Khyāh

The khyāḥ left when the wiring went in. That is what people in Kathmandu told the anthropologist Todd Lewis when he asked why nobody sees them any more: widespread electric lighting had driven the spirits out of the old settlements. It is an odd thing to be told about a ghost, and a very precise one. Not that the belief had faded, which is what a researcher usually hears. That the khyāḥ had moved out.

Lewis was working among the Urāy, the Buddhist merchant caste of Kathmandu, and he found the khyāḥ sitting further down in people’s minds than almost anything else he asked about. Doctrine could be argued over. The ranking of priests could be argued over. But belief in the spirits called khyā ran under all of it, and he noted that even the doubtful among the young accepted them. They are a fat, hairy, short thing, ape-like, and that is roughly where the agreed description stops.

Once a year the Newars put two of them in a picture. Svanti, the autumn festival of lights, turns every house in the Valley into a place prepared for the arrival of Lakṣmī. Floors are smeared with cow dung mixed with red clay and water, and a line of the same mixture is drawn from the front door through the house to the secret shrine so that the goddess can find her way in. Shallow earthen lamps of oil and wick go along every door and window. Then the family brings out everything it owns that shines: old coins and new, money, gold, silver, the measuring vessels and the weighing stones, the first of the new grain. At least one new coin has to be given to her or added to the stores. In the middle of it stands a painting made by one of the traditional painter families, and the Newar anthropologist Bal Gopal Shrestha sets down exactly what is in it. Lakṣmī has four hands. One right hand holds a mirror and the other is raised in the gesture of reassurance; one left hand holds a vermilion container and the other is turned out to give. She sits on her throne in a golden crown with her right foot resting on a tortoise. And in front of her, facing the room, are two gods of wealth and two benevolent ghosts, the khyāḥ.

Benevolent is doing work in that sentence. The word is there because the writer needed to say which sort these two were, which tells you plainly enough that the other sort exists. What nobody appears to have written down is the rule for knowing which one is under your own roof.

The place to actually meet a khyāḥ is a street in Bhaktapur, in the weeks between the cow festival and Indra Jātrā, when the light is going and the drums start. Nine or ten troupes in that city stage the god-and-goddess dances, and the men in them come from the potter and farming castes; the dancers are all male, and the season runs two or three hours an afternoon through August and September. Gérard Toffin, who has watched them for decades, describes the troupe as a company rather than a pantheon. The great goddesses are there, and Bhairav, whose part opens the programme. Behind them come the ranks nobody worships: demons, the corpse-eating betāh, sometimes a dog, and always one or two skeletons in black cloth stitched with bones and a white mask over the face.

And beside the skeleton, its associate, is the khyāḥ. Toffin calls him the jostler. He wears a black cowl pulled over his head and a black woollen pelisse that gives him the look of a bear, and a red tongue dangles from his mouth. The two of them tumble. They go over and over on the brick, the pair of them, bones and fur, and every so often they break loose and rush the crowd to make obscene gestures at the young women watching. In Panauti, a smaller Newar town southeast of the Valley, the same characters roll about the floor in a phrase that is its own sound effect, gwara-gwara tulegu, and the whole company including its musicians comes to eighteen.

None of this is worship. Toffin is careful about it: the people standing round are spectators, not devotees, and enjoyment is the point. The dancers do not go into trance and they do not drink blood, unlike the Nava Durgā troupes whose arrival in a town is closer to an invasion. The one religious act is at the start, when the masked company makes its offering to the god of music and dance, and only after that can the play be dragged outside to the audience. In the Newar colour scheme white belongs to the mild and appeasing figures and black is the demons’ colour, which puts the household spirit of a family’s good fortune on stage in the darkest costume in the box.

That costume has been going for a long while. In 1931 a Bhaktapur troupe was invited down to the garden of the old British Residency in Kathmandu, and a young Englishwoman photographed the whole company on the lawn for her album. The khyāḥ is in the pictures.

Where the khyāḥ came from, nobody says. There is no birth, no first one, no story of a god who made them or a man who became one. The record simply starts with them already in the houses.

What it can do is the plainest power a house spirit ever gets. It stands among the attendants of wealth on the night the wealth is counted, in the room where the money and the grain and the good vessels have been set out under the lamps, and it is put in the picture because the picture is meant to hold everything that makes a household prosper.

Its limits are smaller and stranger than a monster’s. No source records a rite for driving one out, no blade and no priest, which suggests nobody much wanted to. What finished them off in the end was the electric bulb. The thing that survived centuries of Tantric ritual specialists in the Kathmandu Valley did not survive the light being left on, and the people who told Lewis so were not mourning; they were explaining an absence, the way you would account for a neighbour who had gone to live somewhere quieter.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Khyāh?

A khyāh is a household spirit in the tradition of the Newars, the indigenous people of Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley. It is described as a short, fat, hairy, ape-like being, and Newar sources call it a ghost rather than a god. Belief in khyāh was still near-universal in Kathmandu’s Buddhist merchant caste when it was surveyed in the 1990s.

What is the connection between the Khyāh and Lakshmi?

At Svanti, the Newar autumn festival of lights, every household sets up a painting of Lakshmi to represent the goddess during her worship. In that painting, two gods of wealth and two benevolent khyāh are shown in front of the seated goddess. The khyāh appear there as attendants on the night a family lays out all of its money, gold, silver and new grain to be blessed.

What does the Khyāh do in Newar masked dance?

In the god-and-goddess dance troupes of Bhaktapur and nearby Newar towns, the khyāh is a comic character who partners the skeleton. He wears a black cowl and a black woollen pelisse with a red tongue hanging from his mouth, tumbles and rolls on the ground with the skeleton, and rushes the crowd to make obscene gestures at young women in the audience. These dances are staged in the streets between the cow festival and Indra Jātrā, in August and September.

Why are Khyāh no longer seen?

People in Kathmandu attribute the lack of sightings to the spread of electric lighting, which they say drove the khyāh out of the old settlements. It is an explanation for an absence rather than an admission that the belief has gone, and the belief itself was recorded as holding firm even among younger sceptics.

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