Mahalaxmi Temple, Thankot: The Pagoda and the Red Chariots

The Mahalaxmi temple stands in the old bazaar at Thankot, in ward 4 of Chandragiri Municipality, and it is the reason the town is laid out the way it is. Every other element of the historic core, the bazaar street, the raised platform, the rest houses, is positioned in relation to it.

The building is a Newar pagoda in the standard valley idiom: a brick shrine on a stepped plinth, tiered roofs diminishing upward, and carved timber struts running diagonally from the wall to the eaves to carry the overhang. The struts are the sculpture, and they are structural. The deity sits in a small dark garbhagriha (inner sanctum) that is the whole point of the building and the smallest part of it.

It is a living temple, not a monument. Worship happens daily, the metalwork is polished by use, and the sanctum is dressed differently through the year. Visitors are welcome in the courtyard. Whether a non-Hindu may approach the sanctum itself varies by temple and by day in the valley, so watch what other people do and ask rather than assume.

Almost every account of this temple, including municipal and tourism material, gives its construction as around 1690. It is worth being precise about the status of that number.

1690 falls squarely in the late Malla period, when the three valley kingdoms were competing hard in temple patronage and a very large proportion of the surviving pagoda architecture in the valley was built or rebuilt. Stylistically the building is entirely consistent with that. The date is repeated consistently in local accounts and on municipal signage.

What we have not seen is a published foundation inscription giving a Nepal Samvat or Vikram Samvat year for this temple, of the kind that fixes dates precisely elsewhere in the valley. Until that is available and published, the correct formulation is that the temple is dated by local and municipal tradition to about 1690, on stylistic grounds consistent with the late Malla period. That is an honest sentence and it does not weaken the temple at all.

A second caution, which applies to nearly every temple in the valley: a valley pagoda is typically a sequence of buildings on one site. Fires, earthquakes and re-roofing mean the timber you are looking at is often much later than the foundation, and the foundation is often much earlier than the recorded date. Asking how old a Newar temple is rarely has a single answer.

Mahalaxmi in the valley is not simply the goddess of wealth as understood in the wider Hindu world. She is one of the Ashta Matrika, the eight mother goddesses, and the Matrika have a specific function in the sacred geography of the Kathmandu Valley: they are placed at the boundaries, and they hold them.

Each of the old cities is ringed by Matrika shrines that mark and protect its edges, and the same pattern operates at the scale of the whole valley. A Matrika standing at the western approach, on the road, at the foot of the pass, is doing exactly the job the system assigns her. She is a border deity.

That gives the temple a second reading alongside the obvious one. Yes, a goddess of prosperity sits where prosperity physically entered the valley, and travellers made an offering before crossing to the other side. But the older structural logic is protective: this is a boundary, boundaries are dangerous, and a Matrika is what you place on one. Both readings are current in Thankot and residents move between them without difficulty.

The Matrika are also fierce. This is not a gentle domestic goddess. The character of the jatra, loud, red, physical, follows from the character of the deity.

The Mahalaxmi Jatra is Thankot's principal festival and the largest single event in the Chandragiri area. It falls in the Nepali month of Mangsir, which spans November into December, with the main day at or around the full moon. Because the Nepali calendar is lunisolar, the Gregorian date moves each year by up to two weeks or more, so confirm the year's date locally rather than assuming last year's.

Three deities go out, not one. Chariots are built for Mahalaxmi, for Ganesh and for Bhairab, and the three move together. The chariots are timber, assembled for the festival, and hauled by hand on ropes by the young men of the town through the bazaar street. There is nothing decorative about the effort involved: a loaded chariot on an uneven street is genuinely heavy and genuinely difficult to steer.

Music leads the procession. The panche baja, the traditional five-instrument ensemble, plays alongside the deep dhimay drums and bhusya cymbals that are the standard Newar processional sound. Masked dance is part of the programme, most visibly the Lakhe, the red-maned demon figure whose dance turns on the containment of a dangerous power rather than its defeat.

The whole thing is organised by guthi, the endowed community trusts described in our chronicle on Newar Thankot. Specific families hold specific duties: this lineage assembles this chariot, that one provides these musicians, another feeds the participants. The festival is the annual discharge of a set of standing obligations, which is why it survives changes of government, earthquakes and emigration.

The image most people carry away from the Thankot jatra is the vermilion. Participants carry sindoor (red powder) by the plateful and throw it: over the chariots, into the air, over each other. Within hours the crowd, the chariots, the temple steps and a good deal of the bazaar are deep red. Nobody watching stays clean, and being covered is the point rather than an accident.

Sindoor in Hindu practice marks the auspicious, the consecrated and the living. Thrown at this scale it does something simpler as well: it makes the boundary between participant and spectator physically impossible to maintain. You are marked, therefore you are in it.

Residents also connect the red of the jatra to the old name of the place, Shonitapur, the city of blood. It is a good connection and a satisfying one, and it should be described accurately: it is a modern folk reading that links a living festival to a Puranic story, not an origin for either. Our chronicle on the Shonitapur legend sets out what that story is and is not.

Go on the main day, and go in the afternoon. Processions in the valley habitually start later than announced and run into the evening, and the crowd and the noise build rather than fade.

Wear clothes you are prepared to lose. Sindoor does not come out of white cotton, and it does not really come out of anything else either. Bag your phone and camera in plastic with a lens opening, which is what local photographers do, because fine red powder gets into everything with a moving part.

Getting there: Thankot is about 12 km west of central Kathmandu and served by buses and microbuses on the western route, plus taxis and rideshare. On jatra day expect the last stretch to be closed to vehicles and expect to walk in. Our getting to Thankot guide has the routes and current fare ranges.

Behave as a guest at a religious event rather than as an audience at a show. Do not climb on the chariots, do not get between the haulers and the rope, ask before photographing individuals, and step back when a masked dancer is working. Nobody will mind you being there. The festival is genuinely public and Thankot is used to visitors.

For eleven months of the year this is a quiet neighbourhood temple, and that is a perfectly good reason to visit. Early morning is best: the courtyard is busy with people making short offerings on the way to work, oil lamps are lit, and the light is low enough on the eastern side to show up the strut carving properly.

Combine it with the rest of the town rather than treating it as a single stop. The old bazaar around it is the point, the Chandragiri cable car base station is close by for the summit and the Bhaleshwor Mahadev temple at 2,551 m, and Matatirtha, the pilgrimage pond where Nepalis remember their mothers on Matatirtha Aunsi in Baisakh, is a short distance away on the same side of the valley.