ABSTRACT
Kholagaun Chhetris build their houses as mandalas through a mixture of intentional design and conventional social and ritual conduct. Room layout and building practices incorporating what they consider to be ‘vastu rules’ orient the house and the worship room to the cardinal directions and ritual performances accompanying each stage of house are deliberate actions aimed at transforming the domestic compound into an auspicious yantra. Everyday domestic activities, such as the handling and cooking of rice to maintain its purity, customary spatial prohibitions limiting the access of non-household members into increasingly interior spaces, and the planned location of the kitchen in a place inaccessible visually and physically to the impurity and danger of lower caste people, witches and disembodied ghosts, together construct the domestic compound as a concentric mandala with the kitchen as its pure centre. Not just the result of intentional and conventional conduct, domestic spaces shape and give meaning to that conduct. They are auspicious places for carrying out everyday domestic chores, social relations and rituals so that they are in harmony with the cosmos and portend prosperity to the household group. They are also maps and microcosms of the cosmos that serve as instruments for knowledge as Kholagaun Chhetris move through them in the conduct of everyday social life. This multifaceted nature of domestic space is indicative of the more general point that the relation between space, activities and experience in Kholagaun Chhetri social life is internal and mutually constitutive rather than linear and causal.
