Nepal - Emotion and Devotion, Lingering and Longing in Some Nepali Songs

Society for Ethnomusicology
Emotion and Devotion, Lingering and Longing in Some Nepali Songs

Author(s): David Henderson
Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 40, No. 3, Special Issue: Music and Religion (Autumn, 1996), pp.
440-468
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/852471
Accessed: 19/11/2009 00:47
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=illinois.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Society for Ethnomusicology and University of Illinois Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to Ethnomusicology.
http://www.jstor.org
VOL.40, NO. 3 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY FALL1996
Emotion and Devotion, Lingering

and Longing in Some Nepali Songs
DAVID HENDERSON UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
Two interwoven threads hold this article together.' Put loosely, one is
theoretically motivated and the other is practically entwined. In the
theoretical strand, I look to recent work on embodiment for help in rework-
ing overly cognitive, symbolic, and functional descriptions of social and mu-
sical practices. Looped across my theoretical strand is some work designed
to evoke a sense of how some Kathmandu valley musicians express emo-
tion and devotion-especially in bhajan ("praise" or "adoration") songs,
but also in songs about love and longing. These threads can be torn apart,
but they wrap around each other throughout the text in order to pull to-
gether some senses of how songs embody emotion and how singing makes
experiences of sadness and pleasure reverberate with memories of fond-
ness and loss. By traveling through some work on South Asian devotional
song practices and stopping periodically at my own fieldwork in
Kathmandu, Nepal, in 1987, 1994, and 1995, I investigate in this work the
prospects for a richer language to describe the ways that sound works to
affect its users.
Emotion and devotion take similar forms and express themselves through
each other's words in bhajan. But this is certainly not always true: devotion
can also detach itself from feelings and send itself out to experience a divine
form which is radically beyond emotional content. I draw from everyday
Nepali expressions here: emotion and devotion seem to do the work them-
selves, affecting those who experience and talk about them while sometimes
displacing the individual's responsibility for manipulating sentiment. And as
Nepali words for emotions stick to the senses, and words for devotion may
grasp at a divine beyond the senses, in song lyrics composers of Nepali
bhajans and love songs also confuse the location of affect by their intention-
ally ambiguous references both to the object of their desire and to their own
? 1996 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
440
Emotion and Devotion 441
subjectivity.Poets and musicians thus give listeners a space to make their own
connections, a space to fill ambiguous pronouns and oblique references with
personal experiences of love and longing. AnandaCoomaraswamy, referring
to traditionalIndian art music, suggests that music is not only for well-trained
artists: "the listener must respond with an art of his own" (1991:103). Like-
wise, listeners in Nepal must close hermeneutic circles opened by singers
with artistic remembrances, making songs meaningful in the confluence of
ambiguous words and resonant memory. And this is where embodiment-
vague as the term may appear if left as a theoretical seed-takes root in what
I know about songs through singing, listening, and talking about songs in
Nepal, giving shape to a sense that words are not just artifacts-song texts,
transcriptions,or translations.In practice, words provoke a remembered and
remembering body to hear them through the senses as well as in the brain:
words are interlopers between singer and listener, ethnomusicologist and
informant,Americanand Nepali, that engage uniquely with the minds, hearts,
and lives they enter.
In examining the intersection of or distinction between emotion and
devotion, then, I also want to draw in some of the discursive features of
Nepali language use and link bodily experience with Nepali styles of ver-
bal expression. This approach to bodily knowledge skews perceptibly from
the methodology of anthropologist Michael Jackson, who considers "the
intellectualist tendency to regard body praxis as secondary to verbal prac-
tice" a problem in embodying the body (1983:328). He outlines "aphenom-
enological approach to body praxis which avoids naive subjectivism by
showing how human experience is grounded in bodily movement within
a social and material environment, and examining at the level of event the
interplay between habitual patterns of body use and conventional ideas
about the world" (ibid.:330). Instead, I examine emotional experience as
it is verbally depicted and musically conveyed at the level of text and event,
and try to show how habitual patterns of feeling emotion and devotion
connect with conventional ways of speaking and singing about the world.
I speak from "a view of emotion as discursive practice," an emphasis that
"keeps us fixed on the fact that emotions are phenomena that can be seen
in social interaction, much of which is verbal" (Abu-Lughod and Lutz
1990:10-11). My sense of how some emotions in the Nepali language can
actively and publicly fix themselves on the individual diverts my argument
from a path which would lead through the intellectual clarity of language
and mind deep into a phenomenological obscurity of emotion and body; I
instead find myself meandering along a trailwhere mind and body, language
and emotion, have taken root symbiotically on social ground. Similarly,
individual experiences cannot be separated from cultural expressions:
"emotion talk must be interpreted as in and about social life rather than
442 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1996
as veridically referential to some internal state" (ibid.: 11). Lila Abu-Lughod

and Catherine Lutz's work in bringing emotion out of the private realm of
personal (and therefore ethnographically suspect) feelings accords with
Nepali talk and song about emotion. Bhajan singers in Nepal also explic-
itly work to externalize emotion and devotion by providing a generic me-
dium, which is also idiosyncratically affective, for collectively (but not
uniformly) experiencing the divine.
Bhajan, in both Hindu and Buddhist gatherings in the Kathmandu val-
ley in Nepal, is both a genre and a performance event. As a genre, it con-
tains clearly anticipated norms of expression that allow individual songs to
be classified, labelled, and performed or sold as bhajans. They are songs
to gods, songs about gods. As a performance event, bhajan can be a loosely
organized sequence in which at certain points performers can incorporate
a wide variety of song styles, from traditional group hymn-singing with
harmonium and tabala accompaniment to rock music cassette-playing with
guitar and bass accompaniment. But bbajan performances are not always
open-ended nor tacitly traditional. There are also, for example, numerous
Ramayana bhajan groups in and beyond the Kathmandu valley, many of
which perform a fixed (printed) sequence of songs. And in recent years,
the Gyanmald bhajan group centered around the Buddhist stupa of
Swayambu, just west of Kathmandu, has been active in creating a new tradi-
tion by composing, singing, and recording bhajans in the Newari language.2
In this article I give most of my attention to the genre of bhajan. The
two bhajans I transcribe and discuss below were composed by Bhaktaraj
Acharya, a singer who studied with the versatile singer and former music
director of Radio Nepal, Krishna Narayan Shrestha; the style of Acharya's
compositions draws upon modern practices developed by numerous art-
ists since the advent of Radio Nepal in 1950. Briefly, songs with tabald
accompaniment are lightly orchestrated with instruments associated with
both Western music ("paschimi git")-guitars, mandolins, violins, and clari-
nets-and traditional Nepali music-mddals and other drums, bdsuris and
other flutes (see Grandin 1995a, Gurung 1992:40-46). These two pieces
are set against an example of Nepali sastriya sangit (Nepalese "classical
music": the English bears the same undertone of specialist aesthetic behav-
ior implied by sastriya-scripturally sanctioned, derived from the sastras
of the ancient South Asian subcontinent). Besides working closely on emo-
tion and devotion in these songs, I am listening from afar for some large,
shifting patterns in poetic and musical expression particularly in bbajan
music, which some Nepalis consider a dying practice (while others imag-
ine it to be an ongoing, unchanging aspect of Nepali culture). Telesthetically
and microphonically, I try to close the gap between song text and social
life by partially transcribing my senses of what it means to perform or ex-
perience bhajan in Kathmandu.
My senses need a more detailed map, though. Engaging with recent

work on embodiment as a descriptive and analytic paradigm that (partly
influenced by phenomenology) goes beyond a necessarily reductive belief
in logical, rational agency, I develop a notion of "embodiment" that con-
nects directly to Nepali expressions and experiences of identity. Embodi-
ment, briefly, helps me to think about how a person imagines, creates, and
reproduces something that might loosely be called the self. It implies that
identity is never a fixed entity, but must be organized consistently around
social and historical circumstances. It is a way of refiguring the self, a means
of adjusting or tuning the body (including the mind) to its surroundings.
Here I should stop for a moment: the "self' is perhaps a trap I have laid
for myself on my way through emotion and devotion. Sometimes the ob-
jects of psychological or philosophically-oriented studies, selves are not
necessarily the discrete independent shapes they assume in Cartesian writ-
ings, working in isolation from culture and society at large. While it is
difficult not to elide phrases in which the self appears as an autonomous
philosophical entity with phrases where the self is fashioned around specific
geographies (see Trawick 1990, 1991), I need to be reminded of what I will
say in some detail later: Nepalis have different ways of being themselves.
George Marcus insisted that "the self be discussed in terms of the specifics
of the genres in which it is pragmatically developed and apprehended in
the research process" (1991:10); taking another step in this direction, the
self becomes the embodied meeting ground of variegated social practices
and cultural forms, all of which are personally and carefully produced.
Devotional song helps me to explain such a dialectical self (cf.
Crapanzano in Marcus, et. al. 1991:32) in Nepal because participants come
with the aim of affecting a transformation (temporary or permanent) of the
self-in bhajan, using the self as the vehicle to explore the divine. The ev-
eryday self becomes the devotionally enamored self, which in turn becomes
a part of the everyday self. This blurring of mundane and spiritual bound-
aries-boundaries which are rarely marked in many everyday lives in
Nepal-suggests that embodiment as a motivated and motivating practice
is never concluded or closed off: each ritual and musical moment in which
selves become newly embodied in turn opens up further opportunities for
remaking the self-and begins to answer my questions about how bhajan
music works.
Trekking through South Asian Devotional Song Practices
Thoroughly tracing the geographic flow of similarities and differences

in musical expressions of devotion in South Asia and the South Asian
diaspora would produce a map of overlapping terminologies and idiosyn-
cratic uses of terms that would obscure the intent that remains behind a
name: what might be called a kirtan in one place may sound like what a
singer somewhere else calls a bhajan, and the difference in name is not
enough to overcome some similarities of practice. My erratic path through
other writers' words on South Asian devotional song practices moves-with
several diversions-from Banaras in Uttar Pradesh, India (Slawek 1986), to
Gujarati-speaking Western India (Thompson 1987), back to Uttar Pradesh
(Tewari 1974), then just north of Banaras to a few Bhojpuri-speaking vil-
lages (Henry 1988); after pausing in the Kathmandu valley in Nepal (Grandin
1989), the last stopping point is an Indian immigrant community in Fiji
(Brenneis 1985, 1987, 1991).
Stephen Slawek, in his work in Banaras on kirtan devotional song (from
a Sanskrit root meaning to "name," "recite," or "glorify," explores the ef-
fect of an urban context on traditional practices (1986:vi) and finds that
"the veil of tradition conceals the truly eclectic nature of the process by
which the tradition thrives" (ibid.:108). If, "whether folk or classical, In-
dian music is highly traditional" (Deva 1980:79), it is because singers,
musicians, and listeners continually imagine and establish linear relations
with a past through their practices. This is to say that claims to tradition
are not empty associations with an undifferentiated and unchanging past,
but are references fraught with the peculiar histories of the individuals who
make use of the past, "attributing meaning to the present through making
reference to the past" (Handler and Linnekin 1984:287). Slawek historically
grounds the manifold meanings of North Indian devotional song practices
in bhakti, or "intense emotional devotionalism" (1986:37), and the medi-
eval bhakti movement in India. Bhakti ("piety," [shared] "devotion," "par-
ticipation:" from the same Sanskrit root as bhajan [ibid.:68; see also Tewari
1974:120]) contrasts with a scriptural Hinduism: the former allows for a
kind of moksa ("release" from the cycle of rebirth) through intense and
total participation in ritual worship, while the latter demands the piecemeal
achievement of moksa through actions in accordance with one's jat
("kind," "type": not necessarily "caste," as it is often translated), an achieve-
ment which requires the patience of many lives.
Slawek also describes the difficulty in examining bhajan and kirtan
songs as translocal genres, since often the terms are interchangeable, fre-
quently not (ibid.:70-71). The presumed transparency of genre categories is
especially problematic in South Asia because of the diversity of linguistic
practices, which sometimes leads to wild and wide-ranging correspondences
based on a name that have no substantiation in social practice. Without dis-
counting memorable differences, I consider bhajan, kirtan, and bhajan
kavvali (the last from Brenneis 1985, 1987, 1991) to be relatively similar
manifestations of song traditions emanating from a large region encompass-
ing North India (particularly areas dominated by Hinduism) and Nepal.
Gordon Thompson finds music in Gujarati-speaking Western India to

be an individually created form or medium for the reinvention and reinforce-
ment of social values (1987:4). Noticing how Muslim, Jain, Parsi, and Hindu
values are embedded in class and regional interests (ibid.:81-125), Thomp-
son identifies bhajan singing especially with middle-class bourgeoisie and
Hindu gribastha ("householder": the second of the four stages of a devout
Hindu's life) aims. Moksa, release, is the result of judicious mixtures of three
basic elements of Hindu social life-dharma ("duty"), artha ("purpose" or
[use] "value"), and kama ([intellectually sensual] "pleasure")-and it is
particularly the importance of kama for achieving temporary states of
"reflective bliss" (ibid.:84-86) that makes it valuable for middle-class house-
holders otherwise preoccupied with worldly interests. And, partly, this rings
true with my experiences in the Kathmandu valley as well: artha, in Nepali,
can also, like the word matlab, mean "meaning," and participants some-
times admit that they don't really understand the meaning of texts (often
attributed to medieval bhakti poets near the end of each poem) that they
sing, singing more for the embodied pleasures of being and acting together.
Frequently in Nepal, bhajans are sung by men, and the unofficial members
of a group call themselves daju-bhai, older and younger brothers, suggest-
ing a particular way of being together that works, like bhakti, to level dif-
ferences in age, caste, and wealth. "Through bhakti one can achieve
moksa" (ibid.:92); through bhajan one can temporarily experience an
egalitarian divine.
For Laxmi Tewari, bhajan and kirtan are devotional forms of folk
music, which in turn "reveals the inner self of the people, portrayed in
pristine beauty" (1974:211). Depicting the seasonal cycles of a life intimately
grounded in the soil, Tewari places devotional songs-here, also, the ritual
province of men (ibid.:24)-within this cycle, important in both daily life
and in festivals, especially duringjanmastami, the celebration of Krishna's
birth (ibid.:81-120). Tewari fears that folk music will "be swallowed by the
growing hunger of modernization" (ibid.: 16), "lost to the winds of modern-
ization" (ibid.:210). Certainly, if Tewari had been with me at the Himalayan
Guest House in Kathmandu the day I returned in May, 1994, he would have
found his fears well-grounded in Nepal, also: when I told one teenager
working there that I was studying bhajan and classical music, he noted
politely that such things were only found in books and in the practices of
old men. A devout "international" and Nepali popular music aficionado, he
has already relegated bhajan to a past lost amidst modern sounds. And
while ethnomusicologists of late may presume that "pristine beauty" is a
thing of the past, and that attempts to find it in current practices reify the
differences between those first-worlders who change and those third- and
fourth-worlders who remain the same, questions about authenticity and the
pleasure of untouched music often do remain active locally. I want to keep

open the question of how Nepali musicians make explicit connections
between change and identity, how changes in song style suggest changes
wrought on the self. That is, I want to keep alive the sense that music does
in fact reveal something about "the inner self'-or, rather, "inner selves"-
selves which in bhajan music are also outer selves (inscribed on the body
of the song) and non-selves (expressed in depersonalized participation).
A Musical Chautaro ("Resting Place")

The bhajan whose text I have transcribed below is from a recording
(Acharya n.d.) called "Samarpan," a Nepali and Hindi word meaning "dedi-
cation" or "handingover." I bought this cassette in 1987 in Kathmandu,and
saw a copy of it still available in 1994.
bhaga vn iivana nau Bhagavan*, life (is)

a boat;
rT3 TRT
cif
FT au para lagau come, arrange (a way) to
the other side.
jaba jaba safkata parla Whenever a crisis may
fall (upon me)
ai timi chalau come and get (this boat)
moving.
[ icrT ...] Ibhagavan.../ IBhagavan...
mFff4 q ft rt t gyana bina bho andho Without wisdom (I)

became blind.
TPTrcfzrT
TfdK1f vijayi pamar natuva a sense-driven foolish
buffoon.
yo bhava sagar bichama In the middle of this
ocean of existence
crd lqqt siqT lamo pathako batuva (I am) a traveller with a
long way (to go).
) if4i
-4l4 - t W-ET jotirmaya gyanako batti The bedazzling light of
knowledge-
bali bato dekhau illuminate it and show
(me) the path.
[Kt w...i1Tf ...31 Ijaba iaba...bhagavan... [whenever... bhagavan...}
0I2 ;
f,4tI i T TfU timi din dayalu dlni You are meek, merciful.
generous:
q- Fff~ r <,qT'& papi chhu ma bhikhari I am sinful.
a beggar.
ati din hin chhu ma Confused. I am in dire
need:
leu garana malai take me into (your)
shelter.
I{ fid tt-rN?TT1 ma viSayi bandhanama I am in a prison of (my
chhu own) senses;
' ai timi phukau come and set (me)
fr:nt -qr,T-j
free.
[;5qK GM....T ... lfaba

I jaba...bhagavan...l [whenever...bhagavan...
(Bhaktaraj Acharya [Samarpan: Nepali bhajans])
*Bhagavan is an encompassing word for "god," its usual translation. An "undifferentiated

godhead" (Gellner 1992:73), bhagavan is an unspecific and common name for addressing
and referring to a divine presence.
Bhava sdgar, in the second section, is an idiomatic poetic expression in

Nepali and Hindi meaning "ocean of existence." In this song, the sensual,
material world becomes this ocean upon which the boat ("nau") of life
floats. Life is in constant danger of sinking into this ocean, and there are
many obstacles ("sankata"); nonetheless, the individual manages to stay
afloat through devotion. Devotion itself is often expressed through terms
of emotion and dharma ("duty"): bhagavan is always referred to as timi,
the familiar (medium honorific) form of "you," and is the source of mercy
("dayalu"), giving shelter ("sarana") to a beggar ("bhikari"). Sense-oriented
("visayi") things confuse and imprison the self, yet it is through the
senses-the path illuminated and shown by bhagavan-that the self can
touch the divine.
Embodiment and the Path to the Divine
Edward 0. Henry, just prior to his discussion of men's devotional songs

in Bhojpuri-speaking India (1988:118-43), starts to get at just what it is
about music that makes it so compelling, so experientially distinct from
other forms of expression. Extrapolating from Radcliffe-Brown's discussion
of dance in The Andaman Islanders (1964), Henry writes that "singing
gives pleasure to the individual in several ways" (1988:117). Through play
and exertion, individuals receive pleasure sensually-in the body. Through
exhibition and coordination, individuals receive pleasure socially, from their
ability to participate competently in the activities of the group-on and
beyond the body. Drawing on a structural-functional map of culture, Henry
traces a common distinction between the individual (the center of experi-
ence and thought) and society (the source of production and meaning). But
this distinction cuts at precisely that line, inscribed on a theoretical divide
between psychology and anthropology, where music becomes compelling:
it is the apparition that one's personal experience is resonating so strongly
with the experiences of others, the sense that one's own sensations are not
only reflections but also vibrating amplifications of a social experience, that
ultimately gives pleasure. Henry indeed makes a similar point when he
suggests that the energy that singers have drawn from participation is
intensified by the "collective states of emotion" they have summoned up
within themselves (ibid.: 117). However, such performed consonances will
still be noisy with dissonances of individual experience and emotion, and
more work on how the senses make themselves felt socially, how society
makes itself felt sensually, should help splice together the tracks of culture
and self. The "regulated tumult" (Durkheim 1973:179) of the harikirtans
that Henry discusses moves Bhojpuri-speaking villagers (if they're anything
like Kathmandu denizens) toward a collective-yet variegated-experience
of the divine through a clangorous auspiciousness: a massive sound that
cannot be denied or ignored, insisting that it be experienced simulta-
neously-but not identically-by all.3
Embodiment-a practical theory of how theory is practiced-resituates
the language of experience by erasing the line between the individual and
society. It finds the resonances of the social within individuals, who con-
sistently incorporate fragments-excerpts of identity-gathered from other
individuals rather than from an anonymous culture lurking in the shadows.
While compounding the meaning of the social, the individual embodies the
self, which is the miming coordinator of person attached mimetically to
other selves. Embodiment moves beyond a purely functional approach to
the relations between music, emotion, and affect: there is no longer a line
between the individual and society, but an infinite series of shifting points
where the individual is in society at the same time that society is in the
individual. The distinction that Henry makes between personal pleasure and
social gratification becomes lost, missing in action; moving too quickly to
settle in one place, action and experience become fixed only in the paths
of memory, habitus, and body hexis (after Bourdieu 1977).
Recent anthropologies of embodiment and memory explicitly or dis-
creetly work to dissolve not only a distinction between the individual and
society, but also a boundary between the mind and the body. These efforts
refuse to believe in a fictional (reputedly objective) world inhabited by
purely rational agents making logical choices on their way across the pla-
teau of culture, and instead imagine a place where people move through a
terrain where memory and the senses mingle, making thoughtful and
feelingful decisions that can be at once effective and affective. E. P. Thomp-
son, arguing against Althusserian structuralism-which makes a similar
distinction between society and individuals by positing a split between "the
real" and knowledge of the real-imagines a like-minded world: "the real
is not 'out there' and thought within the quiet lecture-theatre of our heads,
'inside here.' Thought and being inhabit a single space, which space is
ourselves. Even as we think we also hunger and hate, we sicken or we love,
and consciousness is intermixed with being; even as we contemplate the
'real' we experience our own palpable reality" (1978:18). Similarly, the

reality of music is wrapped up in thinking about and remembering music:
music is affective because songs contain sensate memories of other songs,
other selves, other moments. And if music lives in and resounds through
memory, it must live countless unique lives that overlap in myriad dimen-
sions, and must resound time and again in performance. In itself (in remem-
bered music) and as itself (through performance) a self can only be collec-
tive-as we reproduce what we know of the world in our own bodies. A
self segmented by any presumed autonomy of the individual may have the
right of way on some discursive paths, but is never the sole owner of the
ground beneath a path.
A danger in theoretically situating culture and the self in the body,
though, is that the senses risk being cannibalized, extracted from the flesh
as sensual alternatives to what are perceived to be visually biased theories
of knowledge prevalent in the social sciences. Several writers have worked
to privilege the senses by setting theories of embodiment up against dis-
course-centered approaches-but by assuming discourse to be associated
with a kind of visual rationality that might be produced by turning talk into
texts. In his work on Body and Emotion in the Nepal Himalayas, Robert
Desjarlais points out "a tendency in contemporary anthropology to privi-
lege the linguistic, the discursive, and the cognized over the visceral and
the tacit. Largelyneglected has been the realm of the senses, the sufferings
of the flesh. We have lost an understanding of the body as an experienc-
ing, soulful being, before and beyond its capacity to house icon and meta-
phor. A less cognate, more sensate treatment now seems needed"
(1992:29). While a move from cognition to soul may come as a relief to
ethnomusicologists in particular, denying "the discursive" also objectifies
(and mystifies) the body, carving it up into discursive (visual or vocal) and
experiential (sensual) realms. Cut off from what it has to say, the soulful
body becomes a mystery of the flesh.
Like Desjarlais, Paul Stoller argues that "embodiment is not primarily
textual" (1994:636), working instead from a notion of the sensitive body,
"a major repository of cultural memories" (ibid.:638). One kind of cultural
memory which Stoller is especially interested in is habit (cf. Bourdieu's
"habitus"[1977]), which resides explicitly in bodily motions: "Habitis some-
thing that does not lend itself to the visual bias that is central to discursive
analysis. In their insistence on the discursive, scholars transform the
figurative into language and text-into discourse. And yet our memories
are never purely personal, purely cognitive, or purely textual" (Stoller
1994:638). However, discourse is not always textual, not necessarily visu-
ally biased.tHaving listened to and engaged in endless hours of gossip and
cross-talk about music and politics while drinking sweet tea in the rain next
to a Kathmandu road bearing a seemingly endless supply of late-evening

diesel trucks, I am convinced that some local discourses embody the senses
just as much as cultural meanings are embodied in individual practices.
While Desjarlais and Stoller both offer useful critiques and alternatives to a
visual bias in the highly textual genres of anthropology, I want to leave some
perceptual space open for local discursive styles. Certainly, "modalities of
perception inform theories of knowledge" (Young 1994:7), and a sense of
how we see the world may deleteriously impact what we think and write
about how others build theirs; but theories can hardly remain fixed to
specific modalities, and instead must locate and relocate themselves in the
cross-modal shifts between memory, the senses, and experience. Likewise,
local theories of knowledge (and of the self) are embodied not only by
Kathmandu bhajan singers, but also in Nepali songs, song texts, and talk
about songs.
Finding sources in both Bourdieu's embodiment through practice (1977,
1984) and Merleau-Ponty's embodiment through perception (1962), Thomas
Csordas postulates that "the body is not an object to be studied in relation
to culture, but is to be considered as the subject of culture, or in other words
as the existential ground of culture" (1990:5-7). Using Merleau-Ponty's no-
tion of the preobjective-"not positing a precultural, but a preabstract"
(ibid.: 10)-Csordas works at exploring precisely that moment when experi-
ence gets collected and abstracted into culture through the naming or word-
ing of the experience. He links this work paradoxically to what he calls
Bourdieu's "dialectical structuralism," which places the individual already
(dialectically) within the social and examines how practice establishes social
(and thus individual) facts (ibid.: 10-12). Centering on the body-the produc-
tive site of experience, culture, and social facts-Csordas hopes to avoid a
subject-object split by putting subjects in touch with other subjects and re-
fusing to objectify them-move them out of touch-by naming them sub-
jects. Culture is subjective because it is open to individual experience; it is
social because those experiences are never produced in isolation.
Making a case for "'contaminated' cultural critique," Kathleen Stewart
argues against the kind of intersubjectivity (cf. Schutz 1967 [1932]) that
Csordas uses to get around objectivity: "'contaminated' deconstructive theo-
rizing disrupts the distance between observing subject and the 'real' world
of objects; it mixes with its object and includes itself as an object of its own
analysis" (1991:395). Culture is not an object sunk in the subjective depths
of individuals waiting for an ethnographer to come and fish it out; it is an
object made between ethnographers and their objects: it is crucial to rec-
ognize "not only that discourse is socially constructed but also that the social
is discursively constructed" (ibid.:398), and Stewart urges that in order to
make any sense of ethnographic work, it is necessary to recognize how
ethnographers' discourses are entangled with their objects (ibid.:400).
"Speakingfrom within the object spoken of' (ibid. :411), the ethnographer
tells tales that keep objects on the move and in and out of touch with each
other. Moving, touching: Stewart refuses to back off from the discursive
stuff that fixes attention and holds it for a moment before moving on.
Meanwhile, for Csordas, embodiment is also, as I noted earlier, a way
to bypass the duality between mind and body: "thought in the strict sense
is itself embodied" and culture is "embodied from the outset," so the body
cannot be separated from the mind because "our bodies are not objects to
us" (1990:36-37). Csordas's two blends-mind-body and subject-object-
put some juice back into the mix of individual and social, but he is occu-
pied with rewriting the subjects that he works with (Charismatic Christian
healers and their patients) rather than interrogating his own position (as a
phenomenologically oriented psychological anthropologist). Stewart, on the
other hand, is most concerned with opening up the dialogue implicit in
fieldwork, giving it some room in the construction of the ethnographic text.
Csordas's work gets him out into a place where Charismatic Christians
construct culture, idiosyncratically yet collaboratively, around their prac-
tices; Stewart's work takes her into the hills of West Virginia where folks
are always making something out of what's at hand-including, for instance,
an ethnographer. Starting from different perspectives on ethnography,
Csordas works out to get in; Stewart works in to get out.
Chasing Objects through Fields of Practice

Both of these styles of movement intersect with my questions of how
music works, how sounds resound: certainly my thoughts on how emotion
expresses itself in and through song come both from what I have made of
performances and talk about songs and from what specifically has come out
of my own presence among friends and teachers in Nepal-vocal instruc-
tion, talk about musical differences, multi-lingualinterpretations of "double
meanings" and metaphors, songs provoked by offhand remarks. But I'm not
quite ready to traverse that intersection. I want to linger for a moment on
the sort of entanglement and contamination that Stewart talks about, but
by talking about entangled things-especially ritual things-objects that
take on subjectivities by mediating between peoples and places. In En-
tangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the
Pacific, Nicholas Thomas (1991) works to "makeexchange into a prism for
seeing what [an anthropological] discourse [on exchange] excluded-the
uneven entanglement of local and global power relations on colonial pe-
ripheries, particularly as these have been manifested in capacities to define
and appropriate the meanings of material things" (1991 :xi).
Exchange-especially the exchange of less material objects like mu-
sic-is not just a local give and take within a coherent and self-sustaining
452 Etbnomusicology, Fall 1996
symbolic system, but is also a worldly practice in which both homemade

and imported goods take on new values, meanings, and significances in each
new encounter. Suggesting that "objects are not what they were made to
be but what they have become" (ibid.:3), Thomas pries things loose from
their fixed meanings and (I am idiosyncratically imagining Thomas's argu-
ment here) sets them loose to appropriate new meanings from the own-
ers they find. However, this is not to give objects free play in a wide-open
field of possible meanings. Things become what they are not because of
authentic meanings intrinsic to objects themselves, but because they are
imagined to carry meanings that may change but appear to be fixed. Ob-
jects become fixed, objectified, because limited interpretations of an
object's meanings circulate in particular communities. And by appropriat-
ing a discourse about itself, an object makes its presence felt and influences
the continued circulation of its meanings.
I am not riddling here, only refashioning Thomas's consideration of
how power relations rework the object in order to hang on to the shifting
power that the object itself has to drag subjects into its "affecting presence"
(Armstrong 1971). As meanings become fixed in a community through
discourse (communicated experience of the object), the object seems to
possess autochthonously those traits that it was given. I stress that these
meanings are vibrant and active in memory and imagination, yet often sta-
bilize in discourse (for bhajans, in talk and song). Objects embody both
meaning and value, but "circulate in different regimes of value in space
and time" (Appadurai 1986:4 [emphasis original]). What is valuable, affec-
tive, in one place can become merely a curious relic elsewhere. The stabil-
ity that objects achieve in use is constantly threatened by the flux that they
acquire through exchange, when the object must make its presence felt
anew in the memory and imagination of its potential owner.
Bhajans and other kinds of Nepali songs, that is, speak for themselves,
yet they are also spoken for. By thinking of songs as material culture, as
sound vehicles that contain the imprints of emotional imagery and devo-
tional sentiment, I contaminate the objective presence of the song with an
equally objective collaboration of perception, memory, and identity. "Mne-
monic processes are intertwined with the sensory order in such a manner
as to render each perception a re-perception" (Seremetakis 1994:9), so that
when songs speak to the senses through sound, metaphor, and icon, they
engage momentarily and uniquely with remembered sounds, metaphors,
and icons. Gods, lovers, and fools-the moving objects entangled in
bhajans and other songs-become clangorous presences within the com-
memorating self.
On the other hand, ritual objects (here I am thinking of bbajans still)
are particularly interesting because widespread and steadfast attempts to
fix the meaning of the object in the ritual itself delegitimate the prospects
for individual ownership (of the experiential object). Bhajan is a repeti-
tively structured performance event that explicitly works toward collective
experience, and to make that experience happen participants need to hold
meanings in common: the meanings of a bhajan, a style of doing a bhajan,
and the metaphorical objects that appear in a bhajan must be drawn from
and directed back toward the group, away from the individual. I mentioned
early on that I wanted to trace the similarities of expression of emotion and
devotion in bhajans to such expression elsewhere in the Kathmandu val-
ley; this comes from my desire to elaborate on ritual meanings by showing
both how those meanings feed upon the everyday world and how Nepalis
use ritual meanings to interpret their everyday world. For a very different
place and for different activities, C. Nadia Seremetakis proposes
"ritualization"as a way to make ritual experience more heterogeneous with
other dimensions of culture (1991:47). Avoiding a linear narrationof death
rituals in Inner Mani (Greece), she defines ritualization "as the processual
representation of death in a variety of social contexts and practices that do
not have the formal status of a public rite. The concept of ritualization
moves the analysis of death rites away from performances fixed in time and
space and resituates it within the flux and contingency of everyday events.
It is from ongoing and discontinuous everyday experience that certain
events and signs are specified and then organized into an ideological sys-
tem that inscribes death as a cultural form" (ibid.:47).
Likewise, in the Kathmandu valley, while a bhajan ghar (bhajan
"house"-usually more of an enclosed platform housing a deity's image and
some musical instruments) may spatiallydistance bhajan singing from other
everyday experiences, the songs themselves draw upon extraordinarily
ordinary events and signs that inscribe devotion as a cultural form. The
paths of memory and habitus thus become the primary routes toward the
explanation of ritual expression, as objects found in song become charged
through "discontinuous everyday experience." By specifying particular
kinds of experiences as privileged sites for the imagination of objects,
bhajan singers create a community of sung objects that resound against
everyday lives and heighten the sense of collectivity embodied in perfor-
mance. And performance implies participation: bhajan musicians perform
dedicated seva ("service") to gods, while bhajan listeners perform feats of
memory that bring resonating devotion into their remembered bodies.
Tracking Practices through Forests of Objects

Most bbajan performances that I heard in the summer of 1987 were
loud and generally unrehearsed. Tourists and locals moved in and out, in-
struments were passed around, strainingvoices cracked and faded, and once
at Swayambu a brass band stuck its notes into a bhajan when it came
walking through at seven in the morning. The cassette that I have been
listening to while writing this contains a different kind of bhajan-bal-
anced, refined, and well-rehearsed (Acharya n.d.). The singer is pictured
on the cover (camera tilted slightly upward), dressed simply in white,
framed by Himalayasand faded blue sky. Full of modem studio sounds (clari-
nets, violins, guitars), the cassette nevertheless suggests itself, through its
content and its compositional and performative styles, to be a traditional
form of devotional expression. I want to suggest that there are two kinds
of poetic and aesthetic practices at work in different kinds of music in
Nepal: one anticipates the fullness of the experience and the other produces
fullness in the text. For bhajan participants, each engenders auspicious-
ness, but carries the listener differently. Experience-centered bhajan per-
formances saturatethe performance space with not necessarily coordinated
sound, and pull selves into that space through their own sounding bodies.
Text-centered performances compose fullness into the song itself-made
auspicious by the abundance of poetic and musical relations prescribed in
it-and lure the minds of the listeners into spiritual contemplation through
the pleasure of textual ingenuities. Soundful participation is central to ex-
periential bhajans; music specialists (singers, tabald players) work to co-
ordinate the movement of the group toward the divine. Mindful participa-
tion is the heart of textual bhajans; solo performers, through their own
edifying play, work to provide "an opportunity for both solitude and so-
cial connection" (Lipsitz 1993:xv). The fullness of the experience makes
the divine resound in the bodies of bhajan participants; the fullness of the
text makes the mind resound in a disembodied divine.
These practices are neither mutually exclusive, nor are they necessar-
ily representative of discrete historical moments; instead, they appear as
the balancing forces to each other in diverse kinds of expression in Nepal.
One bears the mark of social participation, the other the seal of individual
contemplation. Both are forces that move Nepalis themselves towards imagi-
native configurations of culture and society. Through nationally engendered
personal ideologies of bikas ("development" or "growth,"with implications
of "evolution" and "improvement:" see Pigg 1992), these two forms have
taken on complicated meanings: the fullness of the experience can be as-
sociated with rural life and its current musical representative, lok git ("folk
song") and the fullness of the text can be ascribed to urban life and adbunik
git ("modern" or "dynamic song").4 But each of these associations can be
reversed as well: the fullness of the experience echoes the dissonance and
pressure of modem city life, while the fullness of the text harks back to a
pristine and contemplative view of the countryside, recollected from afar
in dusty (or muddy) city streets and roadside shops choked with exhaust.
My bifurcation, for song, primarily indexes a difference in how each

practice works upon memory, yet also suggests differences in how Nepalis
produce themselves out of memory through singing or listening. The dif-
ferent song genres available on cassette, in concerts, on the radio, and in
sitting rooms in the Kathmanduvalley become (in Nicholas Thomas's mean-
ingful sense), through bikas, differential icons of innovation and creativ-
ity, tradition and conformity. Bikas is first and foremost the kind of devel-
opment sponsored by national organizations and international aid agencies,
legible on the streets through a diversity of signs such as road-building
projects, special license plates for foreign service vehicles, and billboards
like the Shikhar ("top, peak, summit") cigarette ad showing a very pale
Nepali man in a double-breasted suit and a woman wearing red tights sus-
pended in each other's arms and reading, "Shikhar-the taste of success."
Yet bikas is also used to imagine local practices on a global terrain of de-
velopment that both threatens and enhances Nepali styles of life. Amidst
the confluence of English-language pop and rock, Nepali-language "pop
rock," Hindiphlim ("film")music, lok git, Ihdunik git, sastriya sangit, and
bhajans available in most cassette stores, people make sense of what they
hear by finding or producing resonances and dissonances between songs
and their own lives. For instance:
Sanjay Singh, the proprietor of a cassette shop in Thamel-the most
tourist-filled area of Kathmandu-where I bought a Stevie Ray Vaughan
cassette, told me in March 1995 "firstwe are Nepalis, and after that we are
Newars" (pahilo bami nepCli bau, tyaspacbbi newar).5 So while he sells
mostly the English-language cassettes preferred by many Nepali teenagers
as well as foreign tourists, he himself also developed a taste for Nepali-lan-
guage songs, which he then supplemented recently by learning Newar
drumming styles. (The most recent local manifestation of bikas, at various
levels, is a sense of viable development simultaneous with cultural preser-
vation.) A few days earlier, my friend Suresh, listening to my Stevie Ray
Vaughan tape, exclaimed in surprise, "Eventhough [I] don't understand [it],
I like it!" (nabujhepani maldi man parchba.. (The words of a song are
central to the pleasure that many people take in song, but are not always
crucial-other dimensions of musical style may be equally affective, espe-
cially in a city where bikasit ["developed"]sounds can be the Nepali equiva-
lent of exoticism in music.)
Meanwhile, the first time I met Manjul, a noted singer of progressive
political songs since the 1970s (see Grandin 1995b), I asked innocently if
he sang pop or rock songs; he made a face and said, no, he sang "poor
people's songs" (garib mdncbbeko git). Similarly, one day in June 1994
while walking with my music teacher's youngest son, Aswin, I asked if he
like Nepali "pop rock"; he said, no, it's just copied (kapi gareko) from
English-language songs. (Implicit in these and other words about pop and
rock music is a sense that pop and rock musicians are icons of the excesses
of American culture, and that those Nepalis who engage productively with
their music are not contributing anything "Nepali" to Nepal.)
By amplifying the implications of bikas in my mix of embodiment,
memory, and meaning, I mean to highlight the politics involved in how
Nepalis make and talk about themselves. In song practices, aspects of style
such as language use, vocal technique, and genre incorporation are implicated
in identities which are at once personal and political, while meanings can
always be contested. Music, like language, is fertile turf in the Kathmandu
valley for differences of opinion, and while discussions can be intensely
political, the danger of hard words is often dispelled by saying that what was
said was just gaph- "gossip" (cf. Brenneis 1987)-as if one didn't really mean
it, as if it were just a way to pass the time. Likewise, what I have to say in
the next few pages about two more songs is gaph-my contribution, drawn
from a wealth of talk about music and life in the Kathmandu valley, to an
ongoing discussion about songs, meaning, and affect.
During the heavy monsoon rains of 1987 and lighter downpours in
1994 I took music lessons from Dilip Kumar Kapali, a Newar tailor and
musician, studying nepali sastriya sangit. In July 1987 he taught me the
next song, which is in Nepali (an Indo-European tongue), often the second
language of many Newars after Newari (a Tibeto-Burman language).
1 f< T 2YTll birsera ha~sna khojda Forgetting and trying to

laugh.
2 f^ l-i 1f bimbale satai dinchha the shadow (of your image)
torments (me).
3 t < 3 'ri ,,Tl roera u(na khojda Crying and trying to
get up.
4 E*i 1 <-
tft rf akaSle thichi dinchha the sky presses (relentlessly)
down (upon me).
5 St
TCRT i< 356IsT sat pheri ghumera utda Completing seven turns
(around the sacred fire)*.
6 qTfh z5TT c'' bunis kuna jala taile" you wove some kind of net
(around me).
7 fN^OTST J<szT bichhoci bhaera basda (I) remain (behind), having
been separated (from you);
8 qfTrg'lc^pL TI pani bolchhas malai taile even so. you (still) speak to
me.
(Music: Dilip Kumar Kapali. Text: Vishnu Pande)

Rag: patdip (ascending sa ga ma pa ni sa, descending sa ni dha pa ma ga re sa,
which on Dilip's harmonium comes out as E-flatG-flatA-flatB-flatD E-flat,E-flat
D C B-flatA-flatG-flatF E-flat.
Tal:jhaptal (10 beats divided 2 1 3 1 2 1 3)
*The sacred fire alluded to here is part of a Hindu wedding: bride and groom make
seven circles around this fire during the main part of the ceremony.
**tais the non-honorificformfor "you,"and-le is an agencymarker-the one who

is doing a transitiveaction takes -le if the action has alreadybeen completed, or
when clarityof agencyis needed. ta is distinctfromtapdi (highest honorific)and
timi (mediumhonorific).Mensometimesaddresstheir wives using td;althoughit
was apparentat the "seventurns"that the two people in this song were husband
and wife, it is only at this point that it is certainthat it is the singer who is the
husbandaddressinghis wife, who has either died or gone away (permanentlyor
temporarily).
Each of the four lines is divided into two complementary parts as indi-
cated by the indentations in the transcription. The same melody is used for
the first, second, and last lines; both parts of it fall into a medium vocal range
(between F of the middle octave and E-flat of the upper octave of the
singer's range) and end on B-flat.The third line contrasts strikinglywith the
two preceding it, and the two parts within it contrast with each other: at
sat ("seven") the melody begins on A-flatof the middle octave and moves
down to G-flat before ascending to B-flat, and at bunis ("wove," second
person non-honorific) the line begins on F in the upper octave and moves
up to G-flatbefore descending to E-flat.Poetically, the first half of the song
mirrors the second half: in each, a line evoking the pleasure of being to-
gether is followed by a grammatically linked line of longing which causes
the affecting presence of the first line to be recast as distant memory. This
linkage intensifies the desire expressed in the latter line of each pair, mak-
ing the uncertainty of the present appear less real than the solidity of the
remembered past. The textual division of this song into two equal halves
works against the use of two unevenly distributed musical lines. Poetically,
the form can be reduced to AA'BB',but musically, the form is AABA:the
reappearance of musical material from the first line in the last line is a com-
mon way of linking the end of a song back to its beginning in csstriya sangit
and other vocal genres in Nepal.
The singer is never responsible for the actions he sings about, but is
rather the recipient of the actions of others or the emotional effects of those
actions. In the first half of the song, the wife's shadow and the sky are the
agents of sentiment in physical gestures directed toward the human object.
Dinnu, in its third-person non-honorific present form dinchha in lines 2
and 4, means "to give" when used alone, but as part of a compound verb,
it gives "me," the object implied here, more prominence as the recipient
of the action.6 In the second half of the song, the singer's wife weaves
(bunnu, second-person non-honorific simple past form, bunis, in line 6)
her net and speaks (bolnu, second-person non-honorific simple present
form, bolchbas, in line 8) from afar. In fact, the singer never really appears
as object (or as subject) in the song until the final line, when malai (ma,
"I,"+ object marker -lai) finally secures the presence of the lingering feel-
ing of longing in the body of the singer. This poetic intensification in the
final line, belied by the musical repetition, is enhanced by breaking the

pattern established by the extremely close pairing of grammaticalelements
in the first two lines:
birsera hasna khojda bimbale satdi - dinchba
roera utna khojda akasle thichi - dinchha
verb (par- verb (in- verb (par- subject compoundverb
ticiple) finitive) ticiple) (habitualpresent)
The difference of the last line is set up primarily on the word pani, here
meaning "even so," which falls at the point where the subject stood ear-
lier. By semantically pulling the two halves of the line together, the word
pani arrests the expectations set up by the grammatical and musical rep-
etition earlier and allows the word malai to sound clearly on kbali
("empty:"the first beat, unaccented, of the second part of the tal, or rhyth-
mic cycle).
Tending towards what I called the fullness of text, this song holds its
intensity in the intricate weaving of words and music. Of course, it must be
activated experientially to convey its intensity-text and experience are not
independent domains. By saying that this song works predominantlythrough
its musical and poetic texts, I am not giving it its final resting place; rather, I
mean to suggest that the composer's use of this composition and performance
style soundfully indexes taste, "the practical affirmationof an inevitable dif-
ference" (Bourdieu 1984:56). Here, the song and Dilip's singing of it affirms
a difference made out of his own unique history: like many performers of
sastriya sangit, Dilip spent some time learning music in India. Since I have
known him, he has sung mostly at home, for friends and students. And be-
cause of the taste that he has developed and produced in his life, he refuses
to believe that anything mitbo-"tasty" -can be found in Americanor Nepali
rock music; his version of such recently developed music is an imitation of
the singer Michael Jackson in which he croons unintelligibly in a falsetto
voice. The previous song meanwhile affirms a connection with a past that
existed before rock music, a past that, in Dilip's opinion, should be extended
into the future through current musical practices.
When a song like the one I transcribed above is considered as part of
a genre, as a materializing object that embodies the identity of its singer
and makes explicit a relationship with other singers, other songs, other
listeners, it may also become disembodied taste, a performed object that
dissolves its own connection with its singer. In the politics of everyday life
in Nepal, in the desire for bikas, songs move around. Changes in Kathmandu
bring new cultural forms (through individual innovations) into the city and
create new senses of taste, which I find expressed in a dialectic between
the fullness of the experience and the fullness of the text. But "when new
forms and items of an emerging materialculture step in between a society's

present perceptual existence and its residual sociocultural identity, they can
be tasteless because people may no longer have the perceptual means for
seeking identity and experience in new material forms" (Seremetakis
1994:8).
Bikas has brought such new material(and musical) forms to Nepal, and
while some have become part of local diets, many are still bland alterna-
tives locally devoid of both textual and experiential intensity. It is perfor-
mance, though, that continues to recreate personal and material identities
by connecting listeners, through the possibility of imbricated memory and
experience in a shared space, to each other and to identifiable (remem-
bered) tastes.
Disembodiment on the Path to the Divine

In his eclectic work on music in Kathmandu and Kirtipur (a town on
a hill southwest of Kathmandu), Ingemar Grandin (1989) provides various
glimpses of musical and music-related activities in Newar communities
(1989). He is interested at one point in locating continuity and change
within vast and subsuming processes of "compartmentalization"and "mod-
ernization" (ibid.: 178). Compartmentalized musical practices continue or
falter because they have been isolated from external influences, while
modernized traditions thrive because they incorporate variously located
influences. Within the structural levels of a bhajan performance in Nepal,
he finds an openness that allows modem and modernizing elements (songs,
performance practices, entire song genres) into its incorporating body:
bhajan is "open, inclusive, assimilative, and innovative"(ibid.:179). My own
recognition of the variety of changes in bhajan song practices led me to
remark at the beginning of this article that bhajan was both a genre and a
performance event: both devotion intentionally embodied in the texts and
songs of bhajans and emotion partly disembodied, taken in and given new
meaning and movement within the bhajan framework.
Alongside this I want to set a sympathetically resonating idea, one that
has been lost amidst the different bodies in my text. Disembodiment, a
displacement of the self from its usual place of residence, is another path
leading outward from some bhajans. By intense bodily involvement and
devout concentration, bhajan participants suggest that it is possible to
experience the divine paradoxically by becoming dissociated from the body
itself. The "self," a term which I have used frequently to mean a coherent
entity made up of interconnected individual, social, and physical parts, has
now become something else: a self which is detachable from the world, a
formless form that travels everywhere without moving and resides any-
where without stopping. Selves supersede collective experience-in which

identities commingle in sound-and temporarily are released from the
bonds which hold them to individually distinct bodily experience, achiev-
ing moksa-in which the ongoing sounds of the bhajan commingle in the
merged divine entity, bhagavan.
If embodiment is a generic way around overly mentalistic and individu-
ally bounded descriptions of social experience, and "since the body medi-
ates all reflection and action upon the world" (Lock 1993:133),
disembodiment is the reverse: a local phenomenon that gives bhajan par-
ticipants the feeling of socially unmediated experience. Neither reflective
nor active, the disembodied self merely exists in a state of perpetual knowl-
edge and experience devoid of flow or motion. The disembodied self
hovers directly above Merleau-Ponty's "preobjective" moment (1962):
objectification is neither necessary nor conceivable. But the feeling of
disembodiment soon becomes part of discourse, a voiced memory, an
amplifying node on and outside the body that in turn provides the experi-
ential frame for future experiences of moksa in bhajan performances-
experiences that resound when music again puts its fingers on the har-
monium keyboard of memory.
Critically, then, ritualization of this experience of the divine comes out
of the words and images of songs and talk. And by "songs" I mean not only
the bhajans that many Nepalis remember hearing since the time they were
children, but also recently composed bhajans: the first song I transcribed
here specifically plays on such an experience of the divine when Bhaktaraj
Acharya entreats bhagavCn to "illuminate (the way) and show the path"
(bcli bato dekhau) and then to "come and set (me) free" (ai... phukau).
Elsewhere, talk that my presence provoked about bikasit America and
abikasit ("undeveloped") Nepal occasionally came around to a claim, remi-
niscent of nineteenth-century Orientalist discourse, that despite the devel-
opment apparent in media images of the United States, Nepal has a differ-
ent, spiritual kind of bikacs-and Nepalis have an ability to experience the
divine that Americans usually don't. (The threat to this ability posed by
material development will return in the last song I will discuss here.) A
bhajan that Dilip took from a performance by Kalpana Pande on Nepal
Television in 1988 finds the singer trapped in the middle of a whirlpool
(bhumari bichko) on the ocean of existence (bhava scgar); the singer then
entreats the god Siva to "come and catch (me) in (your) hand-(I'm) drown-
ing" (au hbt samau, dubla lagyo). The idea of escape (moska) from the
painful bonds of life becomes poignant not because it is so distinct from
everyday life, real and imagined, but because the visions that appear in song
to describe moska are so much a part of it.
This path between disembodiment and embodiment, from experienc-
ing the divine to divining the experience, also travels through the language
of emotion. I have been playing with the notion that objects, like subjects,
have forms that grasp or relinquish other bodies: songs are embodied emo-
tions, texts are disembodied songs, cassettes are disembodied singers, sing-
ers are embodied expressions. "Object,"here, becomes something-a cas-
sette, a musician, a song-that circulates and acquires value (that is, an
objectified sense of utility). Embodiment takes objects into a body: this is
what makes it so appealing as the shifter between individual identity and
social facts. Disembodiment moves objects out of a body: rather than plot
the movement of the social on the individual, it traces the presence of the
individual through the realm of the social (which, in bbajan, is also a realm
that goes beyond the social). What is embodied in one place is always dis-
embodied from another.
My use of the word "body" here to signify any place where various
objects become fixed is possible in English but not in Nepali. Jiu, a com-
mon word for "body,"refers specifically to the "living body," the life com-
ponent of the self, while sarir refers more to the physical body. What does
translate is the motion of emotion toward or away from the body. Many
expressions of emotion and experiential states in the Nepali language work
by moving towards the feeling recipient rather than emanating outward
from the feelingful consciousness. This is expressed frequently by the verbs
parnu ("to fall" [into one's life]) and Ilgnu ("to adhere" or "cling" [onto
the self]), both of which are idiomatic and rarely retain the explicit imag-
ery that they appear to have in my translation. Emotions are experienced
by the human object of the sentence, which takes the object marker -lai
(see also Jacobson 1992). Maldi dukba lagyo: "Pain clung to me" (I am
hurt).... Uslii mayd lagyo: "Love adhered to him" (He is in love)....
Hamildi tyo git man parcbha: "Thatsong, (our) heart-mindfalls to us" (We
like that song). Humans can also be the agents of their emotions, and this
is expressed by using causative verb structures. Rather than have anger rise
up in me (maldi ris uthyo), I can get angry (ma risduchhu); instead of
being afraid of a dog (malai kukurko dar ldgcbha), I can actively fear
(from) it (ma kukurdekbi darauchhu). People use such expressions when
it is clear that a person has decided to take on a particular emotional state
and makes that sentiment publicly (if sometimes unwittingly) known. For
example, if I visit a friend after a fairly lengthy absence, my friend may greet
me, usually jokingly, with, "kina risdunubhayo?"-"why did (you) get
angry?"-as if while we had been sitting apart in our own houses some
thought had come into my heart-mind and played around in it (manmd
kurC khelyo), and, as I dwelled upon that thought and it in me, I had got-
ten mad and decided to allow my friend to suffer, wondering why I didn't
come. Yet this suffering would not be explicitly my fault: maldi dukha
bhayo, "sadness happened upon me," my friend would say, not tapadle
maldi dukha dinnubbayo, "you gave me pain." By and large, when people
talk (or sing) about how they feel, their words suggest that emotions come
to them from unspecified external sources, even when it may be apparent
from the words around those words what may have triggered such emo-
tions. Causative constructions, on the other hand, suggest an intensity of
internally generated experience often avoided in talk about emotion, ex-
cept when emotions are turned around and outwardly expressed: malai
usko dherai maya lagchha, "her love really sticks to me" (I am very much
in love with her)7 but if we're married and people see her showing a thou-
sand acts of kindness toward me everyday, they might say, "u srimanlai
dherai maya garchha" (she loves [her] husband very much). Here, the
emphasis is on acts of emotion rather than the experience of emotion. Part
of the efficacy of songs in Nepal is that emotions are expressed, yet rarely
focused on individually unique experiences; emotional states in both talk
and song reside in words that move freely from outside toward the self,
tending to remain slightly disembodied, affixed to rather than emanating
from the senses-always public and communicable, rarely hidden and
unknown.
Donald Brenneis, in his work with Indian immigrant communities in
Fiji, speaks of bhaw, the local Hindi word for "emotion" as well as for "ges-
ture" or "display" (1987:240). This semantic overlap ties feelings directly
to expressions and presupposes that "feelings" (bhaw) are never private,
but are always externally felt and freely communicated states. Knowledge
and other states of being work similarly. In bhajan kavvali performances
(as inpanchayat legal proceedings), "value and authority for the contents
of such performances derive not from the experience and interpretation
of the performer but from his or her role in giving voice to precepts hav-
ing their origin outside the individual, that is, within the Hindu heritage"
(ibid.:244).
Both disembodied and embodied notions of the self seem to be at work
here, and in parts of Nepal, as I have discussed, as well: selves are discon-
nected pieces that take part uniformly of feelings detached from any indi-
vidual self and located nowhere, yet they are also connected puzzles that
experience feelings pragmatically on their bodies and partake of a divine
essence through particular and highly visible forms.
Another song of Bhaktaraj Acharya's will help clarify this play between
embodied and disembodied expression.
,xr'r MiT hami bhulechhau We have gone astray, intoxicated

dhanjana madale by (the thought) of wealth;
arFft 19 PTIf1 td andho bhaechhau we have become blind. compelled
..,- ~< Sakti tujukale by (the desire) for power.
,3fr'i. r\\{T q3 umkina garo moha Escape is difficult as infatuation

badera grows;
erP TRrr 1fl d jani gara bhagavan favor us, bhagavan. by

^~~~ murkha bujhera understanding (our) ignorance.
Ihami bhulechhau.... (We have gone astray...1
ma hu~ merai sabchij I (exist); everything said to be

bhanne mine...
gae kati ti kharani ...all of these things turned to
bandai ashes and went (away).
pachhuto bhari Remorse became a burden: I came
bhaera ae- (back to you),
umali a~Su naina eyes filled to overflowing with
bharinai tears.
Ihami bhulechhau...I (We have gone astray...l
Pr aTmTItii
;F FMT ke chha ra masanga What is it that I have besides
a~Su sivae (these) tears?
-h a <, Iz-l 1f
t,. kufuro khali bi$aya An empty bundle. useless
ratiko pleasures.
1.0-1-
namile bhagavan It's no use, bhagavan-your pity
C, "si iy'i i
karuina timro (hasn't done any good).
janma janmayo Life was given (to me): it turned
bertha hune bho out to be in vain.
[ C %M1... Ihami bhulechhau... [We have gone astray...

...T
T w ] ...murkha bujheral ...understanding (our) ignorance.1
(Bhaktaraj Acharya [Samarpan: Nepali bhajans (142)])

The musical form of this song is based on a classical (gsstriya) model
which sets a sthai-a fixed, immobile, permanent part (similar to a re-
frain)-against an antara-a different, mobile, changing part (similar to a
verse). The sthai consists of the first two lines of each of the three main
sections, and the antara makes up the second two. In each section, the
sthai is repeated once; the first line of the antara also repeats (as it fre-
quently would in sastriya sangit). In the second and third sections the last
half of the last line is repeated. Between each section the words hami
bhulechhau are sung twice. At the end of the song the entire first section
reappears, but without the repeat of the sthai.
In the first section, the first two lines form an end-rhyming pair rein-
forced rhythmically and melodically: the rhythm of the second line begins
like the first before shifting in the second half of the line, and its melody
also begins like the first on sa (the tonic, or, here, the vadi) but extends
higher and concludes on pa (the dominant, or samvadi). The third and
fourth lines also rhyme at the last two syllables, forming an AABB poetic
scheme. Like a typical antara, these two lines extend into the upper vo-
cal range: the third line begins onpa (dominant) and immediately ascends
to ga (tonic), and the fourth line begins onpa (dominant) and rises as high
as ma, a perfect fourth above the upper tonic, before descending back to
pa (dominant).
In the second section, the rhyme scheme shifts to an ABABform while
the music retains a form similar to that of the first section, creating a dis-
juncture between text and tune. Also, while the text of the third and fourth
lines suggests a greater intensity of emotion here, the tune is more subtly
emphatic, starting as it did in the first section, but moving nowhere near
as high as it did earlier-instead emphasizing the text by using komal (flat)
ni (the subtonic) for the first time in the song on the word, asu ("tears").
The off-setting of text and tune continues in the third section, where
the first line (ending with sivae) rhymes with the first (bhanne) and third
(aCe)lines of the previous section while the second, third, and fourth lines
form a rhyming unit. The entire text thus appears in rhyme as AABBCDCD
CEEE,while the music of the third section is similar to the second section,
giving a musical scheme of AA'BCAA'B'D AA'B'D. The overlaps and con-
trasts between words and music here are both predictable and surprising.
But there is something else going on here in the aesthetic framing of
the singer's role.8 Engaging here with bhagavan rather than with the hu-
man companion in the previous song, the singer experiences the relation-
ship similarly: he is left in a displaced state of mind by events beyond his
control, and can only be set back in place by the actions of another. The
singer becomes an intentional conveyor of emotion which is not his to
command, working to redirect personal experience (his, the poet's, a
listener's) through language that is both bodily evocative and socially in-
teractive. Deliberately negotiating a space in which to engage creatively in
textual resonances while verbally downplaying personal involvement in the
creation of the self, Acharya crafts an ambiguous identity, responsible for
the feelingful production of meaning but not responsible for the events
which produced his own expressions of emotion and devotion.
For, in fact, there are no events that play out for certain within this
song-only the remembered traces of the effects of events appear. Events
themselves have fallen into an unrecountable past, but they still remain
affectively present in embodied memories. Remorse drains into tears, but
only by becoming a burden in itself, as if by itself. Useless pleasures hang
empty in a song that bundles them up into anachronistic sensations. The
fullness of the text brings the remembered experiences of listeners into play
with the sentiments of the individual singer; it is fundamentally opposed
to a fullness of the experience in which the presence of collectively sound-
ing bodies works to bring the divine to all participants.
Like the last song, the design of the text and the manipulation of agency
in this song create a setting in which the articulation of emotion is disem-
bodied from the presence of the self. The repetition of hami ("we") draws
the listener into the experience by naming him or her, and the general lack
of pronouns elsewhere directs disembodied emotion back toward a listener
who is neither here nor there, neither subject nor object. The ambiguity
of the singer's reference, that is, helps convey emotion toward the listener's
body. But this song begins with explicitly embodied terms. Mada, "intoxi-
cation" or "exhilaration"; andho, "blindness"; moha, "love" or "infatuation";
and murkha, "foolishness" or "ignorance": combined with a desire for dhan
("wealth" or "possessions") and sakti ("power" or "efficacy,"), these em-
bodied states resound synesthetically through each other in the first verse
and keep bodies embodied, grounded in worldly experience. Embodied sen-
sation disembodied from a subject, disembodied subjects embodied through
a sensation: putting bodies in place keeps them out of place, objectified.
Asu, tears, the salty reminders of what the tongue left unsaid, release the
singer's experience from his own memory. Sentiment, embodied in song,
goes astray, yet returns. It is this coordination between embodiment and
disembodiment, this interchange between individual experience and social
emotion and devotion, this play between being the self and becoming an-
other, this ambiguity between lingering in the world and longing for else-
where, that makes these Nepali songs speak to their listeners.
Notes
1. My fieldwork in the summer of 1987 in Kathmandu, Nepal, was supported by a grant
from Pomona College. Funding for other work represented here was provided by the Center
for Asian Studies and the School of Music at the Universityof Texas at Austin. I especially would
like to thank Stephen Slawek for some offhand remarks that I developed into a major section
of this work. Shambu and Banu Oja at Cornell Universityhelped me translate some of the songs
that I learned from Dilip Kumar Kapali, my music teacher in Nepal. In 1987, Dilip was pa-
tient enough to teach me in English to sing in Nepali; he then became a fluent interpreter of
my sometimes imprecise Nepali in 1994 and 1995. And Vishnu Pande, the author of the text
of the second song presented in this article, has confirmed and criticized many aspects of my
work. At UT-Austin, Kamal Adhikary gave his extremely gracious help in polishing my tran-
scriptions and translations of all three songs here. Don Brenneis, Calla Jacobson, and Shari
Johnston lent critical eyes and ears to my thoughts and words: I can only hope that their senses
and insights have been embodied in and beyond this text. Two anonymous reviewers for the
Journal also gave extensive comments on an earlier version of these words; this uncanny di-
alogue with strangers has been extraordinarily helpful. This article was completed in April,
1995, while I was living in the Kathmandu valley with the support of a Fulbright grant from
the U.S. Department of Education and a University Fellowship from the University of Texas
at Austin.
My transliterations in this article approximate Nepali spellings and pronunciations. "a"
is the long form of the vowel, "a,"and while "i"and "u" also have long forms, these are usu-
ally not audible in everyday speech. Otherwise I adhere closely to current practices of Hindi
and Nepali orthography, except for various names of people and places that I transliterate as
they usually appear in Nepal. An "b"after a consonant signals the aspirated form of that con-
sonant, except with "c,"which is always followed by an "h"(two if aspirated); "~" produces
a nasalization of the vowel under it.
2. Many languages are spoken in the Kathmandu valley in Nepal. Nepali is the national
language, and is the language of education and most media. Newari is often the first language
of Newars, a kind (jat) of people who consider themselves related through language, culture,
and history: Newars are the indigenous residents of the Kathmandu valley in many historical
representations, written and spoken. Hindi is also common, as Nepal has a large population
of Indian nationals and receives many of its products-including movies and their songs-
from or through India. Many people also have some knowledge of English. Other Indo-
European, Tibetan, and Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken as well in this capital city of a
multi-ethnic nation.
3. Auspiciousness is a term that blankets a variety of South Asian practices. It centers on
the belief "thatthere are auspicious and inauspicious events, times, and places, and that if no
care is taken to counteract any inauspiciousness one may have incurred, bad consequences
will ensue" (Gellner 1992:126-27). Some signs of auspiciousness are easily detected, while
others cannot be read without the help of a religious specialist. In everyday activities in Ne-
pal, for example, many habits are set to avoid inauspiciousness: eating with the left hand,
circumambulating a temple counterclockwise, or failing to give respect to the goddess Saras-
wati before a music lesson might lead to sickness, ill fortune, or a broken voice. Beginnings
and large undertakings, such as building a house or getting married, require the assistance of
a religious specialist to read more completely the planetary and other natural signs that will
affect the scheduling and general disposition of the events. Henry suggests that "music in
general is thought to be auspicious because it is believed to enhance the prospects of attain-
ing the goals of... ritual by glorifying and pleasing the gods" (1988:111). I also suggest that
bhajan music in Nepal can sometimes be auspicious because it aligns the senses and senti-
ments of participants with those of gods, extending notions of community beyond solely
human interaction.
4. My two phrases are meant to encompass a variety of kinds of criticism I heard in Nepal,
often from recent immigrants to Kathmandufrom the hills, but increasingly from Newars and
other locals disgruntled or surprised by the dramatic changes to both city and countryside in
recent years. Immigrants often told me of how food was tastier and more filling in their vil-
lage, how raksi (distilled alcohol made from various grains) was stronger, how life was more
pleasant if more physically demanding, how music was more in tune with its surroundings.
Longtime Kathmandu residents described to me how things have changed: water is scarcer
in the city, air is more polluted, health is harder to maintain, traffic is fiercer. Generally, re-
cent immigrants imagine a better lifestyle out in "the village," while longtime Kathmandu
residents picture a more ordered life still inscribed in the city, underneath the textually dense
changes on the surface of modem urban life wrought by bikas and its nationally powerful
agents.
5. For an intriguing debate on questions of Newar identity, see David Gellner's histori-
cally grounded article, "Language,Caste, Religion, and Territory:Newar Identity Ancient and
Modern" (1986) in conjunction with Declan Quigley's piece on contemporary aspects of
Newar identity, "Ethnicitywithout Nationalism: the Newars of Nepal" (1987).
6. A more common usage in Nepali, for example, is "Usle khaidiyo," which Subara Man
Tuladhar, my Newari language teacher, translated as "He ate it all up!" One implication is that
the food, the implied object of the sentence, wasn't expected or supposed to have disappeared
so quickly.
7. Or, using a definition of maya closer to its meaning in Hindi rather than its sense in
everyday Nepali conversation, I might translate this sentence as, "her illusion (or image) real-
ly adheres to me" (I am infatuated with her).
8. And the poet's: although I have not been able to trace the author of this work, Bhak-
taraj Acharya credits other authors for the words of his songs on a later cassette, and I ex-
pect that he is probably not the author of this piece. However, Acharya is active in selecting
texts to set musically, and in this sense I credit him with some of the creativity that others
might consider the rightful property of the poet.
References
Acharya, Bhaktaraj.1990. Samarpan: Nepali Bhajanharu. Music Nepal 142. Abu-Lughod,Lila,
and Catherine A. Lutz.
- . 1990. "Introduction: Emotion, Discourse, and the Politics of Everyday Life." In Lan-
guage and the Politics of Emotion. Studies in Emotion and Social snteractions. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press. Paris:Editionsde la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. "Introduction:Commodities and the Politics of Value." In The Social
Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Armstrong, Robert Plant. 1971. The Affecting Presence: an Essay in Humanistic Anthropol-
ogy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge Studies in Social and
CulturalAnthropology, number 16. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
- . 1984. Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard
Nice. Cambridge, MA:HarvardUniversity Press.
Brenneis, Donald. 1985. "Passionand Performance in FijiIndian VernacularSong."Ethnomusi-
cology 29(3): 397-408.
- . 1987. "Performing Passions: Aesthetics and Politics in an Occasionally Egalitarian
Community." American Ethnologist 14(2): 236-50.
. 1991. "Aesthetics, Performance, and the Enactment of Tradition in a Fiji Indian Com-
munity." In Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions, edited
by Arjun Appadurai, FrankJ. Korom, and MargaretA. Mills. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 1991. "Indian Music." In The Dance of Shiva: Fourteen Indian
Essays. Third edition. New Delhi: Munshiram ManoharlalPublishers Pvt. Ltd.
Csordas, Thomas J. 1990. "Embodiment as a Paradigmfor Anthropology." Ethos 18(1): 5-47.
Desjarlais, Robert R. 1992. Body and Emotion: the Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the
Nepal Himalayas. Series in Contemporary Ethnography. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Deva, B. C. 1980 [1974]. Indian Music. New Delhi: Indian Council for Cultural Relations.
Durkheim, Emile. 1973. Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, edited by Robert Bellah.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gellner, David. 1986. "Language,Caste, Religion and Territory: Newar Identity Ancient and
Modern."Journal of European Sociology 27: 102-48.
---. 1992. Monk, Householder, and Tantric Priest: Newar Buddhism and Its Hierarchy
of Ritual. Cambridge Studies in Social and CulturalAnthropology. Cambridge:Cambridge
University Press.
Grandin, Ingemar. 1989. Music and Media in Local Life: Music Practice in a Newar
Neighbourhood in Nepal. LinkopingStudies in Arts and Science 41. Linkoping:Linkoping
University Department of Communication Studies.
. 1995a. "One Song, Five Continents and a Thousand Years of Musical Migration."
Saragam 1(1): 56-65.
1995b. "To Change the Face of this Country: Nepalese Progressive Songs under
Pancayat Democracy." Unpublished manuscript, forthcoming in the Journal of South
Asian Literature.
Gurung, Kishor. 1992. Ghantu: a Narrative Ritual Music Tradition as Observed by the
Gurungs of Nepal. M.A. thesis, University of Hawaii (Honolulu).
Handler, Richard, and Jocelyn Linnekin. 1984. "Tradition,Genuine or Spurious."Journal of

American Folklore 97: 273-90.
Henry, Edward 0. 1988. Chant the Names of God: Music and Culture in Bhojpuri-speaking
sndia. San Diego: San Diego State University Press.
Jackson, Michael. 1983. "Knowledge of the Body." Man 18: 327-45.
Jacobson, Calla. 1992. "Ambiguitiesof Agency: Grammar,Self, and Feeling in Nepali Language,
Speech, and Song." Unpublished manuscript.
Lipsitz, George. 1993. "Foreword."In My Music, by Susan D. Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, Charles
Keil, and the Music in Daily Life Project. Hanover and London:Wesleyan University Press.
Lock, Margaret.1993. "Cultivatingthe Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily Prac-
tice and Knowledge." Annual Review of Anthropology 22: 133-55.
Marcus, George E., et al. 1991. "Notes and Queries on the Broader Implications of 'the Self
for the Conduct of Cross-culturalResearch." Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly
16(1): 10-35.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Pigg, Stacy Leigh. 1992. "Inventing Social Categories through Place: Social Representations
and Development in Nepal." Comparative Studies in Society and History 34(3): 491-
513.
Quigley, Declan. 1987. "Ethnicity without Nationalism: the Newars of Nepal." Journal of
European Sociology 28: 152-70.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1964. The Andaman Islanders. New York: The Macmillan Company
and the Free Press of Glencoe.
Schutz, Alfred. 1967 [1932]. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Studies in Phenom-
enology and Existential Philosophy. Translated by George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert
with an introduction by George Walsh. Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press.
Seremetakis, C. Nadia. 1991. The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Seremetakis, C. Nadia, ed. 1994. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Cul-
ture in Modernity. Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press.
Slawek, Stephen Matthew. 1986. Kirtan: a Study of the Sonic Manifestations of the Divine in
the Popular Hindu Culture of Banaras. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois (Urbana).
Stewart, Kathleen. 1991. "On the Politics of Cultural Theory: a Case for Contaminated Cul-
tural Critique." Social Research 58(2): 395-412.
Stoller, Paul. 1994. "EmbodyingColonial Memories."American Anthropologist 96(3): 634-48.
Tewari, Lakshmi. 1974. Folk Music of India: Uttar Pradesh. Ph.D. dissertation, Wesleyan
University.
Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism
in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA:HarvardUniversity Press.
Thompson, E. P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review
Press.
Thompson, Gordon. 1987. Music and Values in Gujarati-speaking Western India. Ph.D.
dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles.
Trawick, Margaret. 1990. Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press.
. 1991. "WanderingLost:a LandlessLaborer'sSense of Place and Self."In Gender, Genre,
and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions, edited by Arjun Appadurai, FrankJ.
Korom, and MargaretA. Mills. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Young, Katharine. 1994. "Whose Body? An Introduction to Bodylore." Journal of American
Folklore 107(423): 3-8.

Nepal - Emotion and Devotion, Lingering and Longing in Some Nepali Songs

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Nepal - Emotion and Devotion, Lingering and Longing in Some Nepali Songs

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Society for Ethnomusicology

Emotion and Devotion, Lingering and Longing in Some Nepali Songs

Emotion and Devotion, Lingering

DAVID HENDERSON UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

? 1996 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

as veridically referential to some internal state" (ibid.: 11). Lila Abu-Lughod

My senses need a more detailed map, though. Engaging with recent

Trekking through South Asian Devotional Song Practices

Thoroughly tracing the geographic flow of similarities and differences

Gordon Thompson finds music in Gujarati-speaking Western India to

pleasure of untouched music often do remain active locally. I want to keep

A Musical Chautaro ("Resting Place")

bhaga vn iivana nau Bhagavan*, life (is)

[ icrT ...] Ibhagavan.../ IBhagavan...

mFff4 q ft rt t gyana bina bho andho Without wisdom (I)

[Kt w...i1Tf ...31 Ijaba iaba...bhagavan... [whenever... bhagavan...}

[;5qK GM....T ... lfaba

(Bhaktaraj Acharya [Samarpan: Nepali bhajans])

*Bhagavan is an encompassing word for "god," its usual translation. An "undifferentiated

Bhava sdgar, in the second section, is an idiomatic poetic expression in

Embodiment and the Path to the Divine

Edward 0. Henry, just prior to his discussion of men's devotional songs

'real' we experience our own palpable reality" (1978:18). Similarly, the

to a Kathmandu road bearing a seemingly endless supply of late-evening

Chasing Objects through Fields of Practice

symbolic system, but is also a worldly practice in which both homemade

Tracking Practices through Forests of Objects

My bifurcation, for song, primarily indexes a difference in how each

1 f< T 2YTll birsera ha~sna khojda Forgetting and trying to

(Music: Dilip Kumar Kapali. Text: Vishnu Pande)

**tais the non-honorificformfor "you,"and-le is an agencymarker-the one who

final line, belied by the musical repetition, is enhanced by breaking the

forms and items of an emerging materialculture step in between a society's

Disembodiment on the Path to the Divine

where without stopping. Selves supersede collective experience-in which

,xr'r MiT hami bhulechhau We have gone astray, intoxicated

,3fr'i. r\\{T q3 umkina garo moha Escape is difficult as infatuation

erP TRrr 1fl d jani gara bhagavan favor us, bhagavan. by

Ihami bhulechhau.... (We have gone astray...1

ma hu~ merai sabchij I (exist); everything said to be

Ihami bhulechhau...I (We have gone astray...l

[ C %M1... Ihami bhulechhau... [We have gone astray...

(Bhaktaraj Acharya [Samarpan: Nepali bhajans (142)])

Handler, Richard, and Jocelyn Linnekin. 1984. "Tradition,Genuine or Spurious."Journal of

You might also like