The Living Goddess, as an Institution

The Kumari of Kathmandu is a young girl recognised as the temporary residence of a goddess, and the office sits precisely on the seam between the valley's two traditions. Michael Allen's ethnography records that she is selected from a Buddhist Newar caste, that she is worshipped by Hindus and Buddhists alike, and that her recognition by the head of state was historically part of what legitimated rule in the valley. The chariot festival at which she appears in public is one of the major annual events of the city. The institution is a living one with living custodians, and the atlas describes it as the community and the published ethnography report rather than reconstructing the selection or the ritual in detail. It has also changed inside living memory.

The end of the Nepali monarchy altered the political role the office had carried, and the arrangements for a Kumari's schooling and for her return to ordinary life after the office ends have been the subject of public debate and of change in Nepal. Allen's account is from the mid twentieth century and does not describe the present arrangements, so the atlas records what it establishes about the office's structure and marks the current practice as a matter on which the custodians, not this atlas, are the authority.