Dungdunge Puja

This was a week after my arrival in the village, on my longer stint.
From my fieldnotes:

"ketipathi, a scented plant, in large amounts. The bamboo leg-tops were the actual plant top, long leaves spouting upwards.
The altar was a sort of extension of the terrace, a sort of balcony basically, facing south when one looked towards it. There were four men initially working on it, tying it all together. One of them was the sparkly eyed man I had met a few days before at the shop. Two others were the drunk Limbus I had met and chatted with the day before. The other was a younger Limbu I think I may have seen before but couldn't remember.
Later another, (what turned out to be the fourth and youngest Phedangma) turned up with a container of millet (whose was this? his? why was he bringing millet to a puja he was "working" at?).
There were a largish number of women, 4-5 coming and going, getting firewood, boiling water, boiling rice, getting tongbas served up, bringing mats to sit on.
The rice was cooked and laid out on a tightly woven mat (the food kind as opposed to sitting-on-kind): (names/terms missing here!).
It was immediately busily and skillfully shaped into two largish statues (15cm high and 20 wide), representations of mountain spirits of some kind, and much of the rest of the rice was patted into little cones, much like the little statues one sees in Tibetan monasteries. 32 little ones in total and 2 big ones. The same was done with millet-flour which had been cooked into a sort of polenta, so that in total 64 little statues and 4 big ones had been made. These were placed on the altar on top of a woven mat on either side of a pair of brass plates with kethipathi and uncooked rice, in 5 lines of 6, with the remaining two placed diagonally just below. (plenty of photos of this).
Flags of some kind were places in the big and small statues, and little lizard like models were placed on the outside of the altar, on banana leaves.
The puja got going with two lines of chanting, in front the younger looking phedangmas, and behind the older looking ones, one of whom beat the drum and the other started the chanting. It was sort of fugal in style, there must be a technical term for this, where the older phedangma would start and the younger one would repeat his words a split second later, as if he didn't really know them himself.
There were a number of interesting things about the puja. There was an informality about the proceedings, about the sitting arrangement, about the breaks taken by the phedangmas very frequently between long verses. I was asked over by the drummer to sit next to him and he made jokes in between drumming about who I should marry of the Limbu girls among the group (there must have been a total of some 20 people)."










The Dungdunge puja, performed for the entire village including non-Limbus) by 4 Phedangmas (Limbu shaman), on the 31st March. This is a puja to appease a particularly "mad" spirit. The only way to do this, so explains one of the Phedangmas, is to perform a live sacrifice of a goat (that is, the goat's heart is removed while the goat is still otherwise alive; it is then placed on a stick in the centre of the altar - still beating!)

The top two photos show the altar being prepared. Three more photos show the tiny statues being prepared to place in the altar. The white ones are made of rice, black of ground-and-boiled millet.Other photos show the altar from a distance.