In The City Of Devotees

This was years ago...A weary traveller, not from around these parts, sought shelter. It was getting dark, and he needed a place to spend the night,” says Tej Kumari Chitrakar. “I thought it would do no harm to let him sleep in our corridor. He was a Pardesi, after all...I couldn’t think of anything bad that could come from giving him one night’s shelter here.”

Tej Kumari has an animated sort of expression on her face. You sense that she really wants to tell this story. What she is about to confide in you amazes her, and she wishes for you to share in that wonder. “It was late at night when I heard frantic knocks and opened the door to find the Pardesi on the landing. ‘The Devatas will not let me sleep,’ he told me. ‘They have hit and prodded me all these hours, and will not let me rest’.”

You find yourself in an old settlement in Bhaktapur, in a home that’s not quite like all the others. It is the holy house of Ya-che Tole where Tej Kumari’s husband, Purna, moulds, paints and brings to life the 13 sanctified masks of the Nava Durga Naach each year.

Purna Chitrakar has been involved in the making of these masks for the past 50 years. As a young boy, in the 1960s, he was apprenticed to his Kaka—then the artisan mask-maker of Ya-che Tole—to train under him. As a member of the extended Chitrakar family to whom the Guthi is believed to have consigned the special privilege of making the Nava Durga masks centuries ago—for it is not certain when the Nava Durga Naach tradition actually began although it is believed that King Subarma Malla systematised the dance, as it exists in its present form, in the 15th century—Purna devoted his youth to mastering the intricacies of his craft.

“Every year, on Gathe Mangal—the day when all homes are rid of the evil spirits dwelling in them—the Gathas, who are the Nava Durga dancers, would bring bocha maato, lightweight, good quality clay, to the holy house,” he remembers. The Gathas—gardeners by occupation, a separate caste whose role in the traditional Newari occupational hierarchy was to grow flowers for worship—belonged, like Purna and his Kaka, to an extended family granted the special privilege of being directly associated with the Nava Durga Naach.

“The clay would be dried in the sun and beaten to dust,” he continues. “This would then be mixed with sticky wheat-paste, and cotton and Nepali paper would gradually be beaten into the mixture.” Purna is describing the very method he still uses today to make his masks. “When the right consistency is reached and time comes for the clay to be placed on the thasa (mould), you pound it again with the mallet and roll it down to its desired thickness,” he explains. Only then does he place the readied clay on the thasa and begin building up the mask’s features.

The mask is left to dry and harden for the next five-six days, after which the edges are properly finished. Painting can begin once layers of jute, fine cotton and Nepali paper have been applied on the mask, and its facade painted over with kamero maato (white mica clay). Every year, Purna spends the months leading up to Dashain invested in this task. Each intricately rendered detail and selectively hued mark is imbued in symbolic meaning and representative of the centuries Purna and the mask-makers who came before him have spent working them over and over again.

For these mask-makers, their work has always been more than artistry and craftsmanship. Purna, like the others who came before him, is believed to be an initiate, an artisan to whom the esoteric world of old enchantments—the mantras and tantric knowledge integral to the making of the Nava Durga masks—is very real and accessible. And the actual process of making these masks is very possibly a ritual only ever witnessed by their makers; no others are allowed to watch.

The likenesses themselves are expected to have looked exactly the same when they were first made almost half-a-millennium ago. And though Purna has never digressed, he seems beset by another change, one where real world economics have come to play a key role. “Each year, I have to find a way of collecting more than half the amount it takes to buy raw material for the masks,” he says, and the total adds up to Rs 200,000. “I make rounds of neighbouring Guthis, municipalities and VDCs because the money I receive from the local Guthi and ministry simply do not cover the expense. It is a tiring, degrading process, and I have little idea who will take over these responsibilities once my time is up.”

And although there is something of a smile on his face as he wonders who the next Nava Durga mask-maker might be—for neither his eldest son, who, if tradition were to be strictly followed, would take up the duty as his fated calling, nor his two younger ones, are interested in doing so—Purna seems disillusioned by the present. Bhaktapur and its people, to whom the mystical lore of the Nava Durga once meant the difference between a good harvest and a bad one, are no longer as reliant on its soil and its gods for good fortune.

As you listen, you notice a black curtain towards the end of Purna and Tej Kumari’s room. It is in the secret workshop that lies just beyond it that the mask-maker works. Each year, right after the master finishes his 13 deified masks, the Gatha dancers ‘steal’ them away. From then on, for an entire nine-and-a-half-month period—which begins on Bijaya Dashami and ends on Bhagasti—Mahakali, Kumari, Barahi, Bramhayani, Maheshwori, Vaishnavi and Indrayani, accompanied by Shiva, Bhairav, Seto Bahirav and Ganesh, and the fierce animal guardians Sima and Duma, walk through the cobbled lanes of Bhaktapur, physically manifest in the dancers who wear their sacred masks.

The feared, revered gods are still very much alive in this ancient city of devotees.