Tanya Jones is a Doctor of Philosophy Candidate at Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University

On the first day, the building was there. By the last day of my stay in Patan, I realised it was gone.

Along the roads to Jyapu Academy stands a Bhairab temple, its composure unchanging except for the poster notices stuck to its sides, and the LED that lights up the trim of its roofs. Where my attention was drawn, however, was toward the daily-changing surrounds of the temple – a crossroads of life moving on; buildings, cars, and construction material finding a play to stay, and then to go, revolving as a mandala around both the holiness and the regularity of the architecture. As a group, we discussed the flow of heritage in its changes and its continuities across livelihoods in Nepal, finding our ways to where water, flora, and fauna once gave life, too, and to where the tangible and intangible meet to enliven that which is maintained and developed across time.  On my own, I explored the ideas that cause a place to change or to remain the same – what are the conditions for something to stay, or to go?

MacDonald (2018) writes that “[h]eritage… is imagined and produced as enduring unchanged over time” (p. 3), in discussion of terminology surrounding heritage preservation and that which is “allowed” (p. 3) to change. I further draw upon Chitrakar (2020) in their exploration of Kathmandu Valley public spaces as an “integral part of urban life… [and] in providing a common ground for human contact and social interactions” (p. 25). In the understanding that the temples, stupa, and everyday parts of living like water and commerce make up these social interactions, I find myself wondering who and what in Kathmandu Valley determine which social interactions stay, and which go, and where and why such vital elements to public life might stay or go.

To begin along the journey to an answer, of some sort, to these ponderings, I think back to the first few days of my stay in Patan. We were told of restoration – both of place and of self and behaviour – where the future creates the past, as selected and curated from repertoire of the past, and that nothing can truly be done for the first time. All relies upon an orientation to the past, built upon by a continuity of acceptance or rejection as each performs their own identities. Similarly, we asked ourselves what heritage might mean for different stakeholders – who curates the past for the future’s care?

In the Kathmandu Valley we may think of the town planners, from the Malla Period, the Nepalese caste system, and the communities that come together to build and carry chariots in times for festivals, or, among the Newar people, we may think of the guthi systems dedicated to religious, funerary, or locality-based traditions, as examples (see Toffin, 2005). I also point to the recent post, Where is gender in heritage research?, (curated by Pooja Kalita, 2024, April 3), where women’s invisibility is recognised in the carriage of tangible and intangible heritage in research from past to present. Who is it, then, who tells what is to be and do, and what isn’t? In some cases, one might say that they who began a heritage, by agreement or by rejection of other values, are the hinges upon which change does or does not occur. In others, we look to other ways of doing and being in this world, and take and learn where we can.

In the case of the Bhairab temple in central Patan, was it a man, or a guthi member, an employee, or a landlord who caused a building nearby to be torn down? As a foreigner to the Kathmandu Valley, I could not ask, and may never even know these answers. Despite this, I wonder, especially, who arranged the LED lights on the temple, or who caused the temple to be untouched and unharmed, and beautiful, in what appeared to be the re-construction of that nearby building? Is it the temple, or the people living around it who carry the heritage of this little crossroads in Nepal?

I, of course, cannot argue for one or for the other – nor can I say that the people and place have equal value in all cases in the Kathmandu Valley. That said, someone, somewhere along the lines of reasoning in changing this little public square, has accommodated the sacred even as they sought to build what may be accommodation for people. Stray dogs sheltered in the shade of the rest house from where I took my photos, and flowers were decorated onto even the tiniest of mandalas in the streets bordering this Bhairab temple. Life flows in and around this public space, maintained through the changing everyday and urban lives of the people in and around it. Vehicles and buildings, and people and animals all come to stay at some point, and all must go, too, swayed by the harmony and discordance in community and the city that holds them.

References:

Chitrakar, Rajjan. 2020. Morphology of Traditional Towns and the Organization of Neighborhood Public Spaces in the Kathmandu Valley. In Revisiting Kathmandu Valley’s Public Realm: Some Insights into Understanding and Managing its Public Spaces. Nova Science Publishers (pp.1-28).

Kalita, Pooja. 2024, April 3. Where is Gender in Heritage Research. Heritage as Placemaking. Accessed 20 April, 2024, from https://heritageasplacemaking.com/blog/where-is-gender-in-heritage-research  

MacDonald, Sharon. 2018. Heritage. The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology (pp. 1-12).

Toffin, Gérard Tofin. 2005. From Kin to Caste: The Role of Guthis in Newar Society and Culture. Lalitpur, Nepal: Social Science Baha.