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Where can we go, where is it still dirty? Bajramuni and I sit on the carpet of his ground floor reception room and study in Cilancva, Kirtipur. It is a week before gathāṃ mugaḥ, the day in the Newar calendar marking the end of the rice planting season. 'Gathāṃ mugaḥ khunhu saphā yāi,' I have scribbled in my notebook from that afternoon. One cleans on gathāṃ mugaḥ. The problem is, where is the dirt?
The Kathmandu Valley has never been more dirty. The rivers are shriveled and putrid. The air thick with pollutants and dust. Cement mafias across Nepal's middle hills create controlled landslides of debris that later wipe out roads and villages. Municipal disposal of garbage is a political and ecological quagmire. Young people in search of different futures are exploited abroad stirring up dirt in Malaysia and the Middle East. Surely, dirt is the last thing difficult to find.
Yet as we know from Mary Douglas, dirt is cultural. The dirt accumulated through the rice planting season that runs from sithi nakhaḥ (around June) to gathāṃ mugaḥ (around July) is the dirt of farming. Various tools and seeds are stored in the ground floor room, but dirt becomes an ontological condition of the entire home, the neighborhood, and people in those weeks. Nhaipugu activities yāi makhu, it is no time for amusements, mhyāymacā vā piyeta vai, the young women have no time to visit their parents, they are planting paddy. But the ontological condition of being dirty is more than a liminal state in which purity of place and person is temporarily allowed to lapse. The danger of dirt is premised on its own ontology.
"There used to be ghosts in these parts." I sat with a Newar lady and her young daughter one evening in the courtyard outside their Patan house. ''That was when there were empty deserted spaces around. Now everything is built up, there are no more ghosts." The notes I have scribbled down from afternoons chatting with Bajramuni are also about ghosts and how to manage them. There are bundles of thorns – cvākaṃ bakaṃ myākaṃ phaṃkaṃ, duḥkha bīgu vastu cvālī pvā dayekī – afflictive things bundled together and carried burning through the house from top to bottom, discarded at the chvāsa stone, beyond the settlement's ritual boundaries, where pollution is always dispelled. Comments like these take up several pages of my school notebook; because another name for this day is bhut vāyegu, ghost banishing. Ghosts, bhut, pret, piśāc, dangerous spirits are not only being evicted from the open rice fields and vacant lots. They are present in the wild substances of the natural world. They come along with the soil on your shoes, the bundles of tinder for your stove, the straw for your livestock, the crud under your fingernails.
Where can we go, where is it still dirty? 'I have a friend in Sunakothi, I will call him,' Bajramuni decides. Our problem is not to find dirt. The dust on my jacket, and in my lungs, from having cycled to Kirtipur from Patan is evidence of that. The problem is that economies of dirt have changed. The agricultural basis of civilization in the Kathmandu Valley, the fertile soil left behind by a lake remembered by myth alone, has been replaced by a speculative real estate market and the suspect (and much protested) projects of city planners. Privatization and the shift away from a predominantly agricultural to a tertiary service economy has meant that house interiors have never been 'cleaner'. Nowadays, domestic dirt is as much a moral as an economic failure.
This paper is scaffolded by the day Bajramuni, his friend, my wife, and I spent in search of a place still dirty enough to celebrate a 'proper' gathāṃ mugaḥ; a locale culturally and religiously representative of the way things are felt by many to once have been. In reconstructing a day out of the cellphone videos and photos I have saved on my laptop, the preparatory conversations held in that schoolbook, and the hastily scribbled lines in my notepad, I recreate my own memory of our peculiar mode of celebration, rumbling along in the back of an unmarked van. But in this unlikely foursome of ghost hunters, there is also at play a different manner of haunting. Modernity has radically altered the valences of mess in the Kathmandu Valley. In so doing, it has summoned new ghosts. The empty lots of old houses torn down for something taller, brighter, newer, but whose owners end up struggling to afford, are as much relics haunting the contemporary cityscape, as are the rustic houses Bajramuni and I encountered on other daytrips to the Valley's hinterland in search of old Newar farming communities. Honest, authentic soil may be the interface of belonging between community and territory, but the clean farming implements in the Jyāpu farming museum are part of a broader defamiliarization and alienation from dirt as a fundamental element to economic, ritual, and human-non-human worlding. Ultimately, this paper is an attempt at addressing the question: what new worlds arise when all this dirt is gone, when there is no crud left beneath our nails?
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
On gathāṃ mugaḥ, one cleans the house. Of what? The dirt of the rice planting season, certainly, but what hitches a ride with that dirt? Or who? Ghosts, bhut, pret. There are elaborate rites for this kind of house cleaning, from the individual residence to the neighborhood. Bundles of thorns are carried burning through each room of the house, top to bottom. Six-foot-tall strawmen with explicit male genitalia of round fruits and cotton are paraded burning through the streets by young men shouting sexualized phrases. But not everywhere. Not everywhere is it still dirty enough. For who still plants rice in June and July? The ground floor is now a garage, home office, reception room, not a barn. This paper recreates a single day spent in search of a 'proper' gathāṃ mugaḥ, and of the forms of life we negate when all the mess becomes yecu picu, neat and clean.