Yesterday, while visiting Kathmandu’s tantric sites with a number of scholars, we ran into a full-scale riot triggered by the cancellation of animal sacrifice. The normal thing to do on this day of the year, the conclusion of Indra Jātrā, is to offer living animals to the Bhairava worshipped in the festival. This year, however, royal patronage has been withdrawn for the first time, so that the government now foots the bill. And the government refused to pay for the traditionally prescribed slaughter. The result: spontaneous rioting, pitched street battles, city-wide disruption and “lockdown” (bandha) now in its second day.
This outcome is not only hard for modern Western minds to comprehend: the Nepalese nouveau elites who incited it had no inkling of what they were stirring up either. Today I heard a non-Newar local sneer, “If the government decided not to kill a chicken, they [Newar traditionalists] would still go crazy!” Actually, what the protesters were objecting to is not so much the loss of animal sacrifice per se, but rather the fact that the festival has not been carried out properly, yathāvidhi.
The fog of misunderstanding is not hard to dispel if one simply recalls how tantric Newar religion is. The idea that bloodthirsty deities must be sated with fresh rakta, found often enough in the tantras and the religious culture of the tantric age, runs particularly deep here. It runs deep enough that one finds it in tantric Buddhist texts too, going back as far as the ‘Indian Period’ of Buddhism.