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

8/9/2019 Nepal - Emotion and Devotion, Lingering and Longing in Some Nepali Songs

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Society for Ethnomusicology

Emotion and Devotion, Lingering and Longing in Some Nepali SongsAuthor(s): David HendersonSource: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 40, No. 3, Special Issue: Music and Religion (Autumn, 1996), pp.440-468Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for EthnomusicologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/852471

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ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

Emotion and Devotion, Lingeringand Longing in Some Nepali SongsDAVID HENDERSON UNIVERSITYOF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Two interwoven threads hold this article together.' Put loosely, one istheoretically motivated and the other is practically entwined. In thetheoretical 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 designedto 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 makesexperiences 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 inKathmandu, Nepal, in 1987, 1994, and 1995, I investigate in this work theprospects for a richer language to describe the ways that sound works toaffect its users.

Emotion and devotion take similar forms and express themselves througheach other's words in bhajan. But this is certainly not always true: devotioncan also detach itself from feelings and send itself out to experience a divineform which is radically beyond emotional content. I draw from everydayNepali expressions here: emotion and devotion seem to do the work them-selves, affecting those who experience and talk about them while sometimesdisplacing the individual's responsibility for manipulating sentiment. And asNepali words for emotions stick to the senses, and words for devotion maygrasp at a divine beyond the senses, in song lyrics composers of Nepalibhajans 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

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VOL.40, NO. 3 FALL1996


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Emotion and Devotion 441

subjectivity.Poets and musicians thus give listenersa space to make their ownconnections, a space to fillambiguouspronouns and oblique references withpersonal experiences of love and longing. AnandaCoomaraswamy,referringto traditionalIndianartmusic, suggests that music is not only for well-trainedartists: "the listener must respond with an art of his own" (1991:103). Like-wise, listeners in Nepal must close hermeneutic circles opened by singerswith artistic remembrances, making songs meaningful in the confluence ofambiguous words and resonant memory. And this is where embodiment-vague as the term may appearif left as a theoretical seed-takes root in whatI know about songs through singing, listening, and talking about songs inNepal, giving shape to a sense that words are not just artifacts-song texts,transcriptions,or translations.In practice, words provoke a remembered andremembering body to hear them through the senses as well as in the brain:words are interlopers between singer and listener, ethnomusicologist andinformant,American andNepali, thatengage uniquelywith the minds, hearts,and lives they enter.In examining the intersection of or distinction between emotion anddevotion, then, I also want to draw in some of the discursive features ofNepali language use and link bodily experience with Nepali styles of ver-bal expression. This approach to bodily knowledge skews perceptibly fromthe methodology of anthropologist Michael Jackson, who considers "theintellectualist 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 byshowing how human experience is grounded in bodily movement withina social and material environment, and examining at the level of event theinterplay between habitual patterns of body use and conventional ideasabout the world" (ibid.:330). Instead, I examine emotional experience asit is verballydepicted and musically conveyed at the level of text and event,and try to show how habitual patterns of feeling emotion and devotionconnect 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 seenin social interaction, much of which is verbal" (Abu-Lughod and Lutz1990:10-11). My sense of how some emotions in the Nepali language canactively and publicly fix themselves on the individual diverts my argumentfrom a path which would lead through the intellectual clarity of languageand mind deep into a phenomenological obscurity of emotion and body; Iinstead find myself meandering along a trailwhere mind and body, languageand 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


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442 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1996as veridically referential to some internal state" (ibid.: 11). Lila Abu-Lughodand Catherine Lutz's work in bringing emotion out of the private realm ofpersonal (and therefore ethnographically suspect) feelings accords withNepali 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 notuniformly) 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 tobe classified, labelled, and performed or sold as bhajans. They are songsto gods, songs about gods. As a performance event, bhajan can be a looselyorganized sequence in which at certain points performers can incorporatea wide variety of song styles, from traditional group hymn-singing withharmonium and tabala accompaniment to rock music cassette-playing withguitar and bass accompaniment. But bbajan performances are not alwaysopen-ended nor tacitly traditional. There are also, for example, numerousRamayana bhajan groups in and beyond the Kathmandu valley, many ofwhich perform a fixed (printed) sequence of songs. And in recent years,the Gyanmald bhajan group centered around the Buddhist stupa ofSwayambu, just west of Kathmandu, has been active in creating a new tradi-tion by composing, singing, and recording bhajans in the Newari language.2In this article I give most of my attention to the genre of bhajan. Thetwo bhajans I transcribe and discuss below were composed by BhaktarajAcharya, a singer who studied with the versatile singer and former musicdirector of Radio Nepal, Krishna Narayan Shrestha; the style of Acharya'scompositions draws upon modern practices developed by numerous art-ists since the advent of Radio Nepal in 1950. Briefly, songs with tabaldaccompaniment are lightly orchestrated with instruments associated withboth Western music ("paschimi git")-guitars, mandolins, violins, and clari-nets-and traditional Nepali music-mddals and other drums, bdsuris andother flutes (see Grandin 1995a, Gurung 1992:40-46). These two piecesare set against an example of Nepali sastriya sangit (Nepalese "classicalmusic": the English bears the same undertone of specialist aesthetic behav-ior implied by sastriya-scripturally sanctioned, derived from the sastrasof 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 bbajanmusic, which some Nepalis consider a dying practice (while others imag-ine it to be an ongoing, unchanging aspect of Nepali culture). Telestheticallyand microphonically, I try to close the gap between song text and sociallife by partially transcribing my senses of what it means to perform or ex-perience bhajan in Kathmandu.


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Emotion and Devotion 443

My senses need a more detailed map, though. Engaging with recentwork on embodiment as a descriptive and analytic paradigm that (partlyinfluenced by phenomenology) goes beyond a necessarily reductive beliefin 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, andreproduces something that might loosely be called the self. It implies thatidentity is never a fixed entity, but must be organized consistently aroundsocial and historical circumstances. It is a way of refiguring the self, a meansof 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 laidfor myself on my way through emotion and devotion. Sometimes the ob-jects of psychological or philosophically-oriented studies, selves are notnecessarily the discrete independent shapes they assume in Cartesian writ-ings, working in isolation from culture and society at large. While it isdifficult not to elide phrases in which the self appears as an autonomousphilosophical entity with phrases where the self is fashioned around specificgeographies (see Trawick 1990, 1991), I need to be reminded of what I willsay in some detail later: Nepalis have different ways of being themselves.George Marcus insisted that "the self be discussed in terms of the specificsof the genres in which it is pragmatically developed and apprehended inthe research process" (1991:10); taking another step in this direction, theself becomes the embodied meeting ground of variegated social practicesand 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 comewith the aim of affecting a transformation (temporary or permanent) of theself-in bhajan, using the self as the vehicle to explore the divine. The ev-eryday self becomes the devotionally enamored self, which in turn becomesa part of the everyday self. This blurring of mundane and spiritual bound-aries-boundaries which are rarely marked in many everyday lives inNepal-suggests that embodiment as a motivated and motivating practiceis never concluded or closed off: each ritual and musical moment in whichselves become newly embodied in turn opens up further opportunities forremaking the self-and begins to answer my questions about how bhajanmusic works.

Trekking through South Asian Devotional Song PracticesThoroughly tracing the geographic flow of similarities and differencesin 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


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444 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1996name: what might be called a kirtan in one place may sound like what asinger somewhere else calls a bhajan, and the difference in name is notenough to overcome some similarities of practice. My erratic path throughother writers' words on South Asian devotional song practices moves-withseveral diversions-from Banaras in Uttar Pradesh, India (Slawek 1986), toGujarati-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 (Grandin1989), 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 (froma 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 bywhich 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 relationswith a past through their practices. This is to say that claims to traditionare not empty associations with an undifferentiated and unchanging past,but are references fraught with the peculiar histories of the individuals whomake use of the past, "attributing meaning to the present through makingreference to the past" (Handler and Linnekin 1984:287). Slawek historicallygrounds the manifold meanings of North Indian devotional song practicesin 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 Tewari1974:120]) contrasts with a scriptural Hinduism: the former allows for akind of moksa ("release" from the cycle of rebirth) through intense andtotal participation in ritual worship, while the latter demands the piecemealachievement 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 kirtansongs as translocal genres, since often the terms are interchangeable, fre-quently not (ibid.:70-71). The presumed transparency of genre categories isespecially problematic in South Asia because of the diversity of linguisticpractices, which sometimes leads to wild and wide-ranging correspondencesbased on a name that have no substantiation in social practice. Without dis-counting memorable differences, I consider bhajan, kirtan, and bhajankavvali (the last from Brenneis 1985, 1987, 1991) to be relatively similarmanifestations of song traditions emanating from a large region encompass-ing North India (particularly areas dominated by Hinduism) and Nepal.


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Emotion and Devotion 445Gordon 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 Hinduvalues are embedded in class and regional interests (ibid.:81-125), Thomp-son identifies bhajan singing especially with middle-class bourgeoisie andHindu gribastha ("householder": the second of the four stages of a devoutHindu's life) aims. Moksa, release, is the result of judicious mixtures of threebasic elements of Hindu social life-dharma ("duty"), artha ("purpose" or[use] "value"), and kama ([intellectually sensual] "pleasure")-and it isparticularly 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 ringstrue 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 (oftenattributed to medieval bhakti poets near the end of each poem) that theysing, singing more for the embodied pleasures of being and acting together.Frequently in Nepal, bhajans are sung by men, and the unofficial membersof 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 achievemoksa" (ibid.:92); through bhajan one can temporarily experience anegalitarian divine.For Laxmi Tewari, bhajan and kirtan are devotional forms of folkmusic, which in turn "reveals the inner self of the people, portrayed inpristine beauty" (1974:211). Depicting the seasonal cycles of a life intimatelygrounded in the soil, Tewari places devotional songs-here, also, the ritualprovince of men (ibid.:24)-within this cycle, important in both daily lifeand in festivals, especially duringjanmastami, the celebration of Krishna'sbirth (ibid.:81-120). Tewari fears that folk music will "be swallowed by thegrowing hunger of modernization" (ibid.: 16), "lost to the winds of modern-ization" (ibid.:210). Certainly, if Tewari had been with me at the HimalayanGuest House in Kathmandu the day I returned in May, 1994, he would havefound his fears well-grounded in Nepal, also: when I told one teenagerworking there that I was studying bhajan and classical music, he notedpolitely that such things were only found in books and in the practices ofold men. A devout "international" and Nepali popular music aficionado, hehas already relegated bhajan to a past lost amidst modern sounds. Andwhile ethnomusicologists of late may presume that "pristine beauty" is athing of the past, and that attempts to find it in current practices reify thedifferences between those first-worlders who change and those third- andfourth-worlders who remain the same, questions about authenticity and the


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446 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1996pleasure of untouched music often do remain active locally. I want to keepopen the question of how Nepali musicians make explicit connectionsbetween change and identity, how changes in song style suggest changeswrought on the self. That is, I want to keep alive the sense that music doesin fact reveal something about "the inner self'-or, rather, "innerselves"-selves which in bhajan music are also outer selves (inscribed on the bodyof 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(Acharyan.d.) called "Samarpan,"a Nepali and Hindiword meaning "dedi-cation"or "handingover."I bought this cassette in 1987 in Kathmandu,andsaw a copy of it still available in 1994.

rT3 TRTif T

[ icrT ...]mFf 4 ft rt t

TfdK1fPTrcfzrT

crd lqqt siqT) if4i -4l4 t W-ET

f,4t T0I2 TfU[Kt w...i Tf ...31

q- Fff~ r


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Emotion and Devotion 447I{ fid tt rN?TT ma viSayi bandhanama I am in a prison of (mychhu own) senses;'fr:nt -qr,T-j ai timi phukau come and set (me)free.[;5qK GM ...T I.. lfaba jaba...bhagavan...l [whenever...bhagavan...

(Bhaktaraj Acharya [Samarpan: Nepali bhajans])*Bhagavan is an encompassing word for "god,"its usual translation. An "undifferentiatedgodhead" (Gellner 1992:73), bhagavan is an unspecific and common name for addressingand referring to a divine presence.Bhava sdgar, in the second section, is an idiomatic poetic expression inNepali and Hindi meaning "ocean of existence." In this song, the sensual,material world becomes this ocean upon which the boat ("nau") of lifefloats. Life is in constant danger of sinking into this ocean, and there aremany obstacles ("sankata"); nonetheless, the individual manages to stayafloat through devotion. Devotion itself is often expressed through termsof 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 thesenses-the path illuminated and shown by bhagavan-that the self cantouch the divine.

Embodiment and the Path to the DivineEdward 0. Henry, just prior to his discussion of men's devotional songsin Bhojpuri-speaking India (1988:118-43), starts to get at just what it isabout music that makes it so compelling, so experientially distinct from

other forms of expression. Extrapolating from Radcliffe-Brown's discussionof dance in The Andaman Islanders (1964), Henry writes that "singinggives pleasure to the individual in several ways" (1988:117). Through playand exertion, individuals receive pleasure sensually-in the body. Throughexhibition and coordination, individuals receive pleasure socially, from theirability to participate competently in the activities of the group-on andbeyond the body. Drawing on a structural-functional map of culture, Henrytraces a common distinction between the individual (the center of experi-ence and thought) and society (the source of production and meaning). Butthis distinction cuts at precisely that line, inscribed on a theoretical dividebetween psychology and anthropology, where music becomes compelling:it is the apparition that one's personal experience is resonating so stronglywith the experiences of others, the sense that one's own sensations are notonly reflections but also vibrating amplifications of a social experience, thatultimately gives pleasure. Henry indeed makes a similar point when he


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448 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1996suggests that the energy that singers have drawn from participation isintensified by the "collective states of emotion" they have summoned upwithin themselves (ibid.: 117). However, such performed consonances willstill be noisy with dissonances of individual experience and emotion, andmore work on how the senses make themselves felt socially, how societymakes itself felt sensually, should help splice together the tracks of cultureand self. The "regulated tumult" (Durkheim 1973:179) of the harikirtansthat Henry discusses moves Bhojpuri-speaking villagers (if they're anythinglike Kathmandu denizens) toward a collective-yet variegated-experienceof the divine through a clangorous auspiciousness: a massive sound thatcannot be denied or ignored, insisting that it be experienced simulta-neously-but not identically-by all.3Embodiment-a practical theory of how theory is practiced-resituatesthe language of experience by erasing the line between the individual andsociety. It finds the resonances of the social within individuals, who con-sistently incorporate fragments-excerpts of identity-gathered from otherindividuals rather than from an anonymous culture lurking in the shadows.While compounding the meaning of the social, the individual embodies theself, which is the miming coordinator of person attached mimetically toother selves. Embodiment moves beyond a purely functional approach tothe relations between music, emotion, and affect: there is no longer a linebetween the individual and society, but an infinite series of shifting pointswhere the individual is in society at the same time that society is in theindividual. The distinction that Henry makes between personal pleasure andsocial gratification becomes lost, missing in action; moving too quickly tosettle in one place, action and experience become fixed only in the pathsof 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 andsociety, but also a boundary between the mind and the body. These effortsrefuse to believe in a fictional (reputedly objective) world inhabited bypurely rational agents making logical choices on their way across the pla-teau of culture, and instead imagine a place where people move through aterrain where memory and the senses mingle, making thoughtful andfeelingful decisions that can be at once effective and affective. E. P. Thomp-son, arguing against Althusserian structuralism-which makes a similardistinction between society and individuals by positing a split between "thereal" and knowledge of the real-imagines a like-minded world: "the realis not 'out there' and thought within the quiet lecture-theatre of our heads,'inside here.' Thought and being inhabit a single space, which space isourselves. 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


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Emotion and Devotion 449'real' we experience our own palpable reality" (1978:18). Similarly, thereality 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 throughmemory, it must live countless unique lives that overlap in myriaddimen-sions, and must resound time and againin 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. Aself segmented by any presumed autonomy of the individual may have theright of way on some discursive paths, but is never the sole owner of theground 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 fleshas sensual alternatives to what are perceived to be visually biased theoriesof knowledge prevalent in the social sciences. Several writers have workedto privilege the senses by setting theories of embodiment up against dis-course-centered approaches-but by assuming discourse to be associatedwith a kind of visual rationalitythat might be produced by turning talk intotexts. In his work on Body and Emotion in the Nepal Himalayas,RobertDesjarlais points out "atendency in contemporary anthropology to privi-lege the linguistic, the discursive, and the cognized over the visceral andthe tacit. Largelyneglected has been the realm of the senses, the sufferingsof 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 toethnomusicologists in particular, denying "the discursive" also objectifies(and mystifies) the body, carving it up into discursive (visual or vocal) andexperiential (sensual) realms. Cut off from what it has to say, the soulfulbody becomes a mystery of the flesh.Like Desjarlais, Paul Stoller argues that "embodiment is not primarilytextual" (1994:636), working instead from a notion of the sensitive body,"amajorrepository of cultural memories" (ibid.:638). One kind of culturalmemory which Stoller is especially interested in is habit (cf. Bourdieu's"habitus" 1977]), which resides explicitly in bodily motions: "Habits some-thing that does not lend itself to the visual bias that is central to discursiveanalysis. In their insistence on the discursive, scholars transform thefigurative into language and text-into discourse. And yet our memoriesare never purely personal, purely cognitive, or purely textual" (Stoller1994:638). However, discourse is not always textual, not necessarily visu-ally biased.tHaving listened to and engaged in endless hours of gossip andcross-talkabout music and politics while drinkingsweet tea in the rainnext


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450 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1996to a Kathmandu road bearing a seemingly endless supply of late-eveningdiesel trucks, I am convinced that some local discourses embody the sensesjust as much as cultural meanings are embodied in individual practices.While Desjarlais and Stoller both offer useful critiques and alternatives to avisual bias in the highly textual genres of anthropology, I want to leave someperceptual space open for local discursive styles. Certainly, "modalities ofperception inform theories of knowledge" (Young 1994:7), and a sense ofhow we see the world may deleteriously impact what we think and writeabout how others build theirs; but theories can hardly remain fixed tospecific modalities, and instead must locate and relocate themselves in thecross-modal shifts between memory, the senses, and experience. Likewise,local theories of knowledge (and of the self) are embodied not only byKathmandu bhajan singers, but also in Nepali songs, song texts, and talkabout songs.

Finding sources in both Bourdieu's embodiment through practice (1977,1984) and Merleau-Ponty's embodiment through perception (1962), ThomasCsordas postulates that "the body is not an object to be studied in relationto culture, but is to be considered as the subject of culture, or in other wordsas 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 callsBourdieu'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 asubject-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 issocial because those experiences are never produced in isolation.

Making a case for "'contaminated' cultural critique," Kathleen Stewartargues against the kind of intersubjectivity (cf. Schutz 1967 [1932]) thatCsordas uses to get around objectivity: "'contaminated' deconstructive theo-rizing disrupts the distance between observing subject and the 'real' worldof objects; it mixes with its object and includes itself as an object of its ownanalysis" (1991:395). Culture is not an object sunk in the subjective depthsof individuals waiting for an ethnographer to come and fish it out; it is anobject made between ethnographers and their objects: it is crucial to rec-ognize "not only that discourse is socially constructed but also that the socialis discursively constructed" (ibid.:398), and Stewart urges that in order tomake any sense of ethnographic work, it is necessary to recognize howethnographers' discourses are entangled with their objects (ibid.:400).


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Emotion and Devotion 451"Speakingfrom within the object spoken of' (ibid. :411), the ethnographertells tales that keep objects on the move and in and out of touch with eachother. Moving, touching: Stewart refuses to back off from the discursivestuff that fixes attention and holds it for a moment before moving on.Meanwhile, for Csordas, embodiment is also, as I noted earlier, a wayto bypass the duality between mind and body: "thought in the strict senseis itself embodied" and culture is "embodied from the outset," so the bodycannot be separated from the mind because "ourbodies are not objects tous" (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 (CharismaticChristianhealers and their patients) rather than interrogating his own position (as aphenomenologically oriented psychological anthropologist). Stewart,on theother hand, is most concerned with opening up the dialogue implicit infieldwork, giving it some room in the construction of the ethnographic text.Csordas's work gets him out into a place where Charismatic Christiansconstruct culture, idiosyncratically yet collaboratively, around their prac-tices; Stewart's work takes her into the hills of West Virginiawhere folksare alwaysmakingsomething 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 PracticeBoth of these styles of movement intersect with my questions of howmusic works, how sounds resound: certainly my thoughts on how emotionexpresses itself in and through song come both from what I have made ofperformances and talkabout songs and fromwhat specifically has come out

of my own presence among friends and teachers in Nepal-vocal instruc-tion, talk about musical differences, multi-lingual nterpretations of "doublemeanings"and metaphors, songs provoked by offhand remarks. But I'm notquite ready to traverse that intersection. I want to linger for a moment onthe sort of entanglement and contamination that Stewart talks about, butby talking about entangled things-especially ritual things-objects thattake on subjectivities by mediating between peoples and places. In En-tangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in thePacific, Nicholas Thomas (1991) works to "makeexchange into a prism forseeing what [an anthropological] discourse [on exchange] excluded-theuneven entanglement of local and global power relations on colonial pe-ripheries, particularlyas these have been manifested in capacities to defineand 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


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452 Etbnomusicology, Fall 1996symbolic system, but is also a worldly practice in which both homemadeand imported goods take on new values, meanings, and significances in eachnew encounter. Suggesting that "objects are not what they were made tobe but what they have become" (ibid.:3), Thomas pries things loose fromtheir 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-openfield of possible meanings. Things become what they are not because ofauthentic meanings intrinsic to objects themselves, but because they areimagined to carry meanings that may change but appear to be fixed. Ob-jects become fixed, objectified, because limited interpretations of anobject's meanings circulate in particular communities. And by appropriat-ing a discourse about itself, an object makes its presence felt and influencesthe continued circulation of its meanings.I am not riddling here, only refashioning Thomas's consideration ofhow power relations rework the object in order to hang on to the shiftingpower that the object itself has to drag subjects into its "affecting presence"(Armstrong 1971). As meanings become fixed in a community throughdiscourse (communicated experience of the object), the object seems topossess autochthonously those traits that it was given. I stress that thesemeanings are vibrant and active in memory and imagination, yet often sta-bilize in discourse (for bhajans, in talk and song). Objects embody bothmeaning and value, but "circulate in different regimes of value in spaceand 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 theyacquire through exchange, when the object must make its presence feltanew 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, assound vehicles that contain the imprints of emotional imagery and devo-tional sentiment, I contaminate the objective presence of the song with anequally objective collaboration of perception, memory, and identity. "Mne-monic processes are intertwined with the sensory order in such a manneras to render each perception a re-perception" (Seremetakis 1994:9), so thatwhen songs speak to the senses through sound, metaphor, and icon, theyengage momentarily and uniquely with remembered sounds, metaphors,and icons. Gods, lovers, and fools-the moving objects entangled inbhajans 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


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Emotion and Devotion 453fix the meaning of the object in the ritual itself delegitimate the prospectsfor individual ownership (of the experiential object). Bhajan is a repeti-tively structured performance event that explicitly works toward collectiveexperience, and to make that experience happen participantsneed to holdmeanings 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 fromand directed back toward the group, away from the individual. I mentionedearlyon that I wanted to trace the similarities of expression of emotion anddevotion in bhajans to such expression elsewhere in the Kathmandu val-ley; this comes from my desire to elaborate on ritualmeanings by showingboth how those meanings feed upon the everyday world and how Nepalisuse ritual meanings to interpret their everyday world. For a very differentplace and for different activities, C. Nadia Seremetakis proposes"ritualization" s a way to make ritualexperience more heterogeneous withother dimensions of culture (1991:47). Avoiding a linear narration of deathrituals in Inner Mani (Greece), she defines ritualization "as the processualrepresentation of death in a variety of social contexts and practices that donot have the formal status of a public rite. The concept of ritualizationmoves the analysisof death rites away from performances fixed in time andspace and resituates it within the flux and contingency of everyday events.It is from ongoing and discontinuous everyday experience that certainevents 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 platformhousing a deity's image andsome musical instruments)may spatiallydistance bhajan singing from othereveryday experiences, the songs themselves draw upon extraordinarilyordinary events and signs that inscribe devotion as a cultural form. Thepaths of memory and habitus thus become the primaryroutes toward theexplanation of ritualexpression, as objects found in song become chargedthrough "discontinuous everyday experience." By specifying particularkinds of experiences as privileged sites for the imagination of objects,bhajan singers create a community of sung objects that resound againsteveryday lives and heighten the sense of collectivity embodied in perfor-mance. And performance implies participation:bhajan musicians performdedicated seva ("service") to gods, while bhajan listeners perform feats ofmemory 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 wereloud and generally unrehearsed. Tourists and locals moved in and out, in-


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454 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1996strumentswere passed around,strainingvoices cracked andfaded, and onceat Swayambu a brass band stuck its notes into a bhajan when it camewalking through at seven in the morning. The cassette that I have beenlistening to while writing this contains a different kind of bhajan-bal-anced, refined, and well-rehearsed (Acharya n.d.). The singer is picturedon the cover (camera tilted slightly upward), dressed simply in white,framedby Himalayasand faded blue sky. Full of modem studio sounds (clari-nets, violins, guitars), the cassette nevertheless suggests itself, through itscontent and its compositional and performative styles, to be a traditionalform of devotional expression. I want to suggest that there are two kindsof poetic and aesthetic practices at work in different kinds of music inNepal:one anticipatesthe fullness of the experience and the other producesfullness 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 coordinatedsound, and pull selves into that space through their own sounding bodies.Text-centered performances compose fullness into the song itself-madeauspicious by the abundance of poetic and musical relations prescribed init-and lure the minds of the listeners into spiritualcontemplation throughthe 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. Mindfulparticipa-tion is the heart of textual bhajans; solo performers, through their ownedifying play, work to provide "anopportunity for both solitude and so-cial connection" (Lipsitz 1993:xv). The fullness of the experience makesthe divine resound in the bodies of bhajan participants; the fullness of thetext 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 asthe balancing forces to each other in diverse kinds of expression in Nepal.One bears the mark of social participation, the other the seal of individualcontemplation. Both are forces that move Nepalis themselves towards imagi-native configurationsof culture and society. Throughnationallyengenderedpersonal ideologies of bikas ("development"or "growth,"with implicationsof "evolution" and "improvement:"see Pigg 1992), these two forms havetaken on complicated meanings: the fullness of the experience can be as-sociated with rurallife and its current musical representative, lok git ("folksong")and the fullness of the text can be ascribedto urbanlife and adbunikgit ("modern"or "dynamicsong").4But each of these associations can bereversed as well: the fullness of the experience echoes the dissonance andpressure of modem city life, while the fullness of the text harks back to apristine and contemplative view of the countryside, recollected from afarin dusty (or muddy) city streets and roadside shops choked with exhaust.


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Emotion and Devotion 455My bifurcation, for song, primarilyindexes a difference in how each

practice works upon memory, yet also suggests differences in how Nepalisproduce themselves out of memory through singing or listening. The dif-ferent song genres available on cassette, in concerts, on the radio, and insitting 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 organizationsand internationalaid agencies,legible on the streets through a diversity of signs such as road-buildingprojects, special license plates for foreign service vehicles, and billboardslike the Shikhar ("top, peak, summit") cigarette ad showing a very paleNepali 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. Amidstthe confluence of English-language pop and rock, Nepali-language "poprock,"Hindiphlim ("film")music, lok git, Ihdunik git, sastriya sangit, andbhajans available in most cassette stores, people make sense of what theyhear by finding or producing resonances and dissonances between songsand their own lives. For instance:SanjaySingh, the proprietor of a cassette shop in Thamel-the mosttourist-filled area of Kathmandu-where I bought a Stevie Ray Vaughancassette, told me in March 1995 "firstwe are Nepalis, and after that we areNewars" (pahilo bami nepCli bau, tyaspacbbi newar).5 So while he sellsmostly the English-languagecassettes preferred by many Nepali teenagersas well as foreign tourists, he himself also developed a taste for Nepali-lan-guage songs, which he then supplemented recently by learning Newardrumming styles. (The most recent local manifestation of bikas, at variouslevels, is a sense of viable development simultaneous with cultural preser-vation.) A few days earlier, my friend Suresh, listening to my Stevie RayVaughantape, exclaimed in surprise, "Even hough [I]don't understand [it],I like it!" (nabujhepani maldi man parchba.. (The words of a song arecentral to the pleasure that many people take in song, but are not alwayscrucial-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 progressivepolitical songs since the 1970s (see Grandin 1995b), I asked innocently ifhe sang pop or rock songs; he made a face and said, no, he sang "poorpeople's songs" (garib mdncbbeko git). Similarly,one day in June 1994while walking with my music teacher's youngest son, Aswin, I asked if helike Nepali "pop rock"; he said, no, it's just copied (kapi gareko) fromEnglish-language songs. (Implicit in these and other words about pop and


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456 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1996rock music is a sense that pop and rock musicians are icons of the excessesof American culture, and that those Nepalis who engage productively withtheir 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 howNepalis make and talk about themselves. In song practices, aspects of stylesuch as language use, vocal technique, and genre incorporation are implicatedin identities which are at once personal and political, while meanings canalways be contested. Music, like language, is fertile turf in the Kathmanduvalley for differences of opinion, and while discussions can be intenselypolitical, the danger of hard words is often dispelled by saying that what wassaid was just gaph- "gossip" (cf. Brenneis 1987)-as if one didn't really meanit, as if it were just a way to pass the time. Likewise, what I have to say inthe next few pages about two more songs is gaph-my contribution, drawnfrom a wealth of talk about music and life in the Kathmandu valley, to anongoing discussion about songs, meaning, and affect.

During the heavy monsoon rains of 1987 and lighter downpours in1994 I took music lessons from Dilip Kumar Kapali, a Newar tailor andmusician, studying nepali sastriya sangit. In July 1987 he taught me thenext song, which is in Nepali (an Indo-European tongue), often the secondlanguage of many Newars after Newari (a Tibeto-Burman language).

1 f< T 2YTll birsera ha~sna khojda Forgetting and trying tolaugh.2 f^ l-i 1f bimbale satai dinchha the shadow (of your image)torments (me).3 t < 3 'r ,,Tl roera u(na khojda Crying and trying toget up.4 E*i 1 tft rf - akaSle thichi dinchha the sky presses (relentlessly)down (upon me).5 TCRTt 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


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Emotion and Devotion 457**tas the non-honorificormfor"you," nd-leis anagencymarker-the one whois doing a transitiveactiontakes-le if the action has alreadybeen completed,orwhen clarityof agency s needed.ta is distinctfromtapdi (highesthonorific)andtimi (mediumhonorific).Mensometimesaddress heir wives usingtd;although twas apparentat the "seven urns" hat the two people in this songwere husbandandwife, it is only at this point that it is certain that it is the singerwho is thehusbandaddressinghis wife, who has either died or gone away (permanently rtemporarily).

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 forthe first, second, and last lines;both partsof it fallinto a medium vocal range(between F of the middle octave and E-flatof the upper octave of thesinger's range) and end on B-flat.The third line contrasts strikinglywith thetwo preceding it, and the two parts within it contrast with each other: atsat ("seven") the melody begins on A-flatof the middle octave and movesdown to G-flatbefore ascending to B-flat,and at bunis ("wove," secondperson non-honorific) the line begins on F in the upper octave and movesup to G-flatbefore descending to E-flat.Poetically, the first half of the songmirrors the second half: in each, a line evoking the pleasure of being to-gether is followed by a grammaticallylinked line of longing which causesthe affecting presence of the first line to be recast as distant memory. Thislinkage 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 theremembered past. The textual division of this song into two equal halvesworks against the use of two unevenly distributed musical lines. Poetically,the form can be reduced to AA'BB',but musically, the form is AABA: hereappearance of musical materialfrom the first line in the last line is a com-mon way of linkingthe end of a song back to its beginning in csstriya sangitand other vocal genres in Nepal.The singer is never responsible for the actions he sings about, but isratherthe recipient of the actions of others or the emotional effects of thoseactions. In the first half of the song, the wife's shadow and the sky are theagents of sentiment in physical gestures directed toward the human object.Dinnu, in its third-person non-honorific present form dinchha in lines 2and 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 recipientof 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 presentform, bolchbas, in line 8) from afar. In fact, the singer never reallyappearsas object (or as subject) in the song until the final line, when malai (ma,"I,"+ object marker-lai) finallysecures the presence of the lingering feel-ing of longing in the body of the singer. This poetic intensification in the


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458 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1996final line, belied by the musical repetition, is enhanced by breaking thepattern established by the extremely close pairingof grammaticalelementsin the first two lines:

birsera hasna khojda bimbale satdi - dinchbaroera utna khojda akasle thichi - dinchhaverb(par- verb(in- verb(par- subject compoundverbticiple) finitive) ticiple) (habitualpresent)The difference of the last line is set up primarilyon the word pani, heremeaning "even so," which falls at the point where the subject stood ear-lier. By semantically pulling the two halves of the line together, the wordpani arrests the expectations set up by the grammaticaland musical rep-etition earlier and allows the word malai to sound clearly on kbali("empty:"the firstbeat, unaccented, of the second part of the tal, or rhyth-mic cycle).Tending towards what I called the fullness of text, this song holds itsintensity in the intricate weaving of words and music. Of course, it must beactivated experientially to convey its intensity-text and experience are notindependent domains.By sayingthat this song works predominantlythroughits musical and poetic texts, I am not giving it its finalresting place; rather,Imean to suggest thatthe composer's use of this composition andperformancestyle soundfully indexes taste, "thepractical affirmationof an inevitable dif-ference" (Bourdieu 1984:56). Here, the song and Dilip's singing of it affirmsa difference made out of his own unique history: like many performers ofsastriya sangit, Dilip spent some time learning music in India. Since I haveknown 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 refusesto believe thatanythingmitbo-"tasty" -can be found in Americanor Nepalirock music; his version of such recently developed music is an imitation ofthe singer MichaelJackson in which he croons unintelligibly in a falsettovoice. The previous song meanwhile affirms a connection with a past thatexisted before rock music, a past that, in Dilip's opinion, should be extendedinto the future through current musical practices.When a song like the one I transcribed above is considered as part ofa genre, as a materializing object that embodies the identity of its singerand makes explicit a relationship with other singers, other songs, otherlisteners, it may also become disembodied taste, a performed object thatdissolves its own connection with its singer. In the politics of everyday lifein Nepal, in the desire for bikas, songs move around.Changesin Kathmandubring new cultural forms (through individualinnovations) into the city andcreate new senses of taste, which I find expressed in a dialectic betweenthe fullness of the experience and the fullness of the text. But "when new


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Emotion and Devotion 459forms and items of an emerging material culture step in between a society'spresent perceptual existence and its residualsociocultural identity, they canbe tasteless because people may no longer have the perceptual means forseeking identity and experience in new material forms" (Seremetakis1994:8).Bikas has brought such new material(and musical) forms to Nepal, andwhile 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 identitiesby connecting listeners, through the possibility of imbricated memory andexperience 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 Kathmanduand Kirtipur(a town ona hill southwest of Kathmandu), Ingemar Grandin(1989) provides variousglimpses of musical and music-related activities in Newar communities(1989). He is interested at one point in locating continuity and changewithin vast and subsuming processes of "compartmentalization"and "mod-ernization" (ibid.:178). Compartmentalized musical practices continue orfalter because they have been isolated from external influences, whilemodernized traditions thrive because they incorporate variously locatedinfluences. 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). Myownrecognition of the variety of changes in bhajan song practices led me toremark at the beginning of this article that bhajan was both a genre and aperformance event: both devotion intentionally embodied in the texts andsongs of bhajans and emotion partlydisembodied, taken in and given newmeaning and movement within the bhajan framework.Alongside this I want to set a sympathetically resonating idea, one thathas been lost amidst the different bodies in my text. Disembodiment, adisplacement of the self from its usual place of residence, is another pathleading outward from some bhajans. By intense bodily involvement anddevout concentration, bhajan participants suggest that it is possible toexperience the divine paradoxically by becoming dissociated from the bodyitself. The "self,"a term which I have used frequently to mean a coherententity made up of interconnected individual, social, and physical parts, hasnow become something else: a self which is detachable from the world, aformless form that travels everywhere without moving and resides any-


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460 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1996where without stopping. Selves supersede collective experience-in whichidentities commingle in sound-and temporarily are released from thebonds which hold them to individually distinct bodily experience, achiev-ing moksa-in which the ongoing sounds of the bhajan commingle in themerged 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 reflectivenor active, the disembodied self merely exists in a state of perpetual knowl-edge and experience devoid of flow or motion. The disembodied selfhovers directly above Merleau-Ponty's "preobjective" moment (1962):objectification is neither necessary nor conceivable. But the feeling ofdisembodiment soon becomes part of discourse, a voiced memory, anamplifying 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 outof the words and images of songs and talk. And by "songs" I mean not onlythe bhajans that many Nepalis remember hearing since the time they werechildren, but also recently composed bhajans: the first song I transcribedhere specifically plays on such an experience of the divine when BhaktarajAcharya 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 andabikasit ("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 thedivine that Americans usually don't. (The threat to this ability posed bymaterial development will return in the last song I will discuss here.) Abhajan that Dilip took from a performance by Kalpana Pande on NepalTelevision in 1988 finds the singer trapped in the middle of a whirlpool(bhumari bichko) on the ocean of existence (bhava scgar); the singer thenentreats 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 thepainful bonds of life becomes poignant not because it is so distinct fromeveryday life, real and imagined, but because the visions that appear in songto 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


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Emotion and Devotion 461of 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, anobjectified sense of utility). Embodiment takes objects into a body: this iswhat makes it so appealing as the shifter between individual identity andsocial facts. Disembodiment moves objects out of a body: rather than plotthe movement of the social on the individual, it traces the presence of theindividualthrough the realmof the social (which, in bbajan, is also a realmthat 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 variousobjects become fixed is possible in English but not in Nepali.Jiu, a com-mon word for "body,"refers specifically to the "livingbody," the life com-ponent of the self, while sarir refers more to the physical body. What doestranslate is the motion of emotion toward or away from the body. Manyexpressions of emotion and experiential states in the Nepali language workby moving towards the feeling recipient rather than emanating outwardfrom the feelingful consciousness. This is expressed frequently by the verbsparnu ("to fall" [into one's life]) and Ilgnu ("to adhere" or "cling"[ontothe self]), both of which are idiomatic and rarely retain the explicit imag-ery that they appear to have in my translation. Emotions are experiencedby the human object of the sentence, which takes the object marker-lai(see also Jacobson 1992). Maldi dukba lagyo: "Painclung to me" (I amhurt).... Uslii mayd lagyo: "Love adhered to him" (He is in love)....Hamildi tyo git man parcbha: "Thatsong, (our) heart-mindfallsto us"(Welike that song). Humans can also be the agents of their emotions, and thisis expressed by using causative verb structures. Ratherthan have anger riseup in me (maldi ris uthyo), I can get angry (ma risduchhu); instead ofbeing afraid of a dog (malai kukurko dar ldgcbha), I can actively fear(from) it (ma kukurdekbi darauchhu). People use such expressions whenit is clear that a person has decided to take on a particularemotional stateand makes that sentiment publicly (if sometimes unwittingly) known. Forexample, if I visit a friend after a fairly lengthy absence, my friend maygreetme, usually jokingly, with, "kina risdunubhayo?"-"why did (you) getangry?"-as if while we had been sitting apart in our own houses somethought had come into my heart-mind and played around in it (manmdkurC 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'tcome. Yet this suffering would not be explicitly my fault: maldi dukhabhayo, "sadness happened upon me," my friend would say, not tapadlemaldi dukha dinnubbayo, "you gave me pain."By and large, when people


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462 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1996talk (or sing) about how they feel, their words suggest that emotions cometo them from unspecified external sources, even when it may be apparentfrom the words around those words what may have triggered such emo-tions. Causative constructions, on the other hand, suggest an intensity ofinternally generated experience often avoided in talk about emotion, ex-cept when emotions are turned around and outwardly expressed: malaiusko dherai maya lagchha, "her love really sticks to me" (I am very muchin 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 srimanlaidherai maya garchha" (she loves [her] husband very much). Here, theemphasis is on acts of emotion rather than the experience of emotion. Partof the efficacy of songs in Nepal is that emotions are expressed, yet rarelyfocused on individually unique experiences; emotional states in both talkand song reside in words that move freely from outside toward the self,tending to remain slightly disembodied, affixed to rather than emanatingfrom the senses-always public and communicable, rarely hidden andunknown.

Donald Brenneis, in his work with Indian immigrant communities inFiji, speaks of bhaw, the local Hindi word for "emotion" as well as for "ges-ture" or "display" (1987:240). This semantic overlap ties feelings directlyto expressions and presupposes that "feelings" (bhaw) are never private,but are always externally felt and freely communicated states. Knowledgeand other states of being work similarly. In bhajan kavvali performances(as inpanchayat legal proceedings), "value and authority for the contentsof such performances derive not from the experience and interpretationof 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 workhere, 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 thatexperience feelings pragmatically on their bodies and partake of a divineessence through particular and highly visible forms.Another song of Bhaktaraj Acharya's will help clarify this play betweenembodied and disembodied expression.

,xr r MiT hami bhulechhau We have gone astray, intoxicateddhanjana madale by (the thought) of wealth;arFt 19 PTI 1td 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 infatuationbadera grows;


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Emotion and Devotion 463jani gara bhagavanmurkha bujhera

favor us, bhagavan. byunderstanding (our) ignorance.Ihami bhulechhau.... (We have gone astray...1ma hu~ merai sabchijbhannegae kati ti kharanibandaipachhuto bharibhaera ae-umali a~Sunainabharinai

I (exist); everything said to bemine......all of these things turned toashes and went (away).Remorse became a burden: I came(back to you),eyes filled to overflowing withtears.Ihami bhulechhau...I (We have gone astray...l

;F PrMTaTmTIti1fh a


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464 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1996as ma, a perfect fourth above the upper tonic, before descending back topa (dominant).In the second section, the rhyme scheme shifts to an ABAB orm whilethe 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 fourthlines suggests a greater intensity of emotion here, the tune is more subtlyemphatic, starting as it did in the first section, but moving nowhere nearas 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, wherethe first line (ending with sivae) rhymes with the first (bhanne) and third(aCe)ines of the previous section while the second, third, and fourth linesform a rhymingunit. The entire text thus appears in rhyme as AABBCDCDCEEE,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 ofthe singer's role.8 Engaginghere 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 hiscontrol, and can only be set back in place by the actions of another. Thesinger becomes an intentional conveyor of emotion which is not his tocommand, working to redirect personal experience (his, the poet's, alistener's) through language that is both bodily evocative and socially in-teractive. Deliberately negotiating a space in which to engage creatively intextual resonances while verballydownplaying personal involvement in thecreation of the self, Acharya crafts an ambiguous identity, responsible forthe feelingful production of meaning but not responsible for the eventswhich produced his own expressions of emotion and devotion.For, in fact, there are no events that play out for certain within thissong-only the remembered traces of the effects of events appear. Eventsthemselves have fallen into an unrecountable past, but they still remainaffectively present in embodied memories. Remorse drains into tears, butonly by becoming a burden in itself, as if by itself. Useless pleasures hangempty in a song that bundles them up into anachronistic sensations. Thefullness of the text bringsthe remembered experiences of listeners into playwith the sentiments of the individual singer; it is fundamentally opposedto 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 manipulationof agencyin this song create a setting in which the articulation of emotion is disem-


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Emotion and Devotion 465bodied from the presence of the self. The repetition of hami ("we") drawsthe listener into the experience by naming him or her, and the general lackof pronouns elsewhere directs disembodied emotion back toward a listenerwho is neither here nor there, neither subject nor object. The ambiguityof the singer's reference, that is, helps convey emotion toward the listener'sbody. 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 verseand keep bodies embodied, grounded in worldly experience. Embodied sen-sation disembodied from a subject, disembodied subjects embodied througha sensation: putting bodies in place keeps them out of place, objectified.Asu, tears, the salty reminders of what the tongue left unsaid, release thesinger's experience from his own memory. Sentiment, embodied in song,goes astray, yet returns. It is this coordination between embodiment anddisembodiment, this interchange between individual experience and socialemotion 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. Myfieldwork in the summer of 1987 in Kathmandu,Nepal, was supported by a grantfrom Pomona College. Funding for other work represented here was provided by the Centerfor Asian Studies and the School of Music at the Universityof Texas at Austin. Iespecially wouldlike to thank Stephen Slawek for some offhand remarks that I developed into a major sectionof this work. Shambu and BanuOjaat CornellUniversity helped me translate some of the songsthat I learned from Dilip Kumar Kapali, my music teacher in Nepal. In 1987, Dilip was pa-tient enough to teach me in Englishto sing in Nepali; he then became a fluent interpreter ofmy sometimes imprecise Nepali in 1994 and 1995. And Vishnu Pande, the author of the textof the second song presented in this article, has confirmed and criticized many aspects of mywork. At UT-Austin,KamalAdhikarygave his extremely gracious help in polishing my tran-scriptions and translations of all three songs here. Don Brenneis, CallaJacobson, and ShariJohnston lent critical eyes and ears to my thoughts and words: I can only hope that their sensesand insights have been embodied in and beyond this text. Two anonymous reviewers for theJournal 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 Kathmanduvalley with the support of a Fulbrightgrant fromthe U.S. Department of Education and a University Fellowship from the University of Texasat 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 Hindiand Nepali orthography, except for various names of people and places that I transliterate asthey usually appear in Nepal. An "b"after a consonant signals the aspirated form of that con-


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466 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1996sonant, except with "c,"which is always followed by an "h" two if aspirated); "~"producesa nasalization of the vowel under it.2. Many languages are spoken in the Kathmanduvalley in Nepal. Nepali is the nationallanguage, and is the language of education and most media. Newari is often the first languageof Newars, a kind (jat) of people who consider themselves related through language, culture,and history: Newars are the indigenous residents of the Kathmanduvalley in many historicalrepresentations, written and spoken. Hindi is also common, as Nepal has a large populationof 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-Burmanlanguages are spoken as well in this capital city of amulti-ethnic nation.

3. Auspiciousness is a term that blankets a variety of South Asian practices. It centers onthe belief "that there are auspicious and inauspicious events, times, and places, and that if nocare is taken to counteract any inauspiciousness one may have incurred, bad consequenceswill ensue" (Gellner 1992:126-27). Some signs of auspiciousness are easily detected, whileothers 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. Beginningsand large undertakings, such as building a house or getting married, require the assistance ofa religious specialist to read more completely the planetary and other natural signs that willaffect the scheduling and general disposition of the events. Henry suggests that "music ingeneral is thought to be auspicious because it is believed to enhance the prospects of attain-ing the goals of... ritualby glorifying and pleasing the gods" (1988:111). I also suggest thatbhajan 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 solelyhuman interaction.4. Mytwo phrases are meant to encompass a varietyof kinds of criticism I heard in Nepal,often from recent immigrants to Kathmandufrom the hills, but increasingly from Newars andother locals disgruntled or surprised by the dramaticchanges to both city and countryside inrecent 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 morepleasant 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 scarcerin 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 Kathmanduresidents picture a more ordered life still inscribed in the city, underneath the textually densechanges on the surface of modem urban life wrought by bikas and its nationally powerfulagents.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 andModern" (1986) in conjunction with Declan Quigley's piece on contemporary aspects ofNewar identity, "Ethnicitywithout Nationalism: the Newars of Nepal" (1987).6. A more common usage in Nepali, for example, is "Uslekhaidiyo," which Subara ManTuladhar,my Newari language teacher, translatedas "He ate it all up!"One implication is thatthe food, the implied object of the sentence, wasn't expected or supposed to have disappearedso quickly.7. Or, using a definition of maya closer to its meaning in Hindi rather than its sense ineveryday 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


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Emotion and Devotion 467texts to set musically, and in this sense I credit him with some of the creativity that othersmight consider the rightful property of the poet.ReferencesAcharya,Bhaktaraj.1990. Samarpan: Nepali Bhajanharu. MusicNepal 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: CambridgeUniversityPress. Paris:Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme.Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. "Introduction:Commodities and the Politics of Value."In TheSocialLife of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai.Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press.Armstrong, Robert Plant. 1971. TheAffecting 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 andCulturalAnthropology, number 16. Translatedby Richard Nice. Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press.- . 1984. Distinction: a Social Critique of theJudgment of Taste.Translatedby RichardNice. Cambridge, MA:HarvardUniversity Press.Brenneis, Donald. 1985. "Passionand Performance in FijiIndianVernacularSong."Ethnomusi-cology 29(3): 397-408.- . 1987. "Performing Passions: Aesthetics and Politics in an Occasionally EgalitarianCommunity."American Ethnologist 14(2): 236-50.. 1991. "Aesthetics, Performance, and the Enactment of Tradition in a FijiIndian Com-munity." In Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions, editedby Arjun Appadurai, FrankJ. Korom, and MargaretA. Mills. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press.Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 1991. "Indian Music." In The Dance of Shiva: Fourteen IndianEssays. Third edition. New Delhi: MunshiramManoharlalPublishers Pvt. Ltd.Csordas, Thomas J. 1990. "Embodimentas a Paradigmfor Anthropology." Ethos 18(1): 5-47.Desjarlais, Robert R. 1992. Body and Emotion: the Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in theNepal Himalayas. Series in Contemporary Ethnography. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press.Deva, B. C. 1980 [1974]. Indian Music. New Delhi: Indian Council for CulturalRelations.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 andModern."Journal of European Sociology 27: 102-48.---. 1992. Monk, Householder, and Tantric Priest: Newar Buddhism and Its Hierarchyof Ritual. CambridgeStudies in Social and CulturalAnthropology. Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press.Grandin, Ingemar. 1989. Music and Media in Local Life: Music Practice in a NewarNeighbourhood in Nepal. LinkopingStudies in Arts and Science 41. Linkoping:LinkopingUniversity Department of Communication Studies.

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