An illustrated talk by Dr.Christoph Emmrich on

Fruit, Ghost and Brick (The Many Marriages of Newar Women)

at Goethe Institute, 4, Rutland Gate, 5th Street, Greams Road, Chennai.

This Newar marriage necklace from Nepal is composed of twenty-one rectangular gold plaques, each with a repousse lion's head, and a row of pate-de-verre pendants. The trapezoid pieces at each end bear the image of a Nepalese divinity

Narratives surrounding childhood rituals for Newar girls in the Kathmandu valley tell us about multiple marriages as prerequisite for the final marriage to a mortal husband. Depending on the narrator, the handbook or the sequence of the ritual performance, the girls subsequently and alternatively engage with Shiva's ascetic bachelor son Suvarnakumara, the fire god Agni, a gandharva, the Five Buddhas, a mysterious being called Khyah and, finally, the sun god Surya represented by an unbaked brick. This talk looks at the prescriptive, performative and discoursive context of each possible pairing, to determine how the construction of serial religious practices and the role of changing divine agents have historically worked hand in hand to bring about the transformation of girls into women.

Christoph Emmrich, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, was born in Amman, Jordan, acquired his PhD in Classical Indology at the University of Heidelberg in 2004 and has worked on the philosophy of time in canonical Theravada Buddhist and Digambara Jaina literature. His current research is on handbooks prescribing childhood rituals for girls among the Newars of Lalitpur, Nepal.