The katto Ceremonies of King Birendra and King Dipendra The 75 year old Brahman priest Durga Prasad Sapkota ate the katto of the late King Birendra on the 11th day of mourning, Monday June 11 at Kalmochan Ghat. The elephant was decorated traditionally, and the Brahman was dressed as the king wearing a gold-embroidered Nepali dress. The priest wore a replica of the crown; he used clothes, shoes and other ornaments that belonged to the deceased king. He was sitting in a tented room which was furnished with offerings from the Royal Palace, such as a sofa, bed, and study table together with more personal belongings of the king including his briefcase and walking stick. On Thursday June 14th, the katto ceremony of king Dipendra was held at Kalmochan Ghat. Kalmochan Ghat is located by the Bagmati River where it forms the border between the former kingdoms of Kathmandu and Patan, and when the katto-Brahman crossed the river, according to the tradition, the priest is not allowed to return again, and he is so highly polluted that the people would not even “see his face” again. When there were only petty kingdoms in Nepal, Kalmochan Ghat and the Bagmati River represented the country’s border, and the kattopriest was expelled from the kingdom by the symbolic crossing of the river. Nowadays the priest is expelled from the Kathmandu valley. Durga Prasad Sapkota felt that he was forced to do the katto ritual, and afterwards he felt cheated. He demanded a house and he was promised gifts worth 10,000 dollars, but he received only some 300 dollars, and he now aims to sell the king’s clothes and personal belongings he received for 10,000 dollars. He is living in his old house at Pahupatinath because he has no other options. According to him, the king’s flesh in the katto ritual is a relict myth from the past. He cooked the meal himself which consisted only of rice, vegetables and goat meat. Some people living in the vicinity of Pashupatinath believed, however, that the kattopriest ate the king’s flesh, and in particular the part of the brain where the “third” eye is located. The priests who cremated King Birendra said that some security guards collected small parts of the ashes from the king which were put into the katto-priest’s meals without Sapkota’s knowledge. It was only symbolically, they believed, but it was a part of the meal, because only goat meat would not have affected and polluted the priest in such a negative way. Just after the ritual Sapkota could not walk openly in the streets, and especially not in the Pashupatinath area. People treated him as excluded from the community, and he sat, predominantly, in the backyard of his house, feeling guilty and impure after the katto ritual. The other temple and funeral priests referred to Durga Prasad Sapkota as “the priest who became a pode”, meaning a “toilet-cleaner”. Sapkota, on the other hand, emphasised that he was a Brahman, although he acknowledged that he was impure and a katto-Brahman. His wife also stressed that both of them were Brahmans, and they categorically refused to hear anything about low-caste status; Sapkota perceived himself as both a Brahman and a priest. According to Sapkota, he was not treated as, and he had definitively not become, a low-caste person or outcaste (despite his impure condition after the katto-ritual, two years later he had worked as a priest on several occasions). Seen from the position of wider society, the priest eating katto will attain the king’s sins. But the impurity of the priest does in no way correlate to the sins committed by the king, who is a living Vishnu, the supreme Godhead. Even low-castes detest the priest and expel him out of the country stressing that the priest is below the lowest in regards of purity. Low castes may eat cows – another type of Vishnu’s flesh – but despite their impurity they are purer than the katto-priest. Everyone, except his family, see the katto-priest as the most polluted man in the nation. It does not seem plausible, however, that the king has been the most sinful person in his kingdom. The pollution acquired through katto must represent other sins than the king’s sins. This, it is argued, is a part of cosmogony – the re-creation of society and cosmos, and has to be seen in light of Hocart’s (1950) interpretation of caste and caste theories in general. .