The Use of Bats as Medicine among the Newars

Previous Studies

There have been no substantive studies of the medicinal use of bats, in the Himalayas or elsewhere. Bat researchers throughout South Asia have reported various medicinal uses, but usually as part of studies of human pressure on bat populations. The January 2005 issue of the newsletter of the Chiroptera Conservation and Information Network of South Asia featured a page of correspondence from various members on the medicinal use of the flesh of fruit bats, usually as a remedy for ‘asthma’ (Walker 2005) 1 . A brief article on the Ao Naga (Kakati et al. 2006) suggests that the flesh of Rhinolophus spp. are used for asthma, while fruit bat urine is used for kidney stones, and an article on the Lushai of Mizoram (Lalramnghinglova 1999) reports that children who wet the bed are fed roasted bat flesh.

There is, however, a burgeoning scientific literature that has developed since the identification of the Hendra and Nipah viruses, both of which are carried in Pteropid bats and which, when transmitted to humans, are frequently lethal. This has provoked epidemiological studies of large bats and flying fox-human interaction in Madagascar (Iehlé et al. 2007), West Bengal (Chadha et al. 2006), Bangladesh (Luby et al. 2006), Thailand (Wacharapluesadee et al. 2005), Cambodia (Reynes et al. 2005), Malaysia (Chua 2003), and Australia. Ironically drinking bat urine is an effective technique for catching these diseases and at least one study (Luby et al. 2006) has speculated that flying fox excrement can render edible palm sap infectious for several days. This literature does contain some information on the ethnobiology of bats, especially Pteropids, but there appear to have been no in-depth studies specifically considering the social context of eating bats or hunting them for bushmeat. The consensus is, however, that the expansion of human settlement and foraging in tropical forests has led to a much greater rate of predation, as well as increased opportunities for transmission of disease.

The study of bats in the Himalayas has a long but sparse history, with a handful of relevant publications. Most reference data comes from Csorba et al. (1999) on Nepal and Bates and Harrison (1997) for South Asia and the Himalayas. Older studies – both Hodgson's initial reports (Hodgson 1842, 1843, 1844) and Scully (1887) and Hinton and Fry (1923) – have some useful information on habits and frequency. The study of ethnomedicine and ethnobiology in the Himalayas is generally vibrant, but the difficulty of overcoming both linguistic and social barriers has meant that Newar ethnobiology is practically unstudied except as part of Nepal-wide surveys, usually in ethnobotany. Newar medicine has been the subject of a few in-depth studies. William Stablein (1973, 1976, 1980) was one of the first Western scholars to engage with the Newar Vajrācāryas. He looked at the intersection of the textual tradition of Mahākāla and tantric medical practice among Newar and Tibetan Buddhist ritual specialists, writing three different works from anthropological, textual and historical perspectives on the same basic material. Durkin-Longley (1982) studied Ayurvedic practice in a Newar clinic with a wide range of customers, and followed her thesis with a study (Durkin-Longley 1984) on the managment of multiple therapeutic systems by Nepalis. David Gellner, while he has not focused on Newar medical practices, did write the first substantive study of modern Newar Vajrayāna (Gellner 1993), contributed an article on possession and healing (Gellner 1994) and wrote a short chapter on lay medical practices (Gellner 2001). Dietrich (1998) did a study of several jhārphuk practitioners in Kathmandu.

The Newars

Newars have a heterogeneous, urban, and highly stratified society that has developed for at least two and a half millennia in the Kathmandu Valley 2 . By their own account, Newar society has developed from a slowly fermented mix of original inhabitants and incomers from the Sanskritic south and the Tibetic north, as well as cis-Himalayan migrations. Newars are united both by their Tibeto-Burmese language with a rich classical and modern literature, and by a complex and fine-grained social order that includes hierarchical distinctions of caste 3 and spatial distinctions through endowed neighborhood societies (New. guhi). These societies are responsible for almost all public rituals, as well as many major life cycle events. Thus one frequently heard definition of a Newar is, “anyone who both speaks Newari and belongs to a funeral guhi”. Yet while these two criteria are recognized by almost all Newars, a significant and growing minority of Newars cannot speak the language, and the guhi system, which depends on spatially dense localities, is collapsing as a result of dispersed settlement and suburbanization.

The Social Organization of Medicine

Traditional medical practices among Newars are distributed among a number of different caste and gender groups, each of which specialize in a distinct area. Provisionally we can distinguish between the following formal systems: Ayurvedic practitioners (vaidya), indigenous pharmacies (jaībuī pasa), tantric healers (jhārphuk yāyep), shamanic healers (jhãkris) and traditional midwives (ajis). The jhãkris and ajis will not concern us in this study. There is also a thriving modern biomedical industry in Kathmandu, with many doctors drawn from the same educated middle and upper class caste groups that historically dominated traditional medical practice; this should be divided into rural clinics, urban clinics and hospitals, and pharmacies both urban and village, each of which have distinct properties. Again, for the purposes of this study we can set aside modern biomedicine as it never resorts to the use of bats. Finally, the dominant women of any large household play a substantial, if informal, role both in prescribing simple remedies and in soliciting interventions by recognized practitioners. I will consider each of these groups briefly in order to contextualize the distribution of the use and preparation of bat oil and its ingredients.

As Gellner (1994, p. 32) notes, “the term vaidya can refer to a wide variety of healers and apothecaries”. In a more restricted sense, taken together with the other categories listed above, vaidya are Ayurvedic practitioners. They are highly educated, often male, and come from priestly castes. Around Asan, there are both Śaiva Brahmin vaidya lineages and Buddhist Vajrācārya families that have strong reputations as vaidya families, prescribing and selling medicines from the same premises for many decades. They are Ayurvedic practitioners, strongly tied to the Sanskrit tradition of Caraka and Sus?ruta. Ayurveda, perhaps in competition with “Western biomedicine”, has become a professionalized industry in South Asia, with Ayurvedic colleges, research institutes and plantations to be found in Nepal as well as India. Ayurvedic remedies extend well beyond prescribing therapeutic medicines, and include notions of correct diet, activity and posture 4 .

Ayurvedic and tantric medical practitioners are expected to be able to consult Sanskrit texts written a thousand years ago, and to correctly pronounce Sanskrit mantras (magical phrases). This reflects the importance of classical Sanskrit as a canonical language for ritual, legal, astrological and medical texts. Most ritual texts have, since the 16^th century, been bilingual composites with the instructions in Newari and the ritual language in Sanskrit. The medical textual tradition is similar. Modern printed editions from India include translations into Hindi or English, but both as a matter of prestige and accuracy; the ability to refer to the Sanskrit is highly valued. There are a few Newar language manuscripts, mostly 20^th century, but both in number and use they are rare. In effect, then, the elite tradition is bilingual, using Sanskrit texts as the basis for diagnoses conducted in Newari or Nepali.

Jaībuī pasa are shops that sell the ingredients for a wide range of Ayurvedic and folk remedies. Their proprietors were usually Baniyā, a specific group within the Urāy caste cluster, until about 20 years ago. Durkin-Longley (1982, pp.186–191) noted that most such shops had changed hands to other castes; in recent research, I found that only the largest shops, which acted as wholesalers, were still in the hands of the Baniyās. Several of the remaining shops belong to other Urāy sub-castes, or to Śākyas. All of these are high Buddhist castes. As with British pharmacists, the proprietor of a jaībuī pasa will have considerable knowledge in the prescription of his wares. While some clients might come to the shop looking for a specific ingredient, others will come with a complaint and hope to find both advice on its remedy and the medicine itself. The materials found in a jaībuī pasa include plant, animal and mineral substances as well as pre-mixed pills and powders. Customers at a smaller jaībuī pasa may, therefore, be purchasing ingredients for a cure once prescribed by a vaidya; or purchasing ingredients for a remedy carried within the informal women's traditions; or expecting both prescription and remedy to come from the proprietor. As with a good pharmacist, the shop owner may well inquire as to whether a customer correctly understands the use of a specific substance. The larger jaībuī pasa, still run by Baniyā, cater to a wide variety of other medical practitioners (including non-Newars, such as Bahun-Chetri vaidyas and Tibetan lamas) and sell in much larger quantities, typically to other practitioners or vendors who come in from remote regions.

Jharphuk yāyep are Buddhist tantric healers that use mantras, blowing or brushing techniques, and magically empowered pills to cure a wider range of afflictions than either the vaidyas or the jaībuī pasa proprietors. Diagnostic techniques include consulting horoscopes, divination with a kīla (ritual spike), and inspecting samples of earth or clothing taken from afflicted places or people, along with the more typically Ayurvedic skill of pulse reading. They are usually Vajrācāryas (Buddhist tantric priests), though others, having studied with a Vajrācārya jharpuk practitioner, may set up business. They see themselves as the healers of the poor and the healers of last resort, and are well known for taking no more money than the client is willing or able to give. In this sense they stand at an opposite pole to organized clinical medicine, which is often extremely expensive and marketed with menu-like lists of fixed prices for differing x-rays, blood tests, etc.

Finally, it is necessary to recognize the constant policing of family health undertaken by the dominant women in any Newar household. It is a patrilocal society, where a traditional family might consist of a father and mother, their married sons and daughters-in-law, and as yet unmarried daughters, and any grandchildren born to the married sons. There are usually also dependent relatives in the ascending generation (the husband's parents and even grandparents). Daily meals will be chosen by the mother; even if the actual cooking is done by daughters-in-law or unmarried daughters, she will teach them what and how to cook. This extends to the preparation of fermented drinks such as rice beer or white brandy. The diet will be varied to protect against seasonal threats, such as excessive cool and damp or excessive heat. There may also be an evening prescription of hot water with herbs, or a change in diet for one individual with diarrhea, a cold, or other maladies. The dominant woman may send members of the family out to a jaībuī pasa to buy specific ingredients for a traditional remedy, or perform simple mantras or invocations. They are also the regulators of family etiquette and reputation, responsible for defending not just the physical body of the family members but the social body of the household as a whole. As new daughters-in-law join the extended household, they bring with them the knowledge of their natal homes and are taught how to cook and prepare medicines in the style of their husband's lineage by their new mother-in-law.

The Ecology of Newar Architecture

Traditional Newar settlement patterns were almost entirely urban. Aside from certain agricultural castes that tended to have isolated homes among the rice terraces, the vast majority of Newars lived in three- or four-story rowhouses, arranged around courtyards that provided a space for social life. Many Newar families were comparable to crofters, dividing their working day between tending rice terraces or kitchen gardens and pursuing their (often caste-bound) professions 5 . Wealthier families had tenant farmers, and most guhis were financed by the produce from an endowment of inalienable cultivated land 6 .

The traditional Newar house 7 was tall (often 10+m), with a peaked tile roof, overhanging eaves and storage space in the attic. Given that Newars tended to build dense urban clumps, surrounded by irrigated rice terrace with scattered trees, this was ideal habitat for insectivorous microchiropterans. Even in smaller settlements such as Kokhna or Pharping, the transition from terraced rice paddy to rowhouses and courtyards is abrupt, and there were few free-standing residences before 1960. Other communities in the Valley, such as Bahun/Chetri or Tamang, did build single dwelling houses, usually only two stories high, but again, the peaked roof, overhanging eaves and rough building materials made for ideal bat roosts.

This style of dense settlement has been a feature of Newar society in the Kathmandu Valley for well over a thousand years, long enough for not just bat populations but also other typically urban mammals and birds to become integrated into the social and ritual system. Swifts, whose nests cluster under the eaves, are regarded as partly divine, and there is considerable reluctance to disturb them or their nests. The passing of the year is marked by an offering to crows, which, together with pigeons, gather on the roof terraces every morning to feast on the remains of the morning worship rituals. Rats are a prize mascot at several temples, and the Asian House Shrew (Suncus murinus L.) figures in local iconography.

The urban core of Newar society cannot be over-emphasized. Other communities in Nepal frequently mention the dense multi-storied cities within which Newars live. Those Newars that live in towns or villages are strongly orientated to the cities. Thus inhabitants of Pharping must, and frequently do, make an hour-long bus trip to consult traditional specialists. Similarly, there are no traditional medical shops in Pharping; residents must go to Kathmandu in order to buy their ingredients even for recipes they prepare in their own homes. The sellers of traditional medical ingredients are concentrated around Itũ Bahā and Asan in Kathmandu.

Preparation of Cikã Lāpa Wasa

As bat oil is prepared in the same way regardless of the condition it is intended to treat, we will review its concoction and ingredients before considering the uses to which it is put. The fullest account I received came from a Dangol family from Panga, near Kirtipur. All other recipes I collected were simpler variations on this. As will become clear through the remainder of the article, this brief recipe conceals a complex web-work of shifting prototypes, trade practices and rules inherited from the Sanskrit canonical tradition.

The procedure is as follows: catch a ‘house bat’ and kill it, or find one recently dead within the house. Dry it and roll it up into a tightly tied bundle rather like a cigar. Take mustard oil and heat it until it is very hot. Decant the oil into a smaller jar, to which add the dried and rolled house bat. Seal the container and leave it until it gives off a distinct and unpleasant smell. The oil is now ready for use as a medicine.

While I will return to the question of how bats are classified below, it is clear from the interviews I conducted that the bat used for bat-oil must be a ‘house bat’ rather than a ‘tree bat’. On the basis of an admittedly incomplete inventory of possible microchiropterans in the Kathmandu Valley and the use of simple cue sketches during interviews, I believe that the most common bat utilized would have been Hipposideros armiger Hodgson, though other members of the Hipposideridae and Rhinolophidae are almost certainly used as well.

Many informants who knew about this medicine agreed that dried bats used to be available in the jaībuī stalls in and around Asan ol. When I saw these dried bats in 1992, I was told that they were sold in order to be immersed in oil, after which the oil would become a medicine. While customers interviewed near Asan or Itũ Bahā remembered purchasing dried bats, they did not agree on any requirement that the bat be desiccated. One Newar colleague, who had never actually seen or used this medicine, suggested that the only reason for drying the bats was commercial expediency. However, when I began to collect personal narratives without reference to the jaībuī shops, informants told me that the usual practice was to catch a live bat or find a recently dead one and use it to tincture the oil. In these stories, the bat was left in the oil until it began to smell bad, and the resulting medicinal oil retained a strong and unpleasant odor. Informants who claimed to have learned to prepare this medicine from their own elders insisted that it was necessary to dry the bat first. One informant, who had prepared the medicine but was not confident in their knowledge of the recipe, said they had not dried the bat first and blamed the hideous odor on the wetness of the bat. It would seem that the bat was ordinarily dried before being used, both in the home and where collected commercially. However, the awful smell is a consistent feature of all narratives describing cikã lāpa wāsa.

Therapeutic Uses

Reported uses of cikã lāpa wasa fall into three distinct clusters: as eardrops to expel an earbug, as a topical baldness cure, and as an antiparalytic. These three uses were not mutually exclusive; some informants reported two or three uses. The only account I was offered of bat oil and its uses in 1992 was as an eardrop. By contrast, in 2005–6 almost all informants offered one of the two other accounts of the use of bat oil, and one informant went so far as to say that oil by itself was sufficient to expel an earbug, with no need to make proper bat oil.

Earbugs

According to informants at the jaībuī shops in 1992, bat oil was used as eardrops to expel insects (nhaybi or nhāypã kī, “earbugs”) that crawl into the ear. This was confirmed by my Newari instructor at the time, a highly educated civil servant. I have heard unsolicited identifications of millipedes as the nhaybi, and this is confirmed by medical texts and dictionaries in both Sanskrit and Newari. They can be seen crawling across the ceiling in the evening hours, and Newars say they drop from the ceiling onto the head of a sleeping person, crawl deep into the ear and gnaw the brain, causing excruciating headaches on that side. While there clearly are several uses for bat-oil, the widespread belief in earbugs may be an indigenous account of migraine headaches. Joshi (1987) in his dictionary of Newari defines nhaybi following this account, and even adds that the proper treatment is oil dripped into the ear, though he does not (here) make the link to bats.

Baldness

Bat oil can be rubbed onto the head to promote hair growth and health, and to restore lost hair. In recent fieldwork this is by far the most common account I have encountered among ordinary people. As we will see, it also accords with the textual sources and with medicines currently sold by itinerant hawkers from the Terai and India. I did not hear it mentioned in earlier fieldwork.

Paralyzed Limbs

Finally three informants, including a Parbatiya Brahmin from the Terai region, mentioned that bat oil could be used to restore strength to paralyzed limbs. Again, there is a specific illness known among Nepalis whose symptoms include paralysis of one arm. This is not the same as a stroke, which is also recognized; it is generally an illness that strikes at a somewhat younger age than strokes. A number of different medicines are apparently used to try to cure this condition, and it was as one of several possible treatments that informants described using bat oil. In this sense, bat oil is simply one of a number of possibly efficacious tinctured oils that can be used during massage. One informant went so far as to recommend its use as a general massage oil, not just for weak or paralyzed limbs, but also for general muscle tone.

Classifying Bats

In trying to understand how bats can be used as a medicine, I have had to consider how bats as a class of organisms are understood. The classification of bats is itself an interestingly residual problem in the literature on ethnotaxonomy. When Berlin (1992, p. 81) writes that “the behavior of these animals makes them essentially unobservable by native biologists,” he betrays the New World bias of his fieldwork, but thereby leaves a delightful problem in classification untouched in his otherwise thorough study. In tropical Asia, it is impossible to escape the larger bats as a salient feature of the twilight sky, and the classificatory difficulties posed by bats recur in any number of tropical Asian societies. The problem is made overt in a folk tale cited by Karma Phuntsho from Bhutan (2000, p. 96) in which a bat claims to be either a bird (by showing its wings) or a beast (by showing its fur), depending on the situation 8 .

In most languages of the Himalayas, bats are classed with birds into a lifeform taxon. For Newars, bats are a kind of jhaṅga, a term usually translated as “bird” but sometimes better understood as “flyer”. The Newari-Newari dictionary (Joshi 1987) defines cikã lāpā as “a specific kind of jhaṅga which has the characteristics of both a mammal (pas?u) and a bird (jhaṅga)”. The term jhaṅga is being forced to do two jobs here, expressing first the unanalyzed lifeform and second the Linnaean taxon “bird”. Studies of New Guinean ethnotaxonomy also mention lifeform taxa of “birds and other flying things”, e.g., Karam yakt (Bulmer 1967, p. 7), and occasionally bats even merit a folk taxonomic term all their own, such as the Nuaulu notone (Ellen 1975, p.138). In Forth's recent review of Malaya-Polynesian words for “bird”, which includes Ellen's data, he refers to this problem, and notes that “because...the life-form is explicitly defined with reference to a kind of movement, the fact that it subsumes the Chiroptera as well as Aviformes is perfectly logical” (Forth 2006, p. 181).

Yet there clearly is a felt tension, at least in some cases, as reflected by the Bhutanese proverb and the awkward need to shift meaning in the two uses of the term jhaṅga in Newari. I suspect the tension is generated in part by the fact that there are two such different kinds of bat, one larger and clearly a mammal-with-wings sort of creature, and another smaller and more of a big-bug-with-fur sort of creature. Bats straddle not just the bird-beast lifeform boundary but also the bird-bug boundary. The word lāpā is translated as “butterfly” by Newars analyzing the compound word cikã lāpā. Lāpā by itself can mean either “bat” or “butterfly, moth”, but the term in isolation is rarely used these days; rather, lāpāca, the diminutive, or even lāpālāpāca, is used for moths and butterflies while cikã lāpā means bat. In Old Newari the term lāpā is one of several that mean “bat”. Bats are also situated on the bird-bug boundary in some classical Sanskrit sources considered below.

Internal Organization of the Taxon

In eliciting information about the preparation of bat oil, I encountered a pair of contrasting taxa: “house bat” and “tree bat”. Almost all informants agreed that one had to use a “house bat”, as opposed to a “tree bat” 9 . In the urban Newar context this distinction makes very good sense. The flying foxes (Pteropus spp.) that roost in trees in the grounds of the Kaiser Library, across from the royal palace, are well-known, and informants frequently referred to these bats as an example of “tree bat”. Tree bats are large, roost in trees and are known to eat fruit. By contrast, house bats are small and can be found in and around old Newar houses. Their diet is unknown, and indeed they are rather mysterious, known only from the occasional animal encountered by accident or found dead in the morning.

This pair of contrasting taxa is not linguistically explicit; there are no terms in Newari that correspond to “tree bat” and “house bat”. Rather, what I repeatedly heard was a conversational sequence in which the informant referred to the well-known flying foxes in order to establish the taxon of “bat” and then immediately moved to deny that these prototypical bats were the right kind of bats to use for making bat oil. Thus the general taxon of “bat” appears to be internally organized around a prototype (Pteropus) chosen for its salience (but not its utility) and the complement (in a rather loose set-theoretic sense) of that prototype, to which medical utility is ascribed. Given that the word for “bat” (cikã lāpā) refers directly to its medical preparation, this tension is perhaps not surprising. I was able to elicit a positive identification of the specific type of bat which one should use to make bat-oil when talking to people with experience of making bat-oil. This makes it tempting to argue that there are in fact two prototypes around which the taxon of “bats” is internally organized, one known to almost everyone (the large, noisy Pteropus) and another, the less visible but useful small bat used to prepare bat oil. Yet the very invisibility of most microchiroptera makes it difficult to argue that this classification system is actually shared by all Newars. Thus, at best it might be possible to argue that a more subtle two-prototype classification is part of the repertoire of certain Newars, those with (or near to those with) expertise in preparing bat-oil, but for the vast majority of informants the former model seems to offer a better fit: there is a prototype, but most people know that there are other bats, of mysterious character, that are (1) unlike the prototype and (2) useful in preparing medicine. This hypothesis is supported by the sorts of incomplete accounts I collected and the mistakes people made in preparing bat oil: some informants did not know how to prepare the bat before immersion, but no informant reported or suggested using a large bat.

It is interesting that 19th century reports, including Scully and Hodgson, remark on the scarcity and infrequent appearance of Pteropus in the Kathmandu Valley. Scully argues that they are seasonal visitors from neighboring valleys at lower elevation (Scully 1887, pp. 236–40). So far as I know, there are no other obvious flying fox roosting sites within or among the Newar cities of the Kathmandu Valley. There is a colony in Sallaghari, Bhaktapur district, which is seasonal; the Pteropus there apparently migrate in from Makwanpur (Rajchal 2007). The colony in the ground of the Kaiser Library is noisy, well-populated, and right across the street from the royal palace. This suggests either that the colony is relatively new – the roosts are in mature Auracaria trees, tall exotics that were planted by the Ranas in the late 19th century – or that foreign observers were not able to make adequate observations near the Narayanhiti palace. If I am correct in arguing that the presence of a visible, central flying fox colony is recent and anthropogenic, then the emergence of the flying fox as a prototype may also be recent. All informants (and the author) agree that this flying fox colony is in a state of rapid decline.

Note that this way of dividing up the possible types of bats by where one encounters them makes no reference to the possibility of going down to the local jaībuī shop and buying a dried bat. Although I encountered dried bats for sale in 1992, and a few informants did remember when prompted that bats had once been available, this fact was never spontaneously mentioned, nor did it ever surface in conversations about the possible kinds of bat or the preparation of bat oil medicine. Nor does this taxonomy refer to bats in caves, of which there a few around the Kathmandu Valley (notably at the Cobhar Gorge, and in the Nagarjun Forest reserve) as well in the broader middle hills region of Nepal. Again, no informant volunteered the possibility of encountering bats in caves, or mentioned caves as a possible habitat, though this clearly was important when there was a trade in dead bats.

Ethnobiologists in similar circumstances elsewhere in the Himalayas have often resorted to the expertise of commercial collectors or merchants in order to refine their understanding of the interplay between available species and emic categories. The Baniyā and others who sold bats in jaībuī in shops near Asan did not collect their own, but purchased them from suppliers and collectors (Durkin-Longley 1982, p. 189). Unfortunately in this case such an inquiry would almost certainly produce convincing, but misleading, answers. The ethnotaxon of “house bat” used by Newars collecting their own bats with which to prepare medicine, is constituted differently from the categories that condition the selection and collection of bats for commercial exploitation. The single commercial collector identified by Nepalese bat workers had been harvesting bats from a cave near Pokhara and was rapidly dissuaded from any further collecting. However common sense suggests that other collectors supplying the Kathmandu merchants would also have exploited cave populations, possibly outside the Valley, rather than trying to collect bats flying around houses or crawling into house eaves looking for one or two individuals at a time. Hence, what commercial collectors there were would not have used the indigenous category (“house bat”) to identify the right bat for medicinal use. Taking into account the bat populations in these caves, it is probable that commercial collectors would have encountered a different distribution of bat species from that encountered by urban Newars seeking to prepare bat oil. Thus, as a class of informant they could shed no light on either the indigenous taxon “house bat” nor could they assist with matching that taxon to known species of bat.

The house bat/tree bat distinction differs from the Linneaen distinction between microchiroptera and megachiroptera; although the two distinctions are parallel, the Newar classification is not an exhaustive division of all possible bats. We can, however, be sure that the house bat used for the preparation of cikã lāpā wāsa is a microchiropteran. To pin down exactly which bats might be used was a more difficult task; it seems that for many people the (largely unexamined) house bat/tree bat distinction is enough to decide what bat might be appropriate for making medicinal oil. Yet the articulation between the ethnotaxonomy and the actual inventory of species in the Kathmandu Valley does bear further investigation for several reasons: local engagement in conservation issues, the possibility of uncovering further specialist knowledge, and understanding the relationship between Newar medical uses of bats and those of other adjacent Himalayan communities which may have access to different species 10 .

We are far from having a complete or accurate record of the bat species to be found in the Kathmandu Valley, or indeed in the Himalayas. In the absence of a systematic survey I have had to work from existing reports and the evidence of local bat conservation workers. However, the available data suggests a number of small bats that might wander into houses, including members of Rhinolophus, Hipposideros, Myotis and Scotophilus. (See Appendix 1 for a list of possible species.) I have included here only those bats likely to be common in the Kathmandu Valley and very likely to be found in or near houses. There are, for example, no records so far of Scotophilus spp. from the Kathmandu Valley as yet, though they are certainly a common urban bat at lower elevations in South Asia; recent fieldwork by others and myself around the Kathmandu Valley has as yet to find a single individual. When I showed my informants a rough sketch of three different bat faces, however, they immediately chose the face with a distinct nose-leaf and prominent ears. This corresponds well with anecdotal evidence collected by bat researchers around the Kathmandu Valley, and tends to confirm that “house bat” means Hipposideros armiger Hodgson, though other members of the Hipposideridae and Rhinolophidae are almost certainly acceptable. Note that reports from the Ao Naga suggest that they also use a member of the Rhinolophidae (Kakati et al. 2006, p. 164). This does not mean that, were a Scotophilus sp. to present itself, it would not be used; it only confirms that H. armiger is – or was – readily available and is good to use.

Textual Precedents

The textual tradition that informs most of the formal Newar medical traditions is the Sanskrit Ayurvedic tradition. Looking into the older textual tradition, we find that concerns with ear infestations and with baldness are as old as the tradition itself, some two thousand years old. Diseases of the head form a distinct category in Ayurvedic texts, with various techniques (purging, massage) that are good for a whole range of afflictions of the head, from earaches to poor vision and graying hair. This may explain why, for the modern use of bat oil, ear infestations and baldness are both good uses for the same medicine. The two conditions have different specific cures in the classical texts. For the purposes of this article I have consulted the three fundamental medical texts in Sanskrit: the Carakasahitā, the Sus?rutasahitā, and the Aāṅgahdaya of Vāgbhata. Where commentaries were available I consulted them, and I also took advantage of the Bower manuscript, a unique and very old medical workbook that was apparently the property of a Central Asian Buddhist monk. It has also been necessary to spend some time working through Sanskrit and Newari lexica. I cannot pretend to have read through any of these texts exhaustively and what follows should be taken only as preliminary investigation.

Curing Earbugs

Caraka (VI.26.26–9) has a section on diseases of the head caused by small vermin (kmi), which can attack the teeth, the ears and other parts of the head. He suggests using ‘sharp’ (tīkn a) fluids to expel insects lodged in the ear. Sus?ruta offers a far richer discussion both of ear pathology and of its cures, listing 28 different sorts of ear ailment in chapter 20 of the Uttaratantra, dedicated to recognizing diseases of the head. The seventh of these is small vermin (again, kmi) in the ear. In the subsequent chapter on remedies for ear diseases, he gives three general sorts of cure. First he proposes purging the head, roughly parallel to Caraka's method, though Sus?ruta recommends that this include the use of incense, followed by rubbing and then inspecting the ear (21.37cd–39). Later, he proposes a series of substances that should kill the infesting insect, such as aubergine smoke or orpiment (As₂S₃) mixed with cow urine (49cd–50). Finally he suggests using tools, such as a probe, to remove any offending organisms, though in this case he appears to be talking about infested ear piercings, rather than the main ear canal (56cd–57ab). Vāgbhata (28.41–2), whose commentary indicates that an ear insect may be a millipede or an ant (!), offers a choice of salt water, vinegar or just warm water. No author proposes using an oily preparation (sneha-).

Baldness

Baldness calls forth a host of cures, many of which do take the form of oils tinctured with various ingredients, none of which are bats. Such cures are also generally good for the whole head and may be part of a program of purging the head and then massaging it with medicinal oil. However in the Bower manuscript, the link between remedies for baldness and headaches is explicit (Hoernle 1893–1912, pp. 113–114). There we find a recipe in which a number of ingredients are added to boiling oil in order to make up a remedy for headaches, taken in the form of eardrops, which is also useful for reinvigorating grey hair. The Bower manuscript does not, however, specify insect-like vermin as the cause of these headaches.

Bats

Bat oil itself is never mentioned in the prior Sanskrit medical literature that I have been able to consult, nor are bats a major feature of the medical literature 11 . The Carakasahitā, for example, recommends bat fat (jatukā-vasā) as an ingredient, but only once (Ci. 14.48) (Caraka et al. 1994, pp. 230–231); and bat (>aṅkapāda) skin may be used to make a particular sort of enema sack (Si. 3.12) (Caraka et al. 1994, p. 606). However, Francis Zimmerman's masterful study of animal flesh in the Ayurvedic material (Zimmerman 1999) alerts us to a possible precedent for the medicinal use of at least some bats. In his careful decoding of the “catalogue of meats” in Sus?ruta, we find that valgulī – flying foxes – fall into the series of animals that peck (pratuda) (Zimmerman 1999, p. 226). Zimmerman, who has spent considerable time trying to decipher the terms on the list, actually proposes, though tentatively, that three of the words (mātnindaka, sārika, valgulī) in the middle of the pratuda series might refer to bats. Valgulī is unambiguously a term for a large frugivorous bat; sārika is clearly a term for a mynah bird (Acridotheres), as Zimmerman acknowledges; and to stretch from mātnindaka (“mother-reviler”, a term with no clear referent) to mātvāhakā (“riding on its mother”, a bat) is somewhat improbable. In any case, it is clear that the bats of the catalogue of meats are fruit bats as all the pratuda are characterized as feeding on fruits (Zimmerman 1999:105).

Zimmerman carefully outlines the way in which meats are categorized in Sus?ruta according to their health-giving properties. The meat of pratuda animals, such as pigeons –and bats – is characterized by being astringent, sweet and dry: promoting the wind humor (vāta) but calming to both bile (pitta) and phlegm (kapha). Bearing in mind that Suéruta's list is referring to flying foxes, we have here a specific description of the medicinal potency of flying fox flesh. The practice of eating flying fox flesh as a cure for asthma is too widespread to be accounted for by the diffusion of Indic medical traditions. Rather, the inclusion of valgulī in Sus?ruta's list may be an indication of the antiquity of the practice as a form of therapy.

What we do not have, though, is any specific precedent for the use of smaller bats. The terms used in Caraka (jatukā, aṅkapāda) appear to refer equally to larger and smaller bats. We might observe again that collecting either medicinally useful quantities of fat or a large enough area of skin from microchiropterans would be challenging. In any case there is no description of small bats as an ingredient for medicinal oils.

We do get a certain amount of useful information about classification of both earbugs and bats from Sanskrit reference texts. I have found useful information in the earliest Sanskrit dictionary (the Amarakoa) and its commentaries and translations into Clasical Newari, and the Bhatsahitā, an important compendium on astrology and other prognostication with its commentary.

Sanskrit has a wealth of words for “bat”, almost all of which describe some feature of the bats that set them aside from other larger winged creatures. Studying this list reveals that some terms refer to larger bats, while others apply to any bat. No term distinctly applies to smaller bats. Most of the unmarked terms refer to the unusual nature of bat wings: carmapakī, carma-patra, “skin-wing”; a-jina-patra, “black-antelope-skin wing”; carma-caaka, “skin-sparrow”. Valgulā or valgulī ultimately derives from a Dravidian root and, as we have already seen, refers to large bats, typically Pteropus spp 12 . The terms mātvāhinī and mātvāhakā, “riding on its mother” only makes sense where this distinctively mammalian behavior could be observed and I presume refer to Pteropus spp., whose colonies, including offspring, are easily observable in the daytime. The occurrence of terms for bats in other lists is also revealing. While the list of meats in Sus?ruta groups bats together with birds, the entry on bats in the Amarakoa, a standard dictionary of Sanskrit, is in the section on names for lions and so forth – that is, names for animals. It gives only two words: jatukā 13 and, as its synonym, ajinapatrā. The entries immediately before are terms for cranes and swans; the entries after are for cockroaches and flies. If we follow Zimmerman's emphasis on the ordering of the endless lists in Sanskrit treatises, then this is a confirmation of sorts that bats are viewed as a transitional animal between birds and winged insects.

The Classical Newari translations of the Amarakoa form the basis of the recently published Dictionary of Classical Newari (Malla and Nepāl BhāṢā Dictionary Committee 2000), but the rich terminology expressed in the online database (Alsop and Tamot 1999) of the actual manuscripts did not filter through to the published dictionary. The single term jatukā of the Sanskrit Amarakoa is translated by four terms across the eight Classical Newari manuscripts compiled into the database. In fact, all but two of the manuscripts disagree, but several of these fall into variants of two terms. The four terms are caku sāriri, jharekeā, phā khā, and finally lapa. Only the last term survives in modern Newari, and it is also the term corroborated by Guānanda Śākya's 14 19th century lexicon that both Conrady (1893) and Jørgensen (1936) used to prepare their earlier lexica of Classical Newari. Phā khā looks like a Tibetan term, and may be related to the known Tibetan term pha wang which also means bat.

As to earbugs, both the Sanskrit and Newari sources make the link between ear infesting insects and millipedes abundantly clear. The term for small parasite in the medical literature may be either kmi, worm, or kīa, insect. Caraka and Sus?ruta both use kmi, while Vāgbhata uses kīa. Apte's Sanskrit-English dictionary defines karakīta (that is, ear-insect) as a “worm with many feet, of a reddish color”, while the Amarakoa itself gives as a headword karajaulaka (ear-millipede) with s?atapāda (centipede) as a synonym. The Newari translation of this section shows none of the confusion it had about bats and translates the term as nhasabi, “ear-bug” 15 . There is clearly confusion in the Sanskrit concerning the number of legs involved; what in English are called centipedes and millipedes are not well distinguished. During interviews I conducted in Nepal the distinction was well maintained, and only millipedes were thought to invade the ear canal. The ambiguity of the commentator on Vāgbhata mentioned above, who wonders whether ants might also be a problem, vanishes when we look at compounds that specify ear-bugs; they are consistently described as centipede/millipedes. In other contexts Caraka, for example, refers to kmi infesting the teeth (VI v 205) or the heart (VI v 96) and so forth; but if it's in your ear, it's a millipede.

Distribution and Revision of Knowledge

What was especially striking about the narratives I gathered on cikã lāpa wasa was the almost total lack of information from informants from the traditional medical professional groups. One Vaidya and one Śākya, both with shops near Asan ol, remembered dried bats having been sold, though neither would say that they themselves had ever sold such a thing. Whether this was reluctance or ignorance remains unclear to me. However, subsequent inquiries among a wide range of specialists, including Baniyā, Vajrācāryas and others with extensive experience of traditional medicine suggested that this was genuinely a folk remedy and not at all the province of professionals. Not one of a group of some twenty highly educated Lalitpur Vajrācāryas had ever heard of this practice, and another famous healer, who had some stake in demonstrating his status, made rather obvious guesses that indicated he had no real experience of preparing or applying cikã lāpa wasa.

By contrast, my best informants were older members of agricultural and mercantile castes (Bālāmi, Jyāpu, Śreha and Urāy), often but not always women. In a particularly striking encounter, a middle-aged female Śākya customer at one jaibui shop jumped into my conversation with the (Śākya) proprietor, who had denied any knowledge. She certainly knew about bat oil, and after confirming that she remembered seeing bats for sale as medicine some years earlier, speculated at length on their habitat loss, making the distinction between (tree) bats which were still visible and (house) bats that were no longer apparent or, indeed, for sale.

Looking back to the rough outline of medical practitioners above, this suggests that the practice of cikã lāpa wasa genuinely is a household practice, not codified in a textual or professional tradition, but being propagated within the domain of informal medicine largely organized and transmitted by women. Unfortunately the practice has already died out to such an extent that I was not able to collect any accounts of how or from whom it had been learned by the few informants who did still possess an active knowledge. A proper account of how this practice was transmitted in Newar society is thus beyond me.

Even taking into account the difference between my unstructured research of 1992 and my more persistent recent investigations, the change in the understanding of the proper use of bat oil is also striking. When bats were actually available in Asan, the explanation for their use was phrased in terms of a system of agent, illness and therapy – the earbug, the headache and bat oil – which has largely vanished. While simply mentioning the word for bat involves a reference to its medicinal use and leads easily to a discussion of the medicinal oil, the active awareness among Asan traders, and indeed most other Newars, of the link between bat oil and earbugs is largely lost. The more recent understanding falls closely into line with the style of medicines, usually flasks of oil with animal bones, which are now for sale by vendors from the Terai and India who congregate around Ratna Park and the bus park in central Kathmandu. Such people are collectively called marsya (“flatlanders”), a derogatory term, and are thought to lack the sophisticated culture of the Newars. Baldness and earbugs are both recognized as illnesses in the textual sources, but only baldness now survives as an illness that can be treated with bat oil. Thus the link between a socially embedded practice of diagnosing and teaching about earbug-caused headaches and the eco-socially embedded practice of using house-bats to cure them has been broken, and both practices are disappearing as a result.

Paradigms and Ecosystems

Why, then, do we have a practice, apparently unique to the Kathmandu Valley, whereby a traditional type of medicine – an oil infusion – was prepared with a non-standard ingredient by non-specialists? This was a well defined and old medical practice, transmitted and practiced without the professional medical castes, and unsupported by the traditional textual canons. The indigenous etiology and cure – a millipede gnawing away inside the ear, expelled by eardrops – does have considerable support in the Sanskrit sources. There is no textual warrant, however, for the use of small bats as an ingredient in preparing these oils.

From the evidence of small bats in Britain, it is clear that they make use of human dwellings, and indeed, new architectural styles, in their search for roosts. Certain features of 20th century house design – notably, the soffet board – have become predictable roosts for pipstrelles. It does not take too great a leap to imagine that the development of traditional Newar architecture with its tall rowhouses and spacious attics and eaves would have presented a host of new roosts for Kathmandu Valley bats. Indeed, such an abundance of roosting sites coupled with the rise in flying insect populations associated with rice terraces and urban waste would have offered a well-furnished ecological niche for those species whose range included the Valley. No wonder, then, that microchiropterans quickly became a feature of recognized household fauna and therefore a resource for traditional medical practices. We can date this development to the Licchavi period of Newar history, no more recent than 1300 years ago.

I cannot here pass beyond speculations as to why oil tinctured with a small bat was identified as the cure for an illness putatively caused by a millipede, nor have I carried out tests on bat oil as a potential remedy for migraines. The existing uses for bats in the older medical literature are extremely limited. Nowhere do the canonical medical texts specify smaller bats, and indeed in places we can be sure it is larger bats that are mentioned. Developments in the ecosystem within which Newar society evolved did not affect the content of most of the Sanskrit texts that were normative for Newar society, though it clearly did condition the use of those texts 16 . Obeyesekere (1992, p. 167) records a Vaidya who deleted an ingredient from an Ayurvedic prescription because it was unavailable in Sri Lanka, but added other legitimate Ayurvedic substances to rebalance the prescription; adding a new ingredient drawn from the Sri Lankan flora was not the right response. Given the enormous normative force of the canonical tradition for traditional medical practitioners in the Ayurvedic tradition, the only surprising element in all this is that Newar traditional medical professionals appeared not to be denying knowledge of bat oil, but actually to be ignorant of it.

Conservation Issues

Local informants are very much agreed that there is a bat conservation crisis: habitat loss is the reason there are no more bats to be used as medicine, and the habitat informants repeatedly identify as under threat is both the woodland around the Kathmandu Valley and the traditional houses which provided ample space for bat roosts. While this reflects a characteristically Newar horror at the suburbanization and overdevelopment of their homeland, it may or may not be an accurate account of the causes for bat population decline. Caves around the Valley are also important sites for bats, and at least one of these has become the subject of tourist attention. Inasmuch as I can reconstruct patterns of exploitation from the oral accounts I collected, it seems as though the use of bats as medicine was largely opportunistic and did not create a demand that sustained a bat collecting industry of any significant size. This is in sharp contrast to the trade in large bats elsewhere in South and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and Melanesia, where bats are taken both for their medicinal value and as bushmeat, and where in the worst cases there are socioeconomic networks of bat collectors and bat buyers. Although bat conservationists have repeatedly noticed this as a significant stress on fruit bat and flying fox populations, so far as I know there have been no applied ethnobiological studies undertaken.

In practical terms, this is an almost perverse instance of an ethnomedical practice that, if it had been the subject of a field inquiry as part of a conservation program, would have been invisible to a top-down investigation. The use of small bats as a medicine developed entirely outside the domain of professional practitioners of traditional medicine; moreover, resorting to commercial collectors in an attempt to understand the practice would have yielded inaccurate information both as to the indigenous categories involved and the species exploited.