Isabella Tree spent 13 years interacting with Nepalese priests and ex-Kumaris to find the history and truth behind the legends around the living goddesses of Nepal. She has finally come up with the book that deals with questions like what happens to the devis after they attain puberty and if they are allowed education. By Divya Kaushik

There is always one thing so peculiar about the place we travel to that it is ingrained in our memories forever. It was coincidentally that Isabella Tree came across the living Goddess or Kumari in Nepal. A chance encounter paved way for extensive research around the Devi, a young, pre-pubescent girl who is worshipped as manifestation of the divine goddess. Worshipping the Kumaris is popular among Hindus as well as the Nepali Buddhists. Kumari is selected from the Shakya or Bajracharya clan of Nepalese Newari community. legends swirl about her. But the facts remain shrouded in secrecy and closely guarded by the living Goddess’ priests and caretakers. Some common questions around the Devi are, why are Buddhist girls worshipped by Hindu monarchsIJ Are the initiation rituals as macabre as they are rumoured to beIJ And what happens to living Goddesses once they attain pubertyIJ Using myth, religion and history, Isabella in her recent book, The living Goddess: A Journey Into The Heart of Kathmandu, tries to answer these questions.

The hard work and research that went into the making of this book is very much evident. Isabella tells us about her first visit to Nepal and how she met the Devi. “I was eighteen — in 1983 — travelling in my gap year with three school friends (one of whom, Charlie Burrell, eventually became my husband). I’d always wanted to go to Kathmandu — my parents had been among the very first tourists who visited when the borders were first opened to the outside world in the 1950s. My father’s pen and ink drawings of Kathmandu covered the walls of their bedroom in london, so I grew up with a longing to see those snow-peaks and pagoda temples. In the 1980s Kathmandu was still caught up in the hippy era, which was intoxicating to us as teenagers. We ended up renting a couple of modest rooms, with no electric light or running water, overlooking the old royal palace in Basantpur Square, in the heart of the old city. We realised we had, quite by chance, landed up living next door to a living Goddess — her palace was on the other side of the square. At night we could see this little figure dressed in red running past the windows on the first floor. We dropped in on her courtyard to catch a better glimpse of her and that first proper sighting had me reeling. Foreigners can’t go into her palace for purity reasons but tourists can enter the interior courtyard and if they’re lucky the living Goddess will appear for them at a window. The same is true today. When she does appear, it’s very striking. She’s made up like a grown-up married woman, and looks down on you with a serious, haughty expression — it’s hard to reconcile her appearance with the little girl that she is. I wrote about her in my diary, trying to make sense of it all — trying to guess what she stood for, what kind of life she might lead, was she happy, bored, lonelyIJ It was very difficult to find out much about her. There were lots of rumours doing the rounds on Freak Street but it was impossible to know how reliable they were. Even Nepalis who worship her seem to know very little about her personal circumstances. Part of the reason for this is that the Kumari tradition is rooted in Tantra, with only those who have taken diksha allowed to know the inner secrets of the practice. I left Nepal that summer in 1983 believing I would never be able to find out any more about her. It wasn’t until 1997, on a return visit to Kathmandu, when I met ex-living Goddess Rashmila Shakya, that doors began to open for me,” informs the author.

Since rituals and facts around the Devi are closely guarded, Isabella’s major source of information were ex-living Goddesses. “To my surprise, it wasn’t hard to track them — there are generations of them, all about six to eight years apart in age — the length of their reign — living in and around Kathmandu. So I interviewed a number of ex-Kumaris and their families. Many of them were reluctant to talk at first because they had been so badly represented and misquoted by journalists in the past. Rashmila writes eloquently about this in her autobiography From Goddess to Mortal. I also interviewed the old royal astrologer, Mangal Raj Joshi, shortly after the royal family massacre. That was an eye-opener, and revealed a lot to me about the connection between the living Goddess and the King, and the deeper karmic reasons — as Nepalis see it — behind the royal family massacre. Gradually, over the years (I’ve spent the past 13 years working almost solely on this book), I got to know the caretakers of the Kumari and the royal priests themselves. I think they began to see that I was serious in my research and therefore began opening up to me. With the political instability and the Maoist threat that came to the fore after the royal family massacre in 2001, I sensed that the traditional guardians of the living Goddess were beginning to feel the need to explain to outsiders they could trust, at least to a certain degree, the beauty and value of what it was they were protecting. They never told me any tantric secrets; nor did I ask them to. But they did seem a little more prepared than perhaps they would have been 20 years earlier, to talk to me, because suddenly the future of the living Goddess tradition was under threat,” says Isabella.

The book talks in detail about the history of Nepal. History serves as a background to the information that she later reveals in the book. Isabella explains, “The sense of history is all-pervasive in Nepal. But it is not history in the western sense — it’s the stuff of myth and legend. The stories of the kings of Nepal and all the great characters of the past, even if only a couple of centuries ago, are interwoven with the machinations of gods and goddesses, sages and bodhisattvas. It’s a very rich, multi-layered way of seeing the world. The Newars — the indigenous people of the Valley — see myth as a living thing, illuminating the events of the present. So when shocking things happen, like the royal family massacre, it is often seen in the context of myth coming to fruition. like the story of the sage Gorakhnath who predicted the Shah dynasty would last only ten generations. Myths surround the living Goddess, too, and connect her with dramatic events in the past — like the conquest of Kathmandu by the Prithvi Narayan Shah, the Gorkha king, the unifier of Nepal and first of the Shah dynasty, who was blessed by the little goddess after he broke into the city. So I felt in order to give a sense of how Nepalis understand the living Goddess I needed to embrace all these stories. My favourite story explains how the living Goddess came into being. In the days, not so long ago, when gods and goddesses used to visit the Kathmandu Valley, to enjoy mortal pleasures, the Hindu Goddess Taleju used to come to the royal palace to play dice with the King. One day, though, the King was overcome by desire for the Goddess and, outraged, she hurled curses at him and vowed never to appear to him again. He did everything he could to placate her and eventually she compromised: she would appear to him again, but only in the form of a living child — a little girl of the Buddhist Shakya caste. From now on, the King would have to bow before this little girl to receive her blessing in order to rule the country. It is a wonderful story, and it is still regarded with deep conviction today. Nowadays the President of Nepal has to bow to the living Goddess to receive her blessing. It is, in a sense, a counterbalance to male power. The most powerful man in the country has to submit to the superiority of a little girl.”

The legend of the Supreme Goddess Adi Shakti Maha Maya creating the world, based on the Devi Mahatmya, was, to Isabella, a complete revelation. “We have nothing like this in Western culture, Christianity or Judaism. To us, god is incontrovertibly male. But to hear a story in which the power behind the creation of the universe is female; that god is, in effect, a woman — well, it was beyond a surprise — it was unbelievably liberating. It made me realise how androcentric my own culture is, how completely brainwashed we are by our patriarchal view of the world,” she says.

It is said that to be eligible to be a Kumari, there are certain requirements. The Kumaris all have to come from the Newar Buddhist caste of Shakyas, goldsmiths who are believed to be descended from Shakyamuni Buddha himself, who live in 18 traditional courtyards in the heart of old Kathmandu. There’s a lovely list of criteria — the 22lakshina, or physical perfections of a bodhisattva — that living Goddesses are said to have. They are supposed to have ‘a voice like a duck’, ‘legs like a banyon tree’, ‘neck like a lion’, etc. But these are obviously notional perfections! Mainly they have to have pure, clear skin and no obvious blemishes, like smallpox scars or birthmarks, or any strange rashes. The royal priest’s wife does a simple check for this, with the candidate’s mother present. And the royal astrologer checks their horoscope to make sure there are no contradictory or inauspicious signs. They are usually selected between the ages of two to four, so before they’ve gone to school and before they’ve undergone the Newar ritual of ihi — the main rite of passage for Newar girls whereby they are notionally married to a god.

There is a popular superstition saying that a man who marries a Kumari dies within six months. There are people claiming that men who marry ex-Kumaris die ‘with their heads burst out’ or that snakes come out of ex-Kumaris’ vaginas if men try to deflower them. Unfortunately such rumours and superstitions still do rounds.

However, Isabella feels that the tradition and practices around the Devi are changing in Nepal with the changing times and education has played a part in it. She shares, “In the past it was felt there was no need to educate living Goddesses. They were omniscient. Only a couple of generations ago very few women were educated in Nepal. Recently, though, as education has become a universal expectation there have been growing demands for the living Goddesses to be properly educated. Ex-living Goddess Rashmila Shakya and her successor Anita Shakya and their families were instrumental in bringing about this change. Rashmila had found it very difficult when she entered school after her dismissal as the Devi, even though she had been given some private tuition at the Kumari Palace. She had to work unbelievably hard to catch up with her peers. Eventually she made it to University. Now the living Goddess receives excellent tuition and her hours of study are not interrupted, as they used to be, by devotees coming to worship her, or by tourists like me demanding to see her at her window.”