Newar Thankot: The Old Bazaar, the Guthi and the Courtyard House

Thankot belongs to a family of settlements around the rim of the Kathmandu Valley that includes Balambu, Satungal, Kirtipur, Machhegaun and Chapagaun. They are Newar towns, they are old, they sit where routes and farmland meet, and they are built to a recognisable grammar. Learn the grammar in one of them and you can read all of them.

The grammar has a small number of rules. Build densely, on the poorest ground you can, and keep the good soil for farming. Put the houses shoulder to shoulder along a street or around a courtyard so that walls are shared and heat is kept. Put a deity at the centre and other deities at the edges. Provide water publicly, shelter publicly, and a paved open platform for the town to stand on when something is happening. Then endow the whole arrangement so that it survives the death of the people who set it up.

Thankot's particular variation is that it is a route town rather than an agricultural town that happens to have a road. The bazaar is linear, drawn out along the line of the old trade road toward the pass, rather than gathered around a single square. Buildings face the street and open to it. That is the plan of a place that expected to sell to people passing through, and it is the physical trace of the trade described in our chronicle on Thankot as customs post and western gate.

Walk the old core with these five elements in mind and the town resolves itself.

The bazaar street is the spine. It runs roughly along the old road, it is narrow, and it was never designed for anything wider than a loaded animal. Where it widens slightly, something happens there.

The dabali is the raised paved platform, usually near the temple. It is the stage. Masked dance during the jatra happens on it, and on ordinary days it is where people sit. Newar towns think of performance as a civic function with a built address.

The pati and sattal are the open-fronted rest houses. A pati is a small roofed shelter with a raised floor, endowed by a family or a guthi so that travellers, porters and old men have somewhere out of the sun. A sattal is the larger, multi-storey version. Their number and placement in Thankot is another trace of the traffic: you build rest houses where people arrive tired.

The hiti is the stone water spout, sunk below street level and fed by a channel that may run a long way. Some are dry now. A functioning hiti is a piece of engineering four or five centuries old that still delivers water, and the reason so many have failed is that the aquifer and the feeder channels were disrupted by modern building rather than that the stonework wore out.

The temple anchors the whole thing. At Thankot that is Mahalaxmi, a pagoda in the standard valley idiom, described in detail in our chronicle on the temple and its jatra.

The traditional house here is three or four storeys, narrow-fronted, deep, and shares its side walls with its neighbours. It is built of fired brick laid in mud mortar, with timber floor joists, timber posts and a pitched roof of jhingati (the small curved clay roof tiles that give valley towns their colour from above).

The facing brick deserves attention. The best work uses dachi appa, a wedge-shaped brick with a fine polished face and a tapering back, laid so that almost no mortar shows on the outside. It is expensive, it is slow, and it is the single clearest signal of status in a Newar street. Ordinary walls behind it are common brick.

The storeys have jobs. The ground floor, low-ceilinged and often opening straight onto the street, is storage or a shop. The first floor is sleeping and living. The second floor is the main living room, where the best window is. The top floor under the roof is the baiga, the kitchen and the place where cooking and eating, which carry purity rules, are kept apart from the traffic of the rest of the house. Putting the kitchen at the top of the building looks eccentric until you understand that the logic is ritual rather than practical.

Doors are low. You bow to enter, which is partly structural economy and partly, according to the way people explain it here, the point.

Newar woodcarving is the valley's most exported image and Thankot has real examples of it, weathered and in use rather than restored for display.

The sanjhya is the projecting latticed bay window on the main living floor, carved in a dense geometric mesh that lets air and a little light through while keeping the interior private from the street. The tikijhya is the flatter, wider latticed window in the same family. Around a doorway or a shrine you may find a torana, the carved semicircular tympanum showing the deity of the building.

The carving was done by the Newar craft castes, the Silpakar and related lineages, whose work built and rebuilt the durbar squares. It is worth saying plainly that the craft was never confined to the three royal cities. A rim town with trade income commissioned the same carvers, and the difference between a Thankot window and a Patan window is usually money and date rather than skill.

Struts on temples, the diagonal timbers carrying the roof eaves, are the other place to look. On the Mahalaxmi temple the struts carry deities and, following the usual valley convention, smaller figures at the base. They are load-bearing sculpture: remove them and the roof comes down.

The institution that holds all of this together is the guthi, and it is the single most important thing to understand about Newar social organisation. A guthi is an endowed trust. Land is given, the land produces income, and the income funds an obligation in perpetuity.

The obligations vary. A dyah guthi maintains a deity: the daily worship, the repairs, the festival. A sana guthi handles death, organising cremation and the funeral obligations for its member households, which in practice makes it the most binding of them all. Others maintain a rest house, a water spout, a road, a bridge or a specific piece of music.

Membership is usually by lineage and locality, and duties rotate. The rotating office holder for the year, and the annual feast at which accounts are settled and the next year's duty is handed on, is the mechanism by which a fourteenth-century obligation is still being discharged in 2026. The neighbouring town of Balambu is a well documented example, where the chariot festival of Ganesh and Mahalaxmi is carried by a set of nine guthis, each with its own defined part.

Since 1964 much guthi land has been administered by the Guthi Sansthan, the state corporation created to manage endowed religious property. The relationship between state administration and living community guthi has been contested ever since, and proposals to alter guthi law have repeatedly brought large protests in the valley. When you watch a jatra in Thankot you are watching a functioning trust discharge a duty, not a performance staged for onlookers.

The Gorkha earthquake of 25 April 2015 and its aftershocks hit the valley rim hard. Old brick-in-mud construction is strong in compression and weak in shear, and the classic failure is the street facade peeling away from the floors behind it. Across the rim towns the losses were heavy and uneven, with buildings on the same street behaving completely differently depending on their condition and their attachment to their neighbours.

Reconstruction has run in two directions since. Some rebuilding follows the old form, in brick, with reinforcement and with carved elements salvaged or recut. A great deal more is reinforced concrete frame with brick infill, which is safer in an earthquake and unrelated to the old grammar. The result along parts of the Thankot bazaar is a mixed street where a surviving carved facade stands next to a concrete frame with a shutter.

This is not a decline story and should not be written as one. Concrete is what a family builds when it wants its house to stay up. The honest observation is narrower: the fabric that carries the town's architectural history is now patchy, unprotected in most cases, and worth looking at properly while it is still there.

Give it an hour. Start at the Mahalaxmi temple, since everything is oriented to it, and walk the bazaar street in both directions rather than one.

Look up, constantly. The ground floor of almost every building has been modernised into a shop front, and the surviving old work is on the upper floors: a carved window, a brick course, a strut, a roof line. Look for the hiti below street level, and for pati along the road out toward the pass. Ask before photographing inside a courtyard, because courtyards are private space even when they are open.

The best day to see the town as itself is during the Mahalaxmi Jatra, held in Mangsir (November into December), when the chariots move through streets that were laid out to exactly the width the chariots need. That relationship, between the vehicle and the street, is the clearest single proof that the plan and the ritual grew up together.

If you want to compare, Kirtipur is twenty minutes away and better preserved, and Balambu is on the same road. Seeing two rim towns in a day teaches more than seeing one twice.