Nepal Archives - Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies

Lecture tag: Nepal

Readings in Netra Tantra: Session Eight (MT 14)

The Netra Tantra is an important text of Śaiva tantrism popular in Kashmir some time between the eighth and eleventh centuries CE. These readings will use the KSTS edition along with two manuscripts from Nepal.

Readings in Netra Tantra: Session Six (MT 14)

Readings in Netra Tantra: Session Five (MT 14)

Readings in Netra Tantra: Session Four (MT 14)

Readings in Netra Tantra: Session Two (MT 14)

Readings in the Netra Tantra: Session One (MT 2014)

Battle of the Gods: A Comparative Study of Narrative Techniques in Nepali Painting

While exploring the collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), I was struck by four dazzling illustrations where splendid architecture and dramatic landscapes in rainbow colours serve as backdrops as Krishna hunts, marries beautiful princesses, and engages in combat. The depicted episodes from the Latter Half of the Tenth Book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa were familiar to me from illustrations produced at the Rajput courts, in the Punjab hills, and in Central India. But here, Krishna had been transposed into the rich and brilliant world of Nepali paintings and occupied the cities and palaces of the Kathmandu valley, his presence bearing testimony to the wide sphere of the Bhāgavata’s circulation and influence.

The four PMA illustrations and the lavish Nepali manuscript to which they belong have never been studied in detail. This is despite the long history of Vaishnavism in Nepal, the ubiquity of artworks dedicated to Vishnu and his incarnations, and the manuscript’s participation in a broader North Indian engagement with the Krishna legend. Moreover, the manuscript is visually spectacular and a singular example in Nepal’s canon. In this talk, I will examine the manuscript’s depiction of the “battle of the gods” between Krishna and Shiva alongside a Nepali scroll that portrays the Harivaṃśa’s version of the encounter. By comparing arrangement of text and image, visualization of space and place, storytelling techniques and style, I will probe how the manuscript’s organization and narrative rhythm derive at least partially from the features it shares with contemporary Hindu (and Buddhist) scrolls. My larger goal is to prompt a revision of the dominant narrative of Himalayan art where “Himalayan” is seen as synonymous with Tibetan Buddhist art; such a characterization fails to account for Nepal’s rich canon of Hindu-themed works and its entangled socio-cultural history where deities, religious practices and artistic styles are shared between Hinduism and Buddhism.

Dr. Neeraja Poddar received her Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University. She was the Andrew W. Mellon—Anne d’Harnoncourt Postdoctoral Fellow in South Asian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and is now Curator at The City Palace Museum, Udaipur. Poddar’s publications and research focus broadly on South Asian illustrated manuscripts; she is particularly interested in the materiality of books, the relationships between text and image and the transmission and circulation of narratives. She also studies the painting traditions of Nepal with particular emphasis on Vaiṣṇava imagery. Poddar co-curated the reinstallation of the South Asian galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is currently working on a book project related to illustrated manuscripts of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as well as a catalogue of The City Palace Museum, Udaipur’s silver collection.

Durgā and the Kings of Nepal: Goddess Worship on Dasaĩ

The period of the autumnal Navarātra has formed a culmination point for worshipping goddesses through and for Nepalese kings. With the rise of the Shah dynasty from the 18th century onwards and the attending state building process this festival, commonly known by its Nepali name Dasaĩ, grew into the state ritual par excellence.

This contribution will focus on the situation in Kathmandu Valley where in 1768/69 the Shahs ousted the earlier Malla kings from power. The Shahs took over the earlier dynasty’s palace(s) and with it the royal goddesses residing there. Though broadly speaking, the two royal houses in question had common religious affiliations—their Brahmins following the same Vedic school and their court religions centre-staging the worship of female divinities according to Tantric liturgy—they promoted distinct ritual practices and relied on different ritual specialists. In remodelling the courtly Navarātra rituals to cope with the new political situation two seemingly opposing and yet interwoven tendencies seem to have been at work. Though new goddesses, specialists and rituals were introduced, the pre-existing ones were partly or entirely left in place, the two sets being tied together by recalibrating each of them. Such processes become evident when engaging with texts dealing with the pragmatic dimensions of religion, including ritual handbooks, court diaries and historical documents on the logistics and organisation of the rituals. Goddess worship there appears as a primarily practical concern, in which it is meaningful who is sponsored by whom to worship which form of the goddess where, when and how. Apart from the question of how the Shahs’ Navarātra ritual built upon that of the Malla kings the paper will also look at practical and administrative steps taken to impose the celebration of Dasaĩ on all subjects and indeed advance it as an integration measure in the rising national state.

Dr Astrid Zotter studied Indology and Religious Studies at Leipzig. She has been doing research on Hindu traditions in the Kathmandu Valley (Nepal), combining textual studies with fieldwork. Her research and publications deal with topics such as the use of flowers in worship, life-cyclic rituals, and festivals. Currently she is a post-doctoral researcher and the deputy leader of the research unit “Documents on the History of Religion and Law of Premodern Nepal” at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.