Finding and Making a Mess. Illegible Fieldnotes, Wayward Translations, and the Undecided Archive of Newar Religion

I want to talk about what happens when those who are involved in Newar religion co-produce an environment that is neither ordered nor disordered, yet as if both calling for order and accepting what may seem like the absence of order, its inhabitants being both troubled by it and yet willing to go with the flow. Equally critical of depictions of Newar religion as either a creative chaos or an encrypted system, on the one hand, and of the order either promised or subverted by academic research, on the other, I want to talk about how in the period of engagement something else emerges that is neither order nor its other, which, from the perspective of order, may indeed look disorderly, but which may be better understood, progressively distancing oneself from that binary, as a situation that is suspended, undecided, and still, maybe even permanently, open.

I write down as I listen to what the priest Buddharatna is saying. As my eye moves back on the page of my notebook, I notice that I can barely read what I just wrote as I had scribbled to fast. I keep going, trying to draw the words more distinctly but lose track of Buddharatna’s line of thought. I write in English, so I translate from his mother tongue Newar, then I insert Newar words into the English. The Newar words get more, until I suddenly notice that I have switched entirely to Newar. Then, again, I cannot think of the English word and use German or Italian, my other two mother tongues. Sometimes Buddharatna throws in the occasional Nepali word and Sanskrit words abound anyway. The next morning, I notice I cannot recognize hardly anything of my scribbles. I try to write down what I recollect. Suddenly I can again read some, until it breaks off again, and I skip several lines. There are no full lines, only half lines, chopped off sentences, word clusters. I waver between trying to turn what I have into entire sentences or to leave things as I see them in my notes.

On another occasion, I work on a text in Newar, write the English translation above each word I read, look up those I don’t know, put question marks where I am unsure, write out the whole or partial translation. Then I sit down with the scholar Aishwaryadhar and he goes over the text, reads it out mumbling in Newar and Sanskrit, then goes over it again, translating the Newar it into Nepali, stopping when he runs into a passage that is hard to read or a rare Newar word. I check my English against his Nepali, note his Nepali or translate right back into English, note when he expands into a commentary, digresses, comes back, reformulates in Newar, expands into Newar synonyms, ponders variant readings, gives Nepali translations for each, emends the text, says he does not know. While this is going on, we have four to five dictionaries open and we check those when Aishwaryadhar runs into a problem: some words are only found in in one, some in another, words can be Romanized in various ways, there is no consistent orthography for one word, and many a word is found in no dictionary. Much of I write back into my draft translation until it becomes almost illegible.

On another occasion, my friend and I take up a loose folio manuscript of a ritual manual lacking pagination. We find that at the end of each folio the text ends in the middle of a sentence and the next folio begins equally randomly in the middle of another sentence, which makes me first suspect that there are folios missing, until we realize that the folios are simply out of order. Possibly the manuscript had at some point fallen down with the pages getting all jumbled. Will my friend and I ever be able to put the text together again? Ritual manuals go through all kind of hardship: they are used by the priest in an open courtyard with the rain falling on it, they may tear when stuffed into a bag or a pocket, the get stained with pigment, yoghurt, and sooth used in worship all the time, they get badly photographed, they don’t have titles, get renamed or or misplaced. Newar printed texts typically from between the 1930s and the early 2000s are too thin for a title to fit on their spine, so are very difficult to identify and to find again, once one has put them onto a shelf together with the others.

I want to talk about situations I have found myself in and in which I have worked together with those participating in Newar religion that created such an environment, not primarily because I find such an environment productive or worth cultivating. In fact, it can be, for some more, for some less, a disturbing and fragmenting experience. But because I feel it is a very basic and pervasive medium in which we as scholars of Newar religion operate and exchange most of the time that we should be aware of to stay sensitized towards and keep being surprised by our field and by the people that join us therein. All these cases fall into much larger frames of “systemic messiness”: the undecidedness of combining ethnography and philology between reading, listening, translating, and observing, between language acquisition and language loss; the messiness of social relationships in the field caused by me parachuting in and out once a year, by my friends’ social mobility or economic disaster; finally, the very political messiness of in-sider outsider, subaltern and neo-colonial, sexual and racial difference and economic disparity in collaborations between Newars and non-Newars including me as a non-Newar. At this point my talk wants to make the point that the mess should not bring us to say that “it’s all complicated,” but rather tell us that certain crucial political things about our work on religion are, in Angie Thomas’ words, very simple.