At an all-night songfest in Nepal's Gorkha district, during the festival of Chandi Purnima in late May, a dohori song took a surprising turn: the male singer asked his female partner to take him away with her, the opposite of traditional custom.

After consulting with her friends, she responded:

His response, in turn, was: "Pheri timi hasera bola na--Naya Nepal, naya ho chalana!" (Speak laughingly again--it's a New Nepal, the customs are new too!)

New Nepal, New Customs

The term "New Nepal" originally referred to a new political system, but it has come to stand for all the changes, political and social, that are currently taking place in Nepal. The question hangs in the air: What will it be like, this New Nepal on which so many have pinned their hopes? Will gender hierarchies be overturned, as suggested in the exchange above? What of the old should be left behind, what of the new should be embraced? Changes are happening fast, and it is often hard to decide whether they should be lauded as bikas (development) or denounced as bikriti (degeneration). One musical genre that embodies much of this dilemma is Nepali dohori song.

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Dohori is a form of question-answer song, sung between men and women, that is performed with diverse variations throughout the foothills of the Nepal Himalaya. The term dohori means "back and forth," referring to the exchange of improvised couplets between singers. Dohori has its roots in a practice found all over the rural Nepali hills--that of negotiating love and marriage through song, particularly among Nepal's indigenous janajati ethnic groups, whose restrictions on interaction between the sexes are much looser than those of Hindu caste societies. Dohori singers play with language, shortening or lengthening words to fit into the prescribed twenty- or twenty-eight-syllable couplets, using local variants of words to ensure perfect rhymes. Clever, improvised lyrics are highly valued, as are vocal virtuosity and a rollicking beat on the madal drum that lures bystanders to dance.

Within the last decade, as armed conflict and economic hardship in rural Nepal have sent more and more migrants to the capital and abroad, this rural hill-based genre has become a nationwide commercial phenomenon. Dohori recordings now form the sales base for almost all Nepali music companies, and over fifty Kathmandu nightclub/ restaurants present nightly performances. Migrant workers visit dohori restaurants to indulge in memories of their villages by singing with restaurant performers or listening and dancing to others' performances; village youths travel to Kathmandu to perform in the restaurants, with dreams of making it in the music industry. Nationwide competitions fuel their hopes, offering cash prizes and the opportunity to travel to compete in new locales. Kathmandu-recorded dohori songs now echo through the most distant villages, as they circulate on cassette, DVD, radio, and television. The restaurant/nightclub trend has caught on in cities throughout Nepal. The dohori industry promotes its products as cultural heritage, as the music of the people, as the sound of the nation. From the village to the urban market and back again in commodified form--as in many parts of the world, where what ethnomusicologist Steven Feld has dubbed "celebratory" and "anxious" narratives come into conflict in attempts to describe and evaluate rapid changes--people worry: Are we "developing" dohori, raising it to new heights, or have we sold our integrity?

Traditional Aspects: Dohori's Rural Heritage

When asked to describe the traditional con text of dohori, most people first mention nighttime songfests such as the Gurung ethnic group's Rodhi: a structured context in which young, unmarried men and women meet to sing all night long, accompanied only by the madal drum. Men seated on one side, women on the other, leaders sing couplets back and forth in an improvised conversational duet. Whoever runs out of couplets first "loses." If the man wins, he wins the right to marry the woman; if the woman wins, she wins the right to remain single. The object is to keep on improvising clever lyrics; legendary singers of past generations are said to have gone on for seven days and nights. Krishna Gurung of the National Cultural Organization explains how songs would evolve: first singers would acknowledge the place, outsiders extolling the virtues of the surroundings in which they now found themselves. Then the song would move on to introductions, and then perhaps to more flirtatious topics. When it was time for the song to end, often at the break of day, singers would say farewell until the next time they met in song. Then and now, many situations exist in which people improvise couplets back and forth for fun, but with no marital obligations at stake. Ten years of armed conflict almost ended nighttime gatherings in rural Nepal; they are just beginning to make a comeback as the country takes steps toward peace. Even so, it is the nighttime songfests and their flirtatious banter that have caught the public's fancy and provide the model for dohori in other contexts--national competitions, urban restaurants, and the recording industry.

Dohori Competitions: Festivals and Fairs

Perhaps the road to today's dohori began in 1983, when a member of the Ministry of Education and Sports, Sharad Chandra Shah, began a nationwide tournament-style dohori competition in conjunction with the Nepali National Games. Competitions also caught on with other organizations and remain popular to this day. Teams of three men and three women each compete in turn, one team's men singing opposite the other team's women, then vice versa. In the beginning, teams placing first, second, and third at regional levels qualified to compete in Kathmandu for cash prizes and the chance to record at Radio Nepal, then the nation's only radio station. Today the cash prize remains, but the rise of multiple FM stations and the growth of the recording industry has made the lure of Radio Nepal nearly obsolete. According to Amar Birahi Gurung, former chairman of the National Folk and Dohori Song Academy, the competitions brought more non-janajatis to dohori as both performers and audience members and raised its level of nationwide prestige. Today's competitions are often part of "county fair" types of festivals, where dohori is the main attraction, drawing audiences of all ages by the thousands. The academy now runs the national-level competitions and tries to keep some control over what people sing. Judges and emcees remind performers to sing polite, easy lyrics, with words that all can "digest" and understand; party politics, caste discrimination, and explicit sexual reference are banned. Teams choose popular tunes and sing songs of introduction, fondly or angrily remembered love, shared school days, the pain of separation. After competing successfully, many dohori singers leave their villages to try their luck in the restaurants of the district centers, making their way toward Kathmandu and dreams of stardom.

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Kathmandu Dreams: Restaurant Dohori

When people of all castes, ethnic groups, and cultures from all over Nepal come together in Kathmandu, familiar contextual restrictions on singing, dancing, and interacting with the opposite sex no longer hold sway. One must learn new rules, new ways of singing, new ways of carrying oneself onstage. No longer is the object to sing for a long time, but rather to satisfy as many customers as possible. This makes for shorter songs and more direct lyrics, as singers must quickly get to the point. Sometimes singers will sing with partners onstage, other times with patrons. While sexual innuendo and erotic metaphor are appreciated in village and competition dohori, urban nightclubs often stress this aspect to the extreme. If, in her village, it was taboo for a woman to sing explicitly about desiring a man, in Kathmandu dohori restaurants there are male patrons demanding exactly that.

Female singers must learn to please customers without promising them too much, as newbie singer Junu found out when her insincere promises to spend the night with her song-partner led this customer to start a fight with the bouncers. Veteran restaurant singer Mina took a large salary cut after getting angry with a male guest who kept lewdly asking to "drink the nectar from this beautiful flower." When she shot him down as an "overly greedy bumblebee," he and his companions left without paying, the responsibility for this loss of business falling squarely on Mina's head. Male singers also sometimes have difficulties adjusting to the fast pace of restaurant dohori, where their more poetic couplets may be ignored in favor of more titillating lyrical fare.

Not only do lyrics change from village to restaurant dohori--the way performers use their bodies has also changed significantly. Dohori restaurant singers used to perform seated in the manner of a nighttime village gathering, with instrumentalists seated among them onstage, separated from the dance floor by a railing. Then, dance-bar don Chhiring Sherpa went into the dohori business and ordered all his singers to stand up and dance. The trend spread, and now not a single one of Kathmandu's fifty-plus dohori restaurants boasts seated performers. The last to go was Laligurans Dohori Sanjh, near the long-distance bus station in northern Kathmandu. "It was the artists who made the choice," says owner Kiran Sherchan. "They think it looks better, and we have to compete with the other places."

The trend toward dance performance in dohori came at a time when competition was fierce among dohori restaurants, each looking for a way to outdo or to keep up with the others. It was not long before some dohori restaurants began to follow the dance bars' lead in other ways: namely, by getting into the sex business. Female dohori singers, for the most part, are not prostitutes. But the waitresses at many dohori restaurants are strongly encouraged, if not forced, by owners to sell sex as well. Former dohori singer Menuka Thapa, who now runs an NGO to prevent young girls from being forced into the sex trade, recalls the way it was when she worked in a dohori restaurant: "The police, the army, gangster-type men would demand girls from the owners, and the owners were afraid to say no. They would force the waitresses to go. We artists got a little more respect, but it was still hard."

Menuka formed a successful employee's union at her restaurant, but she was subsequently harassed into leaving the business altogether. As she works with foreign volunteers to implement the programs of her NGO, Rakshya (Protection) Nepal, she still becomes wistful when she remembers her dreams of becoming a singer.

Dohori and the Recording Industry

"Most of the music companies these days are actually dohori companies--that's all they produce. We try to produce a little bit of everything, but we wouldn't be able to survive without lok dohori." Santosh Sharma, founder of Music Nepal, Nepal's first private music company, describes dohori's importance to his business. While he includes solo folk (lok) songs in couplet form in his use of "dohori," this is merely a technicality as these songs, too, are often sung as dohori when they are picked up by the competition and restaurant circuit. The recording industry these days provides the tunes used in most settings where dohori is sung--be it a remote village or a Kathmandu restaurant. FM stations, TV dohori programs, and brisk cassette sales ensure that the same dohori songs are heard all over the nation.

It comes as a surprise to many dohori fans when they first learn that the lyrics to the dohori they hear on recordings are pre-written, not improvised. Recorded dohori songs are worked on as poems, with lyricists aiming for narrative unity and perfect rhymes. In the dohori recording industry, more so than any other aspect of the dohori world, it is the voice that reigns supreme. Most of the famous studio dohori singers cannot improvise a single line; instead, they have risen to fame through their voices. Veteran studio singer Bima Kumari Dura, known to many as "the voice of village Nepal," explains why her live performances are few and far between: "I wanted to be known for my voice alone." Being known as a voice alone has its merits for female singers--the rest of their bodies, and their private lives, are safer from commodification and exploitation. In the studio, matronly, sari-clad women in their mid-thirties give voice to adolescent longing, and because multitrack recording allows parts of a song to be recorded in isolation, they may never meet the male counterparts in their songs or even know what their lyrics are. Their honor remains intact, and their fame grows with every song they sing, free from the difficulties faced by those who depend on their bodies in performance.

However, these days it is almost impossible to get one's start as a studio singer, and aspiring singers of both sexes find themselves performing in Kathmandu restaurants more often than not. Not having to sing in a restaurant is a measure of success; many restaurant performers dream of the day when they can reap royalties from albums and leave the drudgery of the restaurant stage behind for invitations to perform overseas. A few recently successful female studio singers, such as Sarmila Gurung and Shila Ale, have maintained restaurant careers well after gaining fame as recording artists. The verdict is still out on what this all means: have these singers' successes made the restaurant profession more acceptable for women, or has the recording industry just stooped to a "lower level"? Rita Thapa Magar, currently among the highest-paid female restaurant performers in Kathmandu, has two albums to her credit, along with a bachelor's degree, and many years of music and dance lessons. "I tried to quit working at night (in dohori) and find some other day job," she says. "But I just couldn't leave. It's addictive!"

Like the legendary dohori songs that lasted for days and nights, discussions about the changes in dohori and their wider social implications seem to go on endlessly. Those who bemoan these changes complain that lyrics are getting too "free" in both recorded and improvised dohori; competitions are rigged; the restaurants are a center for prostitution; all in all, the commercialization of this form of cultural heritage is a stain on Nepali honor. Ganja Singh Gurung, who opened Kathmandu's second dohori restaurant in 1998, says he was motivated by his desire to preserve Gurung culture and to bring this hill-country art form to the city for the sake of Nepali identity. But, he continues, the lofty motives of cultural preservation that the industry continues to invoke have now become little more than a sham. Others such as Sharad Chandra Shah, whose original competitions gave a flagging tradition new life in a new context, are more optimistic, focusing on the potentials offered by the competitions, the restaurants, and the recording industry to continue dohori and lead it in new directions. "Now no matter what happens, dohori will not be forgotten," he opines. New contexts for dohori performance create new social boundaries even as they contribute to changing old ones, and dohori's presence in so many different aspects of Nepali life ensures that it can't be easily dismissed. As Nepalis of all backgrounds focus on shaping the future of their nation, dohori will continue to play a part in the ongoing conversation among diverse voices of the New Nepal.

Columbia University