A Rama Temple in Nineteenth-Century Nepal: History and Architecture of the Ramacandra Temple in Battisputali, Kathmandu.

Edited by AXEL MICHAELS. Nepal Research Centre Publications, no. 20. Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 1995. Pp. 81, 21 plates, 5 tables, appendix. DM 48.

In March 1994, fourteen students from the Institute for the Comparative Study of Religions at the University of Bern traveled to Nepal to investigate this Rama temple. They had prepared intensively for their encounter with Nepal by studying Nepalese language, religion, culture, and history. The present volume is the fruit of their labors.

A Rama temple in the Kathmandu valley is of particular interest, not only because it is rather anomalous in that predominantly Saiva and Buddhist region, but also because of current events in India, where the cult of Rama is increasingly tied to political developments.

In his useful introduction, editor Axel Michaels sketches the perils and uncertainty of courtly life in Kathmandu in the nineteenth century. Erich Theophile offers a useful overview of nineteenth-century Nepali architecture.

Michaels, Thomas Schaufelberger and Govinda Tandan (a local historian who helped with this project) provide the historical background to the establishment of the temple.

Dirk Bratz, Bernhard Parodi, and Christian Peter offer a wealth of detail on the temple's architecture. Christoph Baumer, Barbara Messerli, and Marianna Kropf uncover many interesting facts relating to its iconography, and one wishes that they could have explored it in greater depth. Regina Jakob, Jurg Kubli and Claudia Leutschaft provide a brief description of rituals and forms of worship. Judith Gyurki, Franziska Moeri, Marianne Tiefenbach, and Johanna Voegeli offer plausible ethnographic interpretations of activities at the temple, as well as some interesting observations about its restoration committee, which they see as reviving a kind of local solidarity.

Overall the results are positive, given the fact that the fieldwork period was so brief. The students should be congratulated for adding to our knowledge, and Professor Michaels for producing such a promising crop of young scholars.

WILLIAM S. SAX UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY