Painting picture courtesy Christie's Auction House Sometimes, a painting begins to ask more questions than it answers. A late eighteenth-century painting, attributed to the Mandi school and catalogued as showing Raja Sansar Chand of Kangra with a courtier, has intrigued me for some time. At first glance, the identification appears straightforward enough. Two men sit opposite each other, smoking hookahs, while attendants stand behind them holding fly-whisks. One figure is dressed in red, the other in white. The scene is informal, almost intimate, and yet unmistakably courtly. But the more I looked at the painting, the less convinced I became that the red-clad figure was Sansar Chand. The reason came from looking at other portraits. Among the surviving paintings associated with the Mandi court are several portraits of Raja Surma Sen, who ruled Mandi from 1781 until his death in 1788. One such portrait shows him seated smoking a hookah, attended by a fly-whisk bearer. Another depicts ...
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| Former Royal Priest of Nepal Keshari Raj Pandey performing Katto (credit: Outlook India) |
When the monarch of Nepal Sri Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev had passed away intragic circumstances back in 2001, a wave of shock went across the world for the goriness and the strangeness of the incident. Subsequently the funeral rites were conducted. What followed thereafter had sent murmurs across several groups, wondering what was going on.
An interesting ritual post funeral that took place over time was taken up by the Brahmin Head Priest of the royal family. To quote the Independent story from the United Kingdom of the time.
"A Brahmin priest put on the robes of Nepal's murdered King Birendra, mounted an elephant and went into symbolic exile to rid the country of the curse of his death as the official period of mourning ended yesterday."
Further explaining the 'bizarre' ritual, the Independent wrote:
"The Hindu ceremony, known as katto, is performed only after the death of the monarch. First, in a tent specially erected by the river, the priest, whose usual brahminical diet is strictly vegetarian, consumed an "impure" meal containing animal marrow. Then, over his white cotton clothes, he pulled on the elaborate, medieval court dress of the dead king, including a replica of his crown with its long, curling bird of paradise plume, and a pair of heavy black spectacles similar to the late king's.
Possessions of the king were wrapped in cloth television sets, ceiling fans, bedding, baskets of food and strapped to the back of a caparisoned elephant. Then the priest, too, was heaved aboard, and with a mahout (elephant minder) in front, wrapped in a saffron sash, and with a bearer behind grasping a large, fringed parasol, he set off. The elephant waded into the shallow and smelly Bagmati, bearing the king's soul into exile for ever. The brahmin chosen for the job is supposed never to return."
Nothing StrangeAbout It
Looking at the old gazettes of the 1920s it seems that the practice was under different names and with variations rather important to some hill state monarchs across the Himalayan region.
The 1920 Gazetter of Suket State actually had recorded a funerary ceremony called Preta Palu, calling it a "peculiar practice observed among the Hill Rajas". As the Gazetter explained, upon the death of the Raja, a low class Brahman would be called from outside the State's boundaries. He would be fed food from the right hand of the deceased Raja. He would then remain in the kingdom for a year, eat and drink like the late Raja, sleep on his bed and even be treated by the khidmatgars of the Raja. At the end of the year, he would be escorted out of the state on horse back and would be allowed to get off the horse till the state boundary was crossed.
The Brahmin was called a Preta Palu, or a sustainer of the unripe aatma (Preta). The Mandi State Gazetter made some interesting observations on this practice, a screenshot of which is given for the readers' interest.
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