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http://www.himalmag.com/2002/april/travel.htm The Shrine of the Mind’s Wish
Manakamana Temple
Midway between Kathmandu and Chitwan, on the highway along the Trisuli River, a line of cable cars is on the move. They start low, cross the river and rise nearly vertically hundreds of feet to disappear into the mid-day clouds that hug the hillside. This is the Manakamana Cable Car, the longest in South Asia, which leads up to the hilltop shrine from which it takes its name.
Manakamana – the shrine of the mind’s wishes – is an ancient power place that goes back beyond the days when Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha ventured out in conquest to unify Nepal. Indeed, Manakamana rests on a long ridgeline that goes all the way to the fortress town of Gorkha, a few hours’ walk away. One indication of Manakamana’s antiquity is the non-Brahmin officiating priest. He comes from the Magar ethnic group, one that has histor-ically inhabited the lower midhills of central Nepal, the upper mid-hills being the preserve of the Gurung community. (Some historians think that the ruling Shah dynasty of Nepal is of Magar extraction.)
Until just a few years ago, the trip to Manakamana was a grue-ling four-hour hike up unforgiving terrace-farmed slopes. A family of successful development contract-ors from Narayanghat in Chitwan decided that the hilltop shrine provided the best location for a viable cable car. They contracted a top-of-the-line Austrian cable car company to set up the ropeway, and the gamble has paid off. It is said that the cable car has already paid for itself in a handful of years, and the company continues to pack it in.
The meaning of the pilgrimage has definitely been affected, if it means that you gain merit by toiling up the slope to Manakamana. Instead, today you travel upwards comfortably in a six-seater cable car. The ride can be an experiment in the surreal, of blended discordant realities. On the car ride up, I sat between an American tourist with a Nikon camera and a Hindu pilgrim holding a rooster intended for sacrifice. Such ironies are not uncommon here, as the porters who continue to carry 80-kg loads up the hillside underneath the pathway of the cable cars can testify.
Manakamana’s history dates back to the reign of Gorkha King Ram Shah (1606-1633). According to legend, the King’s wife possessed divine powers, which were known only to the Queen and her mentor, Lakhan Thapa. When the monarch discovered his wife’s powers, he died at the moment of revelation. As the Queen prepared to commit sati on her husband’s pyre, she confided in the distraught Lakhan that she would reappear near his home, as she did several months later. The new king granted Lakhan the right to build a temple at the site and to serve as its priest. His lineage has continued to protect and serve Manakamana, and the current Thapa-Magar pujari is a seventeenth generation descendant of the original priest.
The cable car delivers its passengers to the southward flank of the ridge on which the Malla-period two-tiered pagoda temple rests. The ropeway station is far enough from the shrine that a new hilltop town has come up along the curving path that leads up – enough space to create tourist and pilgrim traps that seem to have left the townsfolk nice and happy at their good fortune. Our visit coincided with the eve of Maha Shivaratri (The Day of Shiva), and there appeared to be a flux of pilgrims to the site and notably few Western tourists intruding on the scene. The temple itself is located in the northwest corner of a stone plaza, behind which a low wall demarcates the site of animal sacrifice. A young boy’s cries filled one corner as his parents struggled to shave his head in a bratabandha (mundan) ceremony. Scraps of hair littered the cobb-lestones beneath the boy’s str-uggling body, next to which Hindu mendicants chanted from scrolls.
For the pilgrims, the centre of attention is the sanctum sanctorum of the Mana-kamana temple, where resides the deity Bhagawati to grant all wishes of the mind. For the tourist – local or foreign – attention will be drawn northwards at the nearby panorama of Gorkha Himal, and its peaks of Manasulu, Himalchuli and Baudha, which tower over the low midhills. Visible from up here is the nearby hill trading post of Bandipur across the Marsyangdi river valley, and the districts of Kaski, Lamjung and Gorkha. To the south is Chitwan and the tarai and India beyond.
‘Religious tourism’ is a difficult task, and one which should involve self-imposed limitations on the part of the visitor. The struggle of a place like Manakamana – one that has been invaded by a cable car – is one of self-definition. It is a site now required to awkwardly reconcile its earlier role of holy worship with the new function as a tourist destination. Purists would ban tourists from the site, but tourists also bring in the money that sustains the temple and the locals. Besides, tourists are no longer just the Westerners – Nepalis and Indians come as hybrid pilgrim-tourists. Manakamana therefore emerges as a showcase of the odd juxtaposition of the ‘modern’ and the traditional, of cable cars and porters, Kit Kat wafers and dal bhat.
