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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 September 2017
Throughout the history of movement between country and city in the Nepali-speaking areas of the Indian subcontinent, musical links between cities and the rural hills have integrated emotional associations with rural hill life into the fabric of city life. Songs in the thematic genre of viraha – longing and the pain of separation – articulate lyrical and musical tropes that have come to characterise the experience of moving between hill villages, cities, and back again. This article explores over a century of Nepali-language viraha songs related to labour migration, arguing that as these songs take root in translocal publics crossing urban-rural divides, they contribute to an ruralisation of social and emotional life in the cities.
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14 I am grateful to Santanu Das for bringing this song to my attention, and to Ram Kumar Singh for helping with transcription.
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16 Note on transcription: I give priority to the sound of what was sung and to visually representing poetic meter in the Nepali, so some spellings are nonstandard. And I follow colloquial Nepali Romanisation conventions and use ch and chh, instead of c and ch as in Sanskrit conventions.
17 Perhaps the name of a river, as I have translated it, or perhaps he means “susāī”, “whistling”, a term commonly used to describe the sound of flowing streams.
18 Jyān literally means “life” but also “body” – something like “incarnation” in the material sense, the material manifestation of life, different from juni, which is the time-span of “this life” as opposed to past and future lives. He uses this word to refer to himself and to other people, as well as sometimes to his body. This is common in songs and some rural, colloquial speech today as well. I have translated it differently in different verses according to the context. Since it appears so much throughout the song, it could also be treated as a ṭhego – a word used not for its meaning but to fill out the syllables of the meter. I have translated as a meaningful word and not a ṭhego, but either way it does not change the meaning much. Jiu is another word for body that he also uses, which connotes only the material body.
19 Charī (“birdie”) is often used to refer to a girl in folk songs.
20 While the song is quite clear here, I do not understand what a leaf-bowl from Delhi is supposed to signify in this context. It is still possible that I am mishearing /t/ as /d/, in which case “tilli pāt” would refer to leaves that were shining rather than coming from Delhi.
21 Here he is changing the last phrase to rhyme with the next half of the couplet. So torīko phul phulchha (mustard flowers bloom) is the phrase that he is throwing out.
22 The two lines of this couplet refer to funerary rituals – washing the body, making a cremation fire with straw as tinder.
23 Tolā is a measure of weight. One tolā equals 12 grams. As to why he uses this particular number, tīn tolā is a common phrase in songs, often referring to gold. I think the phrase is tīn tolā and not, for example, chār tolā, because people find the alliteration pleasing.
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32 Onta, “Creating a Brave Nepali Nation in British India”.
33 Stirr, “Sounding and Writing a Nepali Public Sphere”.
34 Hutt, Devkota's Muna-Madan.
35 Ibid ., p. 7.
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