Figure 1 - Mask of a boar Tamang - Nepal, Middle Hills, Wood.

Figure 2 - Mask Middle Hills, Wood; Nepal.

Figure 3 - Magar; Middle Hills; Nepal.  Wood, metal and fur.

Figure 4 - Clown's mask, Middle Hills; Nepal, Wood.

Figure 5 - Middle Hills; Nepal, Wood.

Figure 6 - Mask with crooked nose, Terai, Nepal, Wood and clay.

Figure 7 - Middle Hills, Nepal; Wood and fur.

Figure 8 - Pagaba Mask; Middle Hills, Nepal, wood and Metal.

Figure 9 - Magar Mask, Middle Hills; Nepal, wood.

Figure 10 - Thakali Mask; Western Nepal, wood.

Figure 11 - Mask of a monkey; Terai, Nepal.

Figure 12 - Gurung Mask, Middle Hills; Nepal; wood and white clay.

Figure 13 - Mask of a rakshasa (Demon); Terai, Nepal, wood.

Figure 14 - Middle Hills, Nepal, Wood.

Figure 15a - Square face, Middle Hills, Nepal.

Figure 15b - Round face, Middle Hills, Nepal.

It is a mode of expression that reveals specific characteristics of the original spirit, beliefs and visions of the people who created the masks, and gives an idea of how Buddhism or Hinduism, after defeating the shamanic traditions, transformed and even incorporated many of these rites.  The ethnic groups that created the masks have undergone radical changes; for example, the Thakali of the upper Kali-Gandaki valley in western Nepal first converted from their shamanic religion to Buddhism, and have more recently converted to Hinduism.  Some of the tribal masks represent vanished cults and deities that have been swept away by the conversion to another religion, and several of the masks remain only as mute witnesses to a dead civilization.

The masks discussed in this article were all produced in Nepal by the various ethnic groups inhabiting the Terai (the low plains of the south along the Indian border), the Middle Hills (with the exclusion of the Kathmandu valley) and the northern Himalayas.  Himalayan tribal masks evoke by their shape, patina and carving their African, Indonesian or American counterparts.  They can be reminiscent of Japanese jomon (cord pattern) terracotta masks dating from the second millennium BC, and sometimes they resemble those of Siberian shamans, or of central Indian tribes such as the Bhugas who wore masks for divination before hunting ceremonies.  In these last two cases, it is possible that there is more than just an aesthetic similarity, but only patient comparative studies will be able to determine the depth to which such a comparison can be carried.

In some cases, although the appearance of the sculpture is archaic, it can nevertheless be a Buddhist or Hindu image from a remote village or a small temple, such as  boar mask from a Buddhist village (Fig. 1).  Even when it was produced by a Buddhist or a Hindu, this art was in contact with shamanism.  It seems that making masks has its roots in prehistoric times.  The wearing of an animal mask or skin could originally have been used in magic rites for hunting, healing, laying a curse or killing into Tibetan Buddhist Cham dances.  Owing to social, political and religious changes over the last two centuries, the function of various masks has altered and evolved so that an old mask has sometimes been given a new meaning.  It is therefore difficult, considering the number of existing ethnic groups, to ascertain exactly all the original purposes of these masks.

The pacification of demons is practised frequently in Himalayan communities and without a doubt has taken place since very ancient times.  It was not unusual for a saint or a shaman, the 'medicine-man' of the village, to subdue a local demon and turn it into a protective deity and subsequently an object of devotion.  Sometimes masks are representations of these demons converted into house or temple spirits.  Even in Buddhist monasteries, images of local divinities or demons who have acquired a new status were kept near effigies of the Buddhist protectors (Gonpo).  As the aspects of these adopted divinities were copied from the images of local cults, the style of the masks reflect an archaic origin.

In regard to the shamans (called jhankri in Nepali) of the diverse ethnic groups, the images of faces that they produce are usually limited to their ritual wooden daggers (phurbu) or the handles of their drums (dyangro).  The wearing of masks for healing purposes is nowadays unknown, but in the Himalayas masks may provoke possession by a tutelary deity and induce trances during which divination is often made.  The survival of a similar custom is still observable in the masked dances of the Newars.  A shaman occupies an important position in society.  He is able to exorcise evil spirits, he knows how to cure, occasionally he presides at funeral rituals, he worships secret gods or spirits and understands myths generally forgotten by the common people.

Considering their great number and their importance in village life as men of knowledge, it would seem evident that jhankri carved some of the masks presented in this article, but it is difficult to identify them and to limit their function to purely shamanic use.  Many of the tribal masks belong aesthetically to the same source of inspiration as the ritual wooden objects used by the jhankri.  According to their origin, masks and shamanic objects may share common features and modes of expression, but it is still too early in the study of their relationship to verify this or ascertain its exact nature, especially regarding its distant past.

During great festivals, sumptuous masked dances are held.  They could be popular entertainment or initiation ceremonies as well as village pantomimes or professional theatrical performances.  All religious groups, Hindu, Buddhist and Bon, include masked performances in their ritual, which have been perpetuated by the royal courts (of which there were many before the eighteenth century), the towns, the villages and the religious communities.  Diverse forms of theatre and pantomime were developed to recount exploits of gods and heroes and to illustrate local legends.  Renowned theatrical troupes that possessed masks and costumes were in demand for their performances and travelled from village to village.  Masked dances are not solely the preserve of the high castes.  For example, a blacksmith (kami), who belonged to an untouchable caste, sculpted the mask in Figure 2, which he wore during Durga Dasain, the most important Hindu festival in Nepal which is consecrated to the goddess Durga.  Today, except for the Newars of the Kathmandu valley, most of the professional performances illustration local legends have disappeared, and when the villagers organize a theatrical performance they generally do not use masks.

Village dramas are peculiarly rich in monsters of all kinds, such as fantastic beings which long teeth, popping eyes, characters with crooked or strange faces, hideous animals, demons and ogres.  Masks of rakshasas (demons) often have long teeth and generally have expressions of hatred, anger or the desire to eat human flesh.  Demons kill and devour people, take possession of a person, attack the herds and destroy the crops.

Many masks come in pairs, such as those for village clowns acting out in pantomime the domestic quarrels of an old man and his wife (or wives).  The theme of a drunken old man beating his wife is very popular.  The clowns are not necessarily playing a role in the main drama being presented, but provide comic relief in sketches between acts.  Sometimes they take their inspiration from well-known characters from the dramas performed by professional troupes.  The type of mask depicting these characters can be found in different tribes.

In the Middle Hills, masks that are hung over the doors of cattle sheds, barns or dwelling places have a protective function; their hideous demon faces are designed to frighten away bad spirits and to prevent thunderbolts from falling on the houses.  The goddess of the thunderbolt is a young virgin and these terrifying faces are calculated to scare her away.

At a person's death a mask with human features, or portraying a divinity to be placed on the family altar after the mourning ceremonies, might be made in their memory to give them merit in the next world.

The mountain tribes of the Middle Hills, such as the Gurung, Magar and Rai, still remember some of their clan legends, but unfortunately these have not yet been collected and written down.  Masks may be stored in village homes for use once or twice a year, but the development of mass-media and the policy of cultural uniformity presently in operation in Nepal reduces the interest in popular theatrical performances.  The use of masks becomes increasingly confined to minor clowning or pantomime and its important place in the mythic dramas of the mountain peoples and its function in the initiation of the young is disappearing.

The Rai, who inhabit eastern Nepal, speak nearly twenty different dialects, and are a branch of the Kirant, the original population of the eastern Himalayas.  Knowledge of their legends is perpetuated by the songs of the priests and shamans, and until very recently their tribal religion and beliefs were relatively safe from outside influence.  Among the Rai people of the Arun valley, weddings are a rare occasion when Himalayan women can be seen wearing masks, since female characters, with or without masks, are generally played by men.  During Jantijanu, one of the wedding ceremonies, girls perform a Ratauli dance, where obscenity is allowed under the cover of a disguise.  One or several girls are allowed to hide their faces under the family 'joker' mask and to play the legend of marital duty which, according to Om Bahadur Rai from Shankhuwa-Shava in eastern Nepal, is as follows:

In the old days of satya yuga, there lived a man who had married his three young sons to three young girls of the village.  But trade obliged the three bridegrooms and their father to travel abroad for many years.  The wives languished at home.  When they returned from their long journey, the husbands had grown old.  In order to check their wives' fidelity they knocked at their own doors with masks on their faces, dancing, singing and playing the madal (small drum).  They offered them gifts and asked for shelter.  The wives did not recognize their husbands, but did not forget their duty and refused to give them shelter.  Later on the youngest one recognized her husband's voice.  They all hugged each other and could finally perform their duty!  Since then Rai people have been carving masks for women to wear at weddings.

The recent enthusiasm for festivals of Hindu origin may indicate the old taste of the Rai for masked performances.  During Tihar, a very bright and happy festival that is also called 'the five days of Yama (the god of death)', when the worship of Sarasvati and Krishna has been completed, masked dances generally take place.  The boys disguised as girls are called maruni and the clowns pagaba (Fig.8).  Maruni is a classical dance-drama that takes its name from the main female character of the play.  Dances are accompanied by madal, flutes and cymbals.  A chorus follows the procession, narrating the action of the dramas in long ballads.  Offerings of food, coins and small gifts are given by the spectators to the participants.

In the same manner, in many valleys of the Middle Hills, masked clowns jump in the streets during Tihar.  The first day of the festival is consecrated to the worship of the crow, which is the messenger of Yama, and is considered a bad omen, as in the West.  The second day is dedicated to worshipping the dog, the ally of Yama and the vehicle of Bhairava, a wrathful manifestation of Shiva.  The dog, who guards the doors to the kingdom of death, can be a helpful companion in the other world if properly propitiated.  On the following evening, every house lights lamps in honour of Laxmi, the goddess of prosperity who flies on the back of her owl to watch over the faithful and grant them wealth during the coming year.

This same evening and the following day, groups of women and children go from house to house to sing and beg for a few coins and a handful of rice.  It is an opportunity for enjoyment and drink.  Clowns with comic masks jump in the village streets and dance, tell jokes and play the fool.  People improvise small plays and it is a time to remember the old legends.

The quality of the plays, the beauty of the costumes and the preservation of the masks depends upon where the masquerade takes place.  Prosperous villages and families may keep masks for as long as several centuries.  In most cases, masks are considered an auspicious emblem with protective properties, particularly when sanctified by frequent use, thus becoming both a symbolic witness to the past and to the continuity of the tradition.  Wearing a mask is not merely a ritual or a commemorative gesture, it is an act intended to evoke the power that generates prosperity and fertility.  Dances are often performed at night, as the trembling light of butter lamps creates illusory forms, accentuates grins and grimaces, and gives life to the inanimate matter of the masks.

The West Magar (Kham Magar) are spread all over the Middle Hills, from the Mahabharat hills to the high valley of the Himalayas.  This Mongoloid ethnic group settled in this area even before the Gurung and Tamang.  They have preserved until very recently their tribal traditions.  They bury their dead in a mat containing food, in the form of wheat, for the other world.  Shamanic practices are still alive among the Magar, and they accompany souls to the underworlds of disease and death.  According to Magar beliefs, the individual has three souls.  Observation of the Magar shaman's ritual objects unveils a fascinating world of gods and spirits, but there is very little knowledge about the relation between the shamans and the masks.

Some of the masks of the West Magar represent demons and clowns.  The mask in Figure 9 depicts a yogi or saddhu, a wandering holy man identifiable by a stylized top knot of matted hair.  The yogi is an almost universal character in the Himalayas, found among the southern tribes of the Terai and even among the Buddhists of the high valleys of the north.  Both a target of mockery and someone to fear, the supposed wisdom of the yogi is often seen as a dreadful power by ordinary people, but his asceticism, or rather this begging, is a point of ridicule.  Although this author has not verified this to be the case among the Magar, the yogi is usually represented in the Himalayas by a masked actor carrying a trident and a begging bowl and has merely to make his entry for the audience to begin laughing.  Other characters make fun of him because of his top knot, his clothes or because he does not eat meat or drink alcohol.

The fine carving of Figure 9 suggests that a highly elaborate tradition of mask-making was developed by the Magar, and the shiny black patina is evidence of the mask's antiquity.  The patina of this mask may indicate it was kept in a private house, rather than in a local temple, as it has been blackened by many years of exposure to smoke from a hearth.  Other features of Magar masks are the use of metal or bone for the teeth and a sophisticated system of wooden pins for fixing the hair.

The Thakali dedicate to the ancestors of their clans a festival intended to keep away malevolent spirits.  Masks of ancestors with realistic human features, made of wood coated in white clay, are taken out for memorial ceremonies and placed on the altar during rituals and dances (Fig. 10).  The celebration makes use of disguise, notably in the form of a yak, which is  one of the Thakali gods.  After the salutations to the ancestor's temple, the ceremony involves the use of ritual puppets depicting religious men and birds.  This is followed by a clown and a sword dance to exorcise malevolent powers.

The religious system of the Thakali is syncretic, being a fusion of shamanic, Tibetan Buddhist and, more recently, Hindu beliefs.  The Thakali are divided into four clans that venerate four animal-faced gods.  At the annual festival, these deities are represented by special models of wood or bamboo with an animal-faced mask as the head, and are carried in a procession through the streets.  The masks, which are of high importance to the ceremonies, are preserved in the temples.  The red elephant-faced fire god is a male deity who reigns over the kingdom of the east; is the oldest of the four deities and controls the power of evil.  The green goddess of water , with the face of a makara (mythical aquatic creature), is the elder of the female divinities and reigns over the kingdom of the south.  The white goddess of the earth is queen of the west.  With the face of a snow lion, she has control over clouds and mountains.  The black god resembles the yak, and is the deity of the air and the wind.  He grants prosperity, through the salt trade, and also fertility.  Throughout the Himalayas, the yak is a symbol of prosperity, and for the Thakali it is also an auspicious sign if during the procession the model of the yak comes to knock on one's door with its horns.

In the past, the Nepalese Terai, in the south of the Himalayas, was an impenetrable jungle that was practically isolated from the rest of the country.  This area is inhabited by various ethnic groups among which are the Tharu, Dhimal, Rajbansi and Satar.  The ancestor cults of these groups have been progressively annihilated by the increasing influence of Hinduism, which has developed and even imported its own ritual and iconography.  Most of the traditional dances, both masked or otherwise, have been replaced by rites and dances celebrating the Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, as evidenced by a monkey mask made by the Rajbansi for the Ram-lila dances, which dramatize episodes from the Ramayana (Fig. 11).  However, many of the plots are set in this particular area of the Himalayas.  Most tribal legends, even before 'Hinduization', referred to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and references to Krishna were numerous in masked dances.

Items from the Terai, although sometimes obviously ancient, do not have the shiny black patina found so frequently on examples from the Middle Hills and high plateaus, because in this low tropical region masks would often be stored in an isolated place in the house, or the family or village temple, and thus were not exposed to smoke.  Previously, festivals that required the use of masks took place one or more times a year.  This later became once every three or four years, and nowadays such celebrations have practically disappeared.  These festivals had several purposes including the recollection and commemoration of the exploits of the ancestors and clan heroes, propitiation of fertility deities, divination and prediction, for rites of spirit possession cults and for celebrating weddings.

Apart from traditional mythical themes, there are short plays and local stories, which are mainly intended to be humorous.  When they are performed now, they are generally played without masks--at best the dancers apply make-up.  These local tales often may provide an idea of the plots of many of the ancient village dramas.  Among the comic characters to be found almost everywhere in the Middle Hills and the Terai is the latha, the mute who is an object of both mockery and fear (Fig. 12).  This character is the simpleton par excellence; the joker who has the power to cast a spell.  A mother frequently thinks her child is ill because of an encounter with a deaf-mute.  In the short plays of rural areas, such a character may have the role of exorcist as well as that of releasing the audience's frustrations through laughter.  Old couples are also frequent characters in such plays or pantomimes; buffalo-owning couples who quarrel and drunken husbands who beat their wives are caricatures of miserliness, foolishness and stupidity.

Tigers, feared by everyone in the jungle, were also frequently represented in theatre masks, as well as the equally frightening rakshasas, which can be either local demons or derived from Hindu mythology (Fig. 13).  Today, local legends still tell of the misadventures of villagers with ferocious animals such as bears or tigers.  The plot starts with the vain efforts of a drunken peasant to lead his buffalo home and his clowning provokes immediate laughter.  Then comes the frightening moment of the meeting with the monster.  The story reaches a dramatic phase; tigers, bears and demons do not always have a sense of humour.  But the fun finally reappears.  The peoples of the Terai like to laugh.  Although it usually takes a remarkably long time for a simple story to be resolved, the spectator derives particular pleasure from interminable digressions.  As in the fables of the Panchatantra, the oldest Sanskrit book of tales, the denouement delivers the moral of the story.

The wearing of masks was also often associated with licentiousness.  Many legends deal with temptation, attraction and sexual union in their shameful aspects.  There exist some stories about Krishna and the gopis (milkmaids), weddings, and the role of buffoons whose allusions and gestures are obscene.  Phalluses were exposed during dances, and masked clowns interrupted the monotony of a dance with lewd jokes.  A mask used in this way is the face with a penis-shaped nose in Figure 14, which comes from the Middle Hills but is related in its sentiment to some Terai masks.  These masks are intended to conceal and allow the expression of otherwise inhibited tendencies, of what is usually prohibited or of what cannot be said or shown openly.

The most numerous ethnic group in the Terai is that of the Tharu, with a current population of more than four hundred thousand.  Their origin is obscure since despite some Mongoloid features, their linguistic components have similarities with those of the tribes of central or eastern India.  The Tharu live along the strip of plains that lie to the south of the Middle Hills.  Their customs are extremely varied from community to community, and their social organization is often limited to the borders of a village, without any real unity or relationship with the ethnic group as a whole.  During celebrations and weddings, women are allowed to play drums and dance, while men drink jugs of beer and rice brandy.

The Tharu practised ritual dances and plays where masked actors presented the legends and myths of the clan, but the tribe has now converted to Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism.  According to the practices of their shamanic religion, the outskirts of the villages were protected by carved wooden statures and fences of matting, and earth fertility deities were worshipped twice a year, in winter and summer.  Each house had, in its eastern corner, a private temple dedicated to lineage deities.  Some clans would perform dances around a mask lying on a small triangular altar, which were intended to propitiate fertility deities.

Although most of the gods, demons and clowns depicted in tribal Himalayan masks have been totally forgotten, some of them have found a place in more recent theatrical performances and dances.  Mythical characters and jokers can take different forms and roles.  Village art, which is freely expressed, gives way to a great extent to the power of fantasy (Fig. 15).

In those ethnic groups where masked dances still survive, they are eagerly awaited as important opportunities for communal activity and enjoyment.  The masked performances have the function of maintaining cultural unity; making fun of the beliefs and the life style of others is often a way of defending one's own beliefs and customs.  In addition, it seems to be easier for the spectator to understand the moral of a tale when it is presented in a comic way.  These performances, even the comedies, are like popular books making available knowledge and understanding of the moral laws of the ancients.