Caryā and Cacā: Change and Continuity in Newar Buddhist Ritual Song

Abstract

Carya or cacad songs, and associated dance and instrumental music, performed by Newar2 Buddhist priests of the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, are of musicological interest for a number of reasons. Apart from Tibetan and Sri Lankan monastic traditions, it is perhaps the only tradition of specifically Buddhist music and dance surviving in the sub-continent that can be linked to Indian Buddhist practice of the pre-Islamic period. If so, it is one of the oldest performance traditions in the region, with important implications for the study of South Asian musical history. And although cacd performance is difficult to access for the outsider, there is some evidence for both the continuity of the tradition over many centuries, and radical changes at certain periods, especially the present day. The carya genre of Tantric Buddhist song is believed by Indologists to have originated in India in the 11th century or earlier, and is of importance to the history of South Asian literature, linguistics and religions (Kvaerne 1977). Caryd was also included among the large number of song-types (prabandha) recognized by Indian musical theorists of the 12th and 13th centuries (Rowell 1992:274-94); the majority of such song-types no longer exist in living tradition, but the classical dhrupad genre is believed to have derived from them and to be related, therefore, to caryd (Bake 1957; te Nijenhuis 1974), if somewhat tenuously (Widdess 1992). Similarly, most scholars assume that Newar cacd is directly descended from the early Indian carya, 3 but this assumption has not been examined critically from a musical point of view. In this essay the Sanskrit form carya will be used to denote the early Indian genre, while the Newari form caca will refer to the current Newar repertory (for which Newars use both forms interchangeably). 4 The best known examples of early Indian caryd are contained in the collection of 46 song-texts called Carad-gfti, preserved in a single manuscript in the Kathmandu National Archive. The poems are written in an eastern Indian apabhram a (literary vernacular) language that some identify as the earliest known form of Bengali; refugees fleeing persecution in India presumably transmitted them to Nepal, as were many Buddhist texts at this time. They are believed to date from about the 11th century, though some individual poems may be earlier, and they are accompanied by a Sanskrit commentary of the 13th century. A Tibetan translation of the same work, made in Kathmandu in the 14th century, survives in the Tibetan Buddhist canon (Kvaerne 1977: 2), but I am not aware of any performance tradition of carya in Tibet.

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