Making Rain under the Mallas

Abstract

Records of rainmaking performances offer potentially useful data for climate history. In the Kathmandu Valley, rice cultivation is a central feature of socioreligious life, and references to rainmaking performances and the droughts that accompanied them are found in Buddhist writings going back to the Malla period and the late fourteenth century. One manuscript, now kept in Cambridge University Library, documents four previously unstudied rainmaking rituals taking place between 1551 and 1628. These records provide historical climate information that cannot be obtained from other sources.