my legs, " she laughs.

 

The goddess wants to play badminton and one of her sisters runs to a

local shop to buy a shuttlecock made with real feathers. The cobbled

courtyard outside her house, next to an ancient Buddhist temple

replete with prayer wheels and flags and a large brass bell that

devotees strike when they come to pray, makes a perfect court.

 

For a deity, her game is nothing special, but she plays with the

boundless energy and enthusiasm of a 10-year-old. A neighbour sits on

the floor of the courtyard weaving mats from dried rice stalks while

the prayer flags flutter in the breeze. The scene appears fixed and

unchanging, but for how long? The goddess hits the shuttlecock high

into the air.

 

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