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From Goddess to Mortal
by Rashmila Shakya is a book I read a few weeks ago, but hadn't got round to posting about. I got it through interlibrary loan, it's due in tomorrow, and I have an hour here at the ref desk, hence the post. :)
Nepal has a religious institution known as the kumari, or a living goddess. A young girl of about 4 or 5 is chosen as the kumari, and lives at a temple serving as the Living Goddess and representing her at festivals until she reaches about the age of 12 or 13, whereupon she is sent home and a new kumari is chosen. This book is an autobiography of a kumari from Kathmandu, and covers her years as kumari in 1984-1991 and afterward, until she's in college through 2004 or so.
There's a lot of misinformation online and in the media* about the selection of kumari, which seems to be traced back to a British journalist** who either misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented the process of choosing a kumari, and which has been repeated over and over since. Even Wikipedia repeats a lot of it, although you'll note the section finally has a "disputed" tag. Shakya reports in her book that the process wasn't anywhere near that stringent and mostly depended on her horoscope.
She was taken away from her home, although her family could visit and she was raised at the temple by a family who traditionally stood as caretakers to the kumari. Shakya says that although as the Living Goddess, everyone had to obey her every word, they had a way of staring mournfully at her while complying that ensured she tended to feel quite badly when she overstepped the bounds of her authority. :)
The account of her life at the temple was interesting, but what was more interesting was the account of life afterwards. She returned to her family, and, naturally, took a while to assimilate back into the round of normal family life. Her sisters thought she was stuck up, but the truth was that she was terribly shy and had no idea how to interact with them. :) She'd also received almost no schooling while being the kumari, which affected her badly. She decided to go to school, and ended up starting in the equivalent of the American 3rd or 4th grade at the age of about 13, but was intelligent enough and hungry enough for education that she managed to graduate only a year or two behind her age-mates. After a struggle to find funding, she managed to get into college and at the time of the writing of the book was working towards her bachelor's degree in IT.
Shakya also took it upon herself to campaign for the education of subsequent kumaris, and a few years after she started, the current kumari was given a proper teacher so that she would have a better advantage when she retired. At one point in the book, Shakya was taken to a former kumari at her mother's home in order that she might learn something about assimilating back into her family and society, but found to her horror that the other former kumari wasn't doing much of anything - her mother believed that as the former representative of the Living Goddess, she shouldn't have to do normal things like clean the kitchen, go to school, or, basically, learn anything that would equip her in any way for a normal life. Shakya's family, on the other hand, felt that she should be integrated into normal life as quickly as possible and be given the opportunity for education that all her sisters had.
I never know how to end these summaries/reviews/whatever they are, so I shall JUST STOP. Other than saying that I highly recommend it.
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* You don't say!
** I want to say at the turn of the century, but I can't find the part of the book that mentions him, so he could ahve been working at any time during the 20th century.
by Rashmila Shakya is a book I read a few weeks ago, but hadn't got round to posting about. I got it through interlibrary loan, it's due in tomorrow, and I have an hour here at the ref desk, hence the post. :)Nepal has a religious institution known as the kumari, or a living goddess. A young girl of about 4 or 5 is chosen as the kumari, and lives at a temple serving as the Living Goddess and representing her at festivals until she reaches about the age of 12 or 13, whereupon she is sent home and a new kumari is chosen. This book is an autobiography of a kumari from Kathmandu, and covers her years as kumari in 1984-1991 and afterward, until she's in college through 2004 or so.
There's a lot of misinformation online and in the media* about the selection of kumari, which seems to be traced back to a British journalist** who either misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented the process of choosing a kumari, and which has been repeated over and over since. Even Wikipedia repeats a lot of it, although you'll note the section finally has a "disputed" tag. Shakya reports in her book that the process wasn't anywhere near that stringent and mostly depended on her horoscope.
She was taken away from her home, although her family could visit and she was raised at the temple by a family who traditionally stood as caretakers to the kumari. Shakya says that although as the Living Goddess, everyone had to obey her every word, they had a way of staring mournfully at her while complying that ensured she tended to feel quite badly when she overstepped the bounds of her authority. :)
The account of her life at the temple was interesting, but what was more interesting was the account of life afterwards. She returned to her family, and, naturally, took a while to assimilate back into the round of normal family life. Her sisters thought she was stuck up, but the truth was that she was terribly shy and had no idea how to interact with them. :) She'd also received almost no schooling while being the kumari, which affected her badly. She decided to go to school, and ended up starting in the equivalent of the American 3rd or 4th grade at the age of about 13, but was intelligent enough and hungry enough for education that she managed to graduate only a year or two behind her age-mates. After a struggle to find funding, she managed to get into college and at the time of the writing of the book was working towards her bachelor's degree in IT.
Shakya also took it upon herself to campaign for the education of subsequent kumaris, and a few years after she started, the current kumari was given a proper teacher so that she would have a better advantage when she retired. At one point in the book, Shakya was taken to a former kumari at her mother's home in order that she might learn something about assimilating back into her family and society, but found to her horror that the other former kumari wasn't doing much of anything - her mother believed that as the former representative of the Living Goddess, she shouldn't have to do normal things like clean the kitchen, go to school, or, basically, learn anything that would equip her in any way for a normal life. Shakya's family, on the other hand, felt that she should be integrated into normal life as quickly as possible and be given the opportunity for education that all her sisters had.
I never know how to end these summaries/reviews/whatever they are, so I shall JUST STOP. Other than saying that I highly recommend it.
--
* You don't say!
** I want to say at the turn of the century, but I can't find the part of the book that mentions him, so he could ahve been working at any time during the 20th century.
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There's also the Living Asheth, usually referred to simply as the Goddess, in Diana Wynne Jones' Nine Lives of Christopher Chant, who is quite clearly another fictional avatar of this girl.
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ETA: Well, other than that the process of putting a new kumari in occurs right about the time the incumbent one hits puberty. :D In other words: her privacy was not invaded to that extent.
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I saw the then-current kumari when I was in Kathmandu in 1999; our guide managed to wheedle her into passing by the lattice. I didn't realize it was lucky to see her. He told us a bunch of stories that I have no idea about the veracity of...I'll have to see about picking up the book.
Kathmandu was the closest I've ever felt to really feeling like I was in an alien society. Tibet, China, Japan, and Thailand I could all deal with. Nepal just unnerved me from start to finish, from the kumari ceremony stories to the cremation we saw that started with putting a torch in the body's mouth, to the temple with sacred rats, to the terrified and half-starved cats who skitter along the rooftops (because they're stoned if they're spotted on the streets). I kept trying to turn on cultural-relativist brain and failing, which also bothered me because normally I'm pretty good at that. Ah, well. I don't have any desire to go back, but it was certainly an interesting experience.
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It's not even part of the selection process. :) It's part of an annual ritual of some sort, and the room contains the heads of the 13 or so animals sacrificed earlier in the day, plus at the end of the room, the priest who's performing the rite itself. The kumari has to walk through the room to get to the priest and participate in the ceremony, but Shakya says it didn't occur to her to be frightened, IIRC.
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