ABSTRACT

Ritual landscape, periodically expressed through religious festivals, is key to the continuity of the living urban heritage of Kathmandu Valley World Heritage Site in Nepal. This chapter takes the case of Navadurga Masked Dance Festival that spreads over the town of Bhaktapur to relive a ritually mediated historic landscape. This urban landscape heritage is fast deteriorating particularly in the aftermath of disaster in the town’s physical, social and cultural fabric precipitated by the 2015 Gorkha earthquake. The chapter takes an ethnographic and interpretive research approach to document the form and structure of the ritual landscape to examine deteriorating threats and change and to identify prospects and problems in its safeguarding. The chapter analyses the start and end rituals of the festival also for an enriched understanding of the overall urban ritual landscape of Bhaktapur as perceived by the traditional society through this festival. Issues in balancing developmental demands, cultural conservation and continuity of urban heritage, and the role of community in keeping up the ritual landscape are presented. A community-based approach that seeks participation of the historically diverse social entities and their place-specific activation to safeguard the continuity of ritual landscape is presented for sustaining this living, faith-based urbanism.