Shiva Parvati Temple/Shiva-Parvati(Navadurga)Temple Kathmandu,Nepal
The Shiva-Parvati temple is located on the southwest side of the Basantapur Darbar Square in the heart of Kathmandu. It is a rectangular, two-story building, facing south, standing directly northeast of the much larger Maju Dega temple of 1690, which was destroyed in the 2015 earthquake (and is now under reconstruction). Unlike most temples in Nepal, it is built with only one roof. According to Ronald Bernier, this is typical of shrines intended as votive offerings.
It was built by Bahadur Shah, son of Nepal’s first king Prithvi Narayan Shah.
The temple was constructed at the tail end of the 18th-century during Ran Bahadur Shah’s rule (r. 1777-99). Michael Hutt notes that it “blends harmoniously with the Malla-period architecture that surrounds it.” (Hutt, p. 88). Hutt opines that it was likely built by Bahadur Shah, the youngest son of Prithvi Narayan, the founder of the Kingdom of Nepal (Bahadur is not to be confused with Ran Bahadur, who was Prithvi’s grandson by a different brother).
The monument is widely characterized as the Shiva-Parvati temple as the upper level features a pair of mannequins of Shiva and Parvati, seemingly gazing south across the square. However, the temple’s formal name is the Navadurga, referring to nine manifestations of the goddess Durga whose likenesses are housed on the ground-level floor. These goddesses are not visible to the public. Although the front facade contains five doors, only the central door is operational and is usually kept locked. As with most Nepali temples, the interior is restricted to priests and temple custodians.
The platform on which the temple stands was originally a dabali platform, a stage used for masked dances and performances. According to Hutt, it once housed an inscription on the east side dating from 1641, the final year of Lakshmi Narasingh’s reign (r. 1620-41), recording the oldest known Nepali text discovered in the valley. Hutt notes that the inscription has since been removed to whereabouts unknown. However, Hutt may be misconstruing the location with a nearby Shiva temple in Makhan (a neighborhood immediately to the north), as T. W. Clark, an expert on inscriptions, notes in a 1957 article that the tablet dating from 1641 was housed inside the inner shrine of that temple. Unfortunately, Clark does not definitively identify the temple he refers to, so the tablet’s whereabouts remain uncertain.
The earthquake of April 2015 did not substantially damage the temple, but the brick superstructure is crisscrossed with a series of worrisome cracks. As a temporary measure, the four facades are reinforced by scaffolding to prevent further movement of the brickwork. A modern fence surrounds the site to keep the area clear in case of any falling masonry.
