Modernizing Nepal's Living Goddess Tradition

[Guest guest]

Nepal's goddess stumbles into modernity

By TIM SULLIVAN,

Associated Press

Dec 21, 2007

 

On a cold autumn evening, during a festival giving

thanks for the monsoon rains, dozens of chanting

worshippers pulled her enormous wooden chariot

through the narrow streets of Katmandu's old city.

Thousands of cheering people pressed forward, hoping

for a blessing. Drunken young men danced around her,

pounding drums and shouting.

 

But the goddess - a child wrapped in red silk, a third

eye painted on her forehead as a sign of enlightenment

- took little notice of the joyous riot. Instead, she stared

ahead intently, her jaw pumping furiously. Then, finally,

she blew a yellow bubble about the size of a plum.

 

And then the goddess smiled, just a little.

 

Priti Shakya is 10 years old, the daughter of a family of

poor goldsmiths. At the age of 4, a panel of judges

examined her in a series of ancient ceremonies -

checking her horoscope, searching for physical

imperfections and, as a final test, seeing if she would be

frightened after a night spent in a room filled with 108

freshly decapitated animal heads. She was not.

 

So Priti became a goddess, worshipped as the

incarnation of the powerful Hindu deity Taleju, and

going into near-complete isolation in an ancient

Katmandu palace.

 

She will return home only at the onset of menstruation,

when a new goddess will be named. Then Priti will be

left to adjust to a life that - suddenly and absolutely -

is supposed to be completely normal.

 

That is how it has been for nearly four centuries, in a

tradition that held out against modernity even as Nepal,

ever so slowly, began to change.

 

But modernity is coming, even to the goddess.

 

She has been dragged into Nepal's political maelstrom,

her influence argued over by everyone from Maoist

militants to the prime minister. Her role, meanwhile, has

become a topic of public debate, with human rights

lawyers, politicians and academics wrangling about a

child's rights and an ancient form of worship.

 

Today, everything from television to insults reach into

the goddess' palace.

 

A communist politician called her an " evil symbol " and

the Supreme Court launched an investigation after

activists said the tradition violates Nepalese law. In a

showdown that melded religion, politics and the

monarchy, the nascent democratic government refused

to allow King Gyanendra to receive the goddess' annual

blessing - thought to be an all-important protector of

the king. When the king went without permission, the

government slashed the number of royal bodyguards.

 

Among the Shakyas, the goldsmith caste that chooses

the goddess from its daughters, it has become

increasingly difficult to find families willing to send

their girls away.

 

For some people, all this is simply too much.

 

" We know there needs to be change, " said Manju Shree

Ratna Bajracharya, the eighth generation of priest from

his family to oversee the temple of the royal kumari -

or virgin - as the goddess is commonly called. " But

this criticism of the tradition, this is pure ignorance. "

 

He is bitter about politicians who focus on the kumaris

for political gain, and the way she has been pulled into

their battles with the king. He distrusts the rights

activists, wondering if they are using the practice for

publicity.

 

" The tradition can't be treated like this, " said

Bajracharya, who spends most of his days working as a

bureaucrat in the state electricity company. " It is too

important to Nepal. "

 

But any criticism at all would have been unthinkable

just a few decades ago, when Nepal was emerging from

centuries of Himalayan isolation. It was a nation bound

by feudal traditions, a country that handed out visitors'

visas very reluctantly, and where few people could

imagine a king without absolute power.

 

While change did eventually come - foreigners began

arriving regularly in the 1960s, when Katmandu became

famous for its hippies and cheap drugs - it came

slowly. It was only five years ago, for instance, when

women earned equal inheritance rights under Nepalese

law.

 

Today, Nepal is a democracy - albeit a fragile one,

with crushing poverty, a figurehead monarch and a

powerful Maoist militant movement with tenuous ties to

mainstream politics - and change is coming even to the

kumari.

 

Some of those changes are political, such as how the

prime minister now seeks her official blessing, instead

of the king. But some are more personal.

 

Teachers have been appointed, keeping the goddess on

the same academic track as any other girl her age.

There's also television in the palace these days, giving

the kumari access to everything from Bollywood to the

news, and there's talk that she may be allowed someday

to live at home with her family.

 

It is an attempt to give some normalcy to the goddesses,

who can flail desperately when they return to the outside

world.

 

Rashmila Shakya, one of eight ex-royal kumaris still

alive, remembers the pain of her return. Now a 25-year-

old computer technician, she left the kumari palace at

age 12. She'd had no proper schooling, and her feet had

not touched the outside ground for years. Her only

playmates had been the children of the palace's

caretaker, and while her family could visit, even they

saw her as a goddess. Her return home took a heavy toll.

 

" I didn't even know how to walk around like a regular

person, " said Shakya, a quiet, bookish young woman

who dreams of becoming a software designer. " The

crowds frightened me. "

 

Still, she said, she doesn't regret her time in the palace.

 

" Not everybody gets to be a goddess, " she said, smiling.

" In one life, I got to have two lives. "

 

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