南アジア・インド洋世界研究会

Abstract
Crossroads Setting of Temples in Nepali Towns

The setting of the Nepali temple today is clearly urban and it is in this urban setting, in the crossroads created by streets and the spaces and squares they create, that the temple and its form come to life. A study of the urban development pattern of the Kathmandu Valley shows that both the temple and its setting derive from a more than a 2000-year-old history of urbanisation. The form of the city itself was mediated principally by temples and their associated rituals. That such should have been the case with Lichchhavi towns is understandable, given the classical Hindu knowledge and practices in city planning and patterning that they would have brought from their background in the Gangetic plains. Surprisingly, what comes out of the analysis of records of the Lichchhavi themselves is that the Kirat society before their arrival was also quite urban and the Kathmandu Valley was already dotted with small but dense urban settlements. The small towns of the Kirat were also ritually mediated: the devakula temple and its counterpart pith had as strong and deterministic a role in defining the form of the town itself as the street patterns were for the Lichchhavi town. The inter-assimilation of the classical Hindu pattern and the Kirat pattern seem to have reinforced the Hindu idea of locating temples within or near the town as well as in natural ‘power places’ and tirthas and developed a unique set of locational and siting characteristics for temples in the Valley. A syncretism of the Kirat idea of godly spirits or energy resident at crossroads and the Hindu/Buddhist concept of planning a town in the cosmic image (and their technique of realising the concept through the patterning of intersecting streets) is behind the development of the crossroads of Kathmandu Valley towns as the key setting of temples.

Professor Sudarshan Raj Tiwari studied architecture and earned Bachelor’s degree from School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi (University of Delhi) in 1973. He took his Master’s degree in Architecture from University of Hawaii, USA in 1977 specializing on housing in tropical countries. His interest drew him to the study of Nepali historical architecture, urbanism and culture, which led to a PhD from Tribhuvan University for his dissertation on ancient settlements of Kathmandu Valley in 1995. He has served in the faculty of Tribhuvan University’s Institute of Engineering for more than thirty years, and was Dean of the Institute of Engineering between 1988 and 1992. Prof Tiwari has worked at several world heritage sites such as Lumbini, Swoyambhu, Changunarayan and Bhaktapur Durbar Square.