Brides of the Gods
The Ihi ritual of the Newars (Kathmandu Valley, Nepal)
The Newars are the
indigenous people of
The Newars practice their
religiosity in a variant-rich and complex fusion of Buddhist and Hindu
elements. They worship numerous gods, which they add to the two traditional
Nepalese religions. The “living goddess” Kumari, an incarnation of the Hindu
goddess Durga, is one example of the Newars’ religious practice. A prepubescent
girl, whose family belongs to a certain Buddhist “caste”, is selected and,
until she menstruates, worshipped as a goddess. However, in Hinduism, gods that
have many names, identities and forms of appearance are particularly powerful.
During the Ihi ritual, the
Newars marry very young girls to gods, whose names and forms of appearance
maintain undisclosed. The brides of the gods are only between three and ten
years old, but the Ihi ritual is considered already as a step towards the
threshold to adulthood. During the Ihi ritual, the girl holds a fruit of the
wood-apple tree called bel fruit, which her father handed to her, in her hand
and wears a small golden disk from her mother on her forehead. The father then
gives the girl over to the god as a “virgin”. To which god the father entrusts
his daughter as companion remains secret. Although the divine bridegroom stays
unnamed, the ritual corresponds for many Newars to a real wedding and is
celebrated as such: for two days, people sing, dance, eat, and drink together
in public places, just like at a folk festival. Often up to 200 girls,
gloriously dressed in wedding Saris, bestow an unimagined glow upon the small
cities of the
Already days before the
ritual, family members pick up the girl and lead her through the city to call
on the paternal and maternal relatives, where she receives a symbolic meal to
establish a ritual relation to the family clan. Upon her return to the
threshold of her home, the women of all the households she visited bless the
girl with rice offerings. But only the offering of a ritual meal containing
alcohol from the hands of the oldest married woman in the family clan concludes
the girl’s transition to a ritually adequate being. A few months after the
actual Ihi ritual, the girl devotes the fruit of the wood-apple tree, which she
received from her father during the ritual, to the family clan’s ancestral god.
With this, she has finally become a nubile and accomplished member of the
family.
However, just like all
Nepalese of Hindu faith, the Newars proscribe remarriage, too. That means,
although the Ihi ritual borrows real nuptial elements it is actually not a
wedding ritual. By being married to a god, the Newars say, the girls evade
widowhood, a fate that can have grave consequences in Hinduism. The divine
husband will live forever and thus the girl can never become a widow, even if
her later, human husband dies.
The research on the Ihi
ritual is part of SFB 619’s Subproject A2 with the main topic A2.2 “Hindu
childhood and adolescence rituals in the
