Introduction

My fascination with Bhaktapur began with my first visit in spring 1977. The city immediately charmed me with its brick streets, traditional buildings and temples, wonderful carvings in stone and wood everywhere, and a way of daily life strongly evocative of everything I had ever studied about Medieval Europe. It was a farmers’ city, but had neighborhoods devoted to special crafts and religion played a prominent role in the life of the people, both in daily activities and in the many annual festivals. It had electricity and road connections by trolley and minibus to Kathmandu, but was basically a city like those in Medieval Europe. I returned often.

To a large degree the same held true for Patan and Kathmandu, but those two cities had modern neighborhoods adjacent to their traditional cores and were more influenced by the contemporary world. Bhaktapur was surrounded by its farms, motor vehicles did not run on its streets, television hadn’t been introduced to Nepal then, and life in the city proceeded closely along the lines it had been doing for the past few centuries.

I became more familiar with Bhaktapur while researching my first book project—Guide to Enjoying Nepalese Festivals. With its separate historical development, Bhaktapur had its own unique festivals, like Bisket, Ghantakarna and Bhimsen’s Penis Puja, as well as local variations on the events shared with Kathmandui and Patan, like Gai Jatra and Dasain.

To carry out my next book project, sponsored by the Bhaktapur Development Project, to collect the unrecorded folk tales of the city, I rented a house there in autumn, 1982 and stayed on afterwards until the end of 1987. My involvement with the city deepened, as I followed and photographed all the seasonal and daily activities, participated in the festivals and worked with local weavers. Today I look back on that period as one of the best episodes of my life.

Jim Goodman,
Chiangmai, Thailand,
April 2019