Robert Levy's _Mesocosm_

[Mittal Sushil]

Introducing

Robert Levy's _Mesocosm: Hinduism and the Organization of a Traditional
Newar City in Nepal_ (University of California Press, 1990). _Mesocosm_ is
a study of civic religion. It considers Hinduism as a system for
contributing to communal order in a certain kind of city as exemplified by
a city in Nepal's Kathmandu Valley. It examines the way that selections
from South Asian ideas about time, space, social order, priest and king,
pantheon, festival and "Vedic" and "Tantric" Hinduism are used to generate
an integrative urban system of sacralized conception and action which has
a dialectical relationship to other kinds of urban patterns and forces. 


(P.S. A special issue of the _International Journal of Hindu Studies_,
planned for December 1997, will assess this book. The contributors to this
special issue are:  Paul Cartledge, David Gellner, Michael Jameson, Todd 
Lewis, Steven Parish, Declan Quigley, Gerard Toffin, and Michael Witzel).