1 - A violence that is not violence

Summary

To offer in sacrifice or to offer oneself in sacrifice are both rendered by the Nepali phrase ‘to offer a bali dān’, bali dān caḍāune. In this compound, dān designates the gift, while the meaning of bali is less well defined. It derives, according to the majority of the villagers I interviewed, from bal, which means ‘strength’. This is a popular etymology, far from its attested meaning in Sanskrit, where the term simply means ‘offering’. The local interpretation thus sheds light on sacrifice as it is understood in contemporary Nepal, as a ‘gift of strength’, through the death inflicted on a ‘breathing being’, prāṇi, whether it be animal or human. The phrase sometimes also applies to the sacrifice of plants, such as squash or coconuts, insofar as these are explicitly presented as substitutes for prāṇi beings.

Bali dān refers to death inflicted in two specific contexts: sacrifice and war. In the former, death is inflicted upon another being, while in warfare bali dān refers to the act of offering one's own life. At least, this is the meaning which prevails today. The more ancient, reciprocal version of this transaction in the context of war, where both killing and being killed were equated with sacrifice, no longer holds true. This reciprocity can still be found in the oral epics of western Nepal and is also found in a number of testimonies dating from the pre-unification period (before the nineteenth century), when the captured enemy was offered in sacrifice. For instance, a chronicle of the second half of the nineteenth century reports that in 1660, the king of Bhaktapur attacked a stronghold of the king of Kathmandu and captured twenty-one prisoners, whom he had beheaded as a sacrifice to the deities of his kingdom the following day (Wright 1877: 244). A century later, a Capuchin father also witnessed the offering of enemies at the temple of a goddess in the Kathmandu Valley. And the inhabitants of Pyuthan (mid-western Nepal) have to this day kept the memory alive of the old practice of collecting the enemy's blood in pokhāri, ritual ponds which are today filled with water but still have a sacrificial post staked in their centres.