About the Book
The Festival of Indra details the textual and performative history of an import-ant South Asian festival and its role in the development of classical Hinduism. Drawing on various genres of Sanskrit textual sources especially the epic Mahabharata-the book highlights the innovative ways that this annual public festival has supported the stable royal power responsible for the sponsorship of these texts. More than just a textual project, however, the book devotes significant ethnographic attention to the only contemporary performance of this festival that adheres to the classical Sanskrit record: the Indrajatra of Kathmandu, Nepal. Here, Indra's tall pole remains the festival's focal point, though its addition of the royal blessing by Kumari, the "living goddess" of Nepal, and the regular presence of the fierce god Bhairav show several significant ways that ritual agents have re-constructed this festival over the past two thousand years.
"This valuable and ambitious work covers an important and understudied ritual form that has a long South Asian history, the Indra Festival. This festival is particularly interesting historically, since it falls between the Vedic sacrificial models of ritual in the earliest period and the image-puja models of later temple Hinduism. Baltutis approaches the topic as an Indologist, historian, and ethnographer, and the resulting book represents a significant contribution to South Asian religious studies."
Acknowledgments
This book has taken much longer to see the light of day than I thought it would. An easy option would have been to edit my 2008 dissertation, publish it right away, and move on to other projects. I cannot express how glad I am that I did not do this. By sitting on this project for more than a decade and working on other odds and ends, I was able to wait out the vagaries of history, especially the many ways that life in Nepal has adapted and adjusted to the downfall of the 240-year-long Shah monarchy in 2006, portions of which process I describe at relevant points in this book. One of the most significant adjustments in this period has been how local communities have filled the cultural vacuum of power from the absence of the Hindu king. During my first visit to Nepal, many people told me that within a few years the Indra festival (and other festivals and elements of Nepal's rich culture) would no longer be celebrated because the younger generation was no longer interested. For complex reasons that are worthy of their own study-including the end of the Shah dynasty in 2006, the pair of devastating earthquakes that struck Nepal in 2015 and killed some ten thousand people and destroyed many heritage sites, and the COVID-19 pandemic that prevented the Indra festival from being celebrated for the first time in centuries-young people have never been more interested in their heritage. At the center of this interest and participation in Kathmandu's heritage, and especially in its entertaining and accessible festival culture, is the Indra festival that has maintained its place as the core festival of Kathmandu.
Introduction
On the third day of Kathmandu's Indra festival in 2005, I pressed in with the crowd gathering underneath the overhanging balcony of Gaddi Baithak on the west side of the royal palace. Standing in stark contrast to the brick pagoda-style temples throughout the palace area, its neoclassical architecture recalls the intertwined history of Nepal and Europe and the British empire. Surrounded by a community of diplomats, ambassadors, and officials from across the globe at this most festive moment of the eight-day festival, and anticipating the first and most significant chariot procession of the living goddess Kumari, King Gyanendra distributed to the crowd the symbolic largesse of one-rupee coins. No one could have predicted that this would be the final time in Nepal's history that this particular scene would play out.
