Axel Michaels

Macht und Ohnmacht einer lebenden Göttin Die Kumārī im politischen Wechsel Nepals

Zusammenfassung Die Kumārī, die sogenannte lebende Göttin, in Nepal ist seit einigen Jahren wiederholt Gegenstand politischer und juristischer Auseinandersetzungen geworden. Der Aufsatz behandelt diese Konflikte, vornehmlich im Hinblick auf Fragen der komplexen Agency, die Priester, Politiker, Menschenrechtsinstitutionen, die Öffentlichkeit (Presse), die Familie der Kumārī und nicht zuletzt die Kumārī selbst beanspruchen.

“Religious” Approaches to Heritage Restoration in Post-Earthquake Kathmandu

university of heidelberg, germany In the aftermath of the 2015 earthquakes of Nepal we noticed two key attitudes towards preserving and restoration of monuments of cultural heritage among archeologists, architects, conservationists and cultural experts concerned with or interested in rebuilding and reconstruction of Nepal’s heritage buildings (Weiler and Gutschow 2016). One has to do with authenticity, the other with agency. We argue that both approaches have quasi-religious or even ideological implications in that they insist on the enforcement of a particular view or practice. The focus of attention in the form of international as well as stateand NGO-based donations and activities has so far been on such large monuments as have been declared UNESCO world cultural heritage sites since 1962: temples and palaces of the three cities of the Kathmandu Valley: Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur. In 2015 some of these remarkable monuments from the Malla period (ca. fourteenth century to late eighteenth) had collapsed within minutes. According to a damage assessment report by the Department of Archaeology, more than a thousand monuments were damaged, 140 were completely destroyed. The immediate reaction of international donor organizations, NGOs, most media and other agencies or institutions and politicians was to rebuild or restore these impressive buildings that have attracted the attention of so many international visitors and have become the source of a growing heritage tourism business. This ongoing process of restoration and preservation is based on various criteria that evolve around originally western but nowadays almost ubiquitous notions of “authenticity” and “originality.” The aim of some conservationists and the Department of Archaeology is to rebuild the monuments in their “original” or traditional form (Tiwari 2016). As a consequence, discussions among archeologists, conservationists, architects, and culture experts started on the question what “original” material and forms actually mean. In March 2016, the Government of Nepal decided, that “Traditional construction materials should be used, and traditional construction technology and norms adopted, for the restoration and rebuilding of all types of monuments” (Government of Nepal 2016, 6). In practice, this meant that, wherever possible, all traditional buildings should be rebuilt in their “authentic” form using original material only, i.e. bricks, wood, stones, and roof tiles. Proposals by organizations such as the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust (see also Weiler, in this issue) regarding rebuilding of the famous Char Narayan Temple at Patan Darbar Square (Figures 1 and 3) to stabilize it with concrete and iron fortifications, thus ensuring that the monument would not collapse so easily again in case of another earthquake, were rejected—or led to massive delays by the Department of Archaeology. Such politics implied acts and regulations that, in the end, separated the people from the once living places, and increasingly transformed the royal (Darbar) squares of Kathmandu Valley into a kind of outdoor museum. However, simultaneously thousands of smaller, less monumental shrines and temples had also been destroyed or damaged. Yet these buildings did not attract the attention of the general and international public even though they are often much more central for worship and more frequented than the monuments. This could be a neighborhood’s shrine of Ganesha, a small temple of a local goddess, or a simple rest-house (pati) where members of a local community gather to chat or chant devotional songs in the mornings or evenings. The renovation and preserving of places such as the Chandeshvari Temple in Patan (see Figure 2) happened with no support from the Government of Nepal (e.g. the National Reconstruction Authority) or foreign donations. Instead, money came from the municipality or local businessmen, for instance. The local people displayed a list of residents who have provided material and monetary support for the renovation work. Not everyone regrets the lack of official support. In personal conversation, one local even argued that: “This is a ‘Department-of Archaeology free zone,’” which means that the community would not like to see “outsiders” imposing their rules and regulations Manik Bajracharya is a Research Fellow at the South Asia Institute, Department of Cultural and Religious History of South Asia and Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, Heidelberg University, Germany. His research interests are: Newar Buddhist studies, Nepalese chronicles, history of the 18th–19th century South Asia. manik.bajracharya@adw.uni-heidelberg.de

Rethinking the Body: An Introduction

In this volume we are pursuing two objectives. On the one hand, we want to address and study the concept of the body in India. On the other, we want to clarify to the German and European reader, using the example of India, that the human body is understood differently in foreign cultures as to European culture. The two objectives are linked and represent the specific aim of this volume. They raise the question of what is understood by the body in the respective cultural context.

Notions of Nature in Traditional Hinduism

This article focusses on four features in the perception of nature which are specific to Hinduism. However, this does not imply that I summarize the concept of nature in Hinduism for there is no such single concept. Any attempt to put forward such a concept would be falsifying Hindu thought which is based on a variety of independent sources, social groups, languages and regions and which, therefore, cannot be reduced to a one, single, uniform world-view. In this context, it must not be forgotten that the term “Hinduism” itself, denoting a monolithic religion, was coined by Muslims to speak of the phenomenon of Indian religious life, whereas the so-called Hindus themselves have not tended to regard theselves as a unitary social group or community. Thus, in those cases where the Hindu conceptions of nature is spoken of it is usually either simplistic or reductive and even wrong, tending predominantly to focus on just one corpus of literature, the Sanskrit literature, and merely one social group, the Brahmin priests.