Nepal’s goddess steps into modernity

For some people, all this is simply too much.

"We know there needs to be change," said Manju Shree Ratna Bajracharya, the eighth generation of priest from his family to oversee the temple of the royal kumari — or virgin — as the goddess is commonly called. "But this criticism of the tradition, this is pure ignorance."

He is bitter about politicians who focus on the kumaris for political gain, and the way she has been pulled into their battles with the king. He distrusts the rights activists, wondering if they are using the practice for publicity.

"The tradition can't be treated like this," said Bajracharya, who spends most of his days working as a bureaucrat in the state electricity company. "It is too important to Nepal."

But any criticism at all would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago, when Nepal was emerging from centuries of Himalayan isolation. It was a nation bound by feudal traditions, a country that handed out visitors' visas very reluctantly, and where few people could imagine a king without absolute power.

Nepal catches up slowly
While change did eventually come — foreigners began arriving regularly in the 1960s, when Katmandu became famous for its hippies and cheap drugs — it came slowly. It was only five years ago, for instance, when women earned equal inheritance rights under Nepalese law.

Today, Nepal is a democracy — albeit a fragile one, with crushing poverty, a figurehead monarch and a powerful Maoist militant movement with tenuous ties to mainstream politics — and change is coming even to the kumari.

Some of those changes are political, such as how the prime minister now seeks her official blessing, instead of the king. But some are more personal.

Teachers have been appointed, keeping the goddess on the same academic track as any other girl her age. There's also television in the palace these days, giving the kumari access to Bollywood, the news and more, and there's talk that she may be allowed someday to live at home with her family.

It is an attempt to give some normalcy to the goddesses, who can flail desperately when they return to the outside world.

Not everyone gets to be one
Rashmila Shakya, one of eight ex-royal kumaris still alive, remembers the pain of her return. Now a 25-year-old computer technician, she left the kumari palace at age 12. She did not have any proper schooling, and her feet had never touched the outside ground for years.

Her only playmates had been the children of the palace's caretaker, and while her family could visit, even they saw her as a goddess. Her return home took a heavy toll.

"I didn't even know how to walk around like a regular person," said Shakya, a quiet, bookish young woman who dreams of becoming a software designer. "The crowds frightened me."

Still, she said, she doesn't regret her time in the palace.

"Not everybody gets to be a goddess," she said, smiling. "In one life, I got to have two lives."

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