The advent of the 1970s indicated the arrival of live-music performances in town. But what was at its budding stage was still not enough. There were excellent Motown performers like Singapore-born Man Singh Gurung, the Jimi Hendrix of Kathmandu; Pemba Lepcha of Darjeeling and Subarna Limbu (born in Hong Kong) of The Diamonds and Prism were playing at Soaltee, as well as mostly Kalimpong-based Kishore Gurung and his brothers and friends forming The Brotherhood in later years for public shows in Kathmandu. Later, Robert, George and other Subbas of Kalimpong teamed up with Om Bikram Bista of Kathmandu to produce some danceable hits. Even Kathmandu native Kumar Basnet recorded a couple of Nepali Rock n’ Roll in Calcutta.
Then there was even a Japanese rock group called Go Dai Go who flew in with some six tons of electronic equipment – guitars, amplifiers, organs, synthesizers, percussion sets – and a sound and technical crew of their own. They did their live afternoon show in the middle of the Dashrath Stadium at Tripureshwor. But Kathmanduites in general did not know how to behave as a rock concert crowd in a charged-up and high-voltage public performance like this. But it was one of those timely opportunities for a city people to learn what a mass rock show would be like.[break]
One night I entered a new diner and watering hole at Pako. It was an imitation of an Indian restaurant and bar. There was a regular local band with three guitarists – rhythm, lead and bass –and a drummer. Fine! But there was also a scale-changer harmonium and a dukki-tabla set on the side of the gaddi baithak. I left the scene after a drink when a Rajesh Khanna clone, a young Indian business traveler with a bevy of Nepali and Indian girls, started dittoing a movie hit called “Mai shayar to nahin,” or something to that effect. The night’s setting exemplified the exit of the old Shakespearewallah era and the new entrance of Gazal Mehfil.
Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju
But the supply was not adequately fast enough because fad-driven youngsters were still forced to throng to the new phenomenon called discotheques which catered recorded music to the dancers on the floor. In the new decade, this was a new culture of clubbing among teens, and they were conspicuous for avoiding the contact dances of the previous decades like plagues. The old school of waltz, foxtrot, jives or jitterbug, ballroom dancing and slow dance had disappeared overnight, and the new disco dancers rather gyrated individually to the thumping beats under the streaking strobe lights on the parquet floor. Peter’s Place and Copper Floor were two of the new discotheques in town where clinical sanitization vis-à-vis touch-dancing seemed to be the ground rule among the young patrons: “Everything goes but no touchy-feely-crawly thing, okay? You hear?” was the social rule. This was a strange era of new dance forms in indifferent and insouciant individualism, in safe and aloof isolation; so near yet so far! Disco dancers preferred to be lonely and alone in the crowds. Very strange, indeed!
In other words, there were much fewer live music providers in town and more music consumers who but closeted themselves to their drawing rooms to listen to Sonny & Cher, the soundtracks from Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Westside Story and the recorded performances of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, The Modern Jazz Quartet and the Ramsay Lewis Trio and the reissued editions of Aaron Copeland, Benjamin Britten, Vaughn Williams, and Villa Lobos. Personal preferences and idiosyncratic tastes were not for publicizing and public display. People listened to music but there were very few musicians in Kathmandu in those days to play the maestros and their works.
Worse still, most of the consuming cognoscenti were – and still are – upper-crust Nepali glitterati and illuminati and their foreign guests of mixed pedigrees in mostly white skin in the host country. They congregated, as they do to this day, to clink their champagne glasses and enjoy The Yale Whiffenpoofs and their collegiate a cappella in the Durbar Hall of Hotel Yak & Yeti, or marveled at, as they still do, the chamber orchestra visiting from Austria and playing Chopin and Schubert inside the Patan Museum, or applaud(ed) the violin bass maestro from Oxford University at some ambassador’s residence. They are no Charlie Byrd to play in the open theater of the Tundikhel, are they? Ordinary Nepali musicians like us have had no access to such musical smorgasbords, nor were we ever invited to such dos which were and are but the given turf of the smatterati and chatterati of the capitalist and feudal crowds of Kathmandu who have traditionally sucked the spirit of the creative artistes of Nepal. There was and is virtually nothing to expect from Nepal’s highest castes and uppermost classes of such unbecoming snatchers and leeches who only seize and retain the fruits of the struggling middle class, and promote no arts on their own, and give nothing back to where or whom it is owed.
The result was more desertification of Kathmandu’s music meadows which were, albeit ever slowly, greening, largely due to the efforts of immigrant musicians, such as “Daddy” Georgie Banks.
There was yet another cancerous reason to Kathmandu being rendered a musical wasteland: that Kathmandu’s old habits still die hard, and the hidebound views still persist at the nation’s highest levels of its social, cultural and economic conventions and political practices, all determining its orthodox value systems. That there is an unwritten misunderstanding that westernization, borne of “cow-eating” nations, is akin to modernism, and vice versa, and the twain should never meet. No one knows, too, why the two mutually complimenting streams are taken as opposite banks of a river of no return in Nepal. Kathmandu does not yet seem to accept that a people and their country can both be selective in choosing to become simultaneously western and modern where universal modernity is apt to dominate continental westernization. Is Japan, for instance, too Shinto-ized or is it overtly western? It is both; but more importantly, Japan is a modern nation where business suits and frocks and skirts and jeans are de rigueur factors for regular occupational life while kimonos and tea ceremonies are other equal de rigueur signatures for customs and traditions that make Japan what it truly is: Nippon! Nihon!!
In Nepal, the picture was sheer black and white in the 1960s and ’70s, as it is today as well: Classicist Nepalis try to best India, forgetting that their entire Hindu legacy truly belong not in Nepal but over “there,” and attempt to make Nepal the “Asali Hindustan” by wearing the Rajasthan-centric daura-suruwal – and topped by western waistcoats and jackets! – and speaking and writing in Sanskritized Nepali and worshipping major deities all originating in India – Matshyendranath and Taleju, Shakaracharya School and the Mul Bhattas at Pashupatinath Temple are some of the many illustrations. The rest, the “others” – the truly prehistoric heritages of the Nepali Himalaya – are unacceptable as un-Nepali to these adamant and stubborn Pure Hindu Nepali gerontons who again adhere to two holier-than-thou and mutually exclusive convictions: one caste class basing itself on the Brahmanic/Bahun sacerdotal rigidity, and the other Kshatriya/Thakuri/Chhetri class caste preferring to proxy themselves through Tantrik treats and tricks. The third players were the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley. They were of both Buddhist and Hindu faiths, and they influenced the Bahun-Chhetri nexus in their own ways and added colors to Nepali affairs controlled from Kathmandu, the capital of the kingdom. In these convenient ways, the conservative keepers and upholders of these Old Nepali Ways continued to reign supremely in Kathmandu during the 1960s and ’70s, and they still do.
These were the impressions I gleaned while I was adjusting to the cultural climate and existential machinations which Kathmandu wielded, polished and perfected in those years I am describing. Not much has changed. The grass has been mown several times on the surface, yes, but the same stubborn roots remain.
Perhaps I was not wrong in my diagnosis of the myopic aldermen and leaden leaders of those times, the aging voices of conscience and neutralized academic pathfinders of the decades, the accommodative faux intellectuals and pointillist political apparatchiks at the fag end of their best years when I was studying them and their antics. According to Dor Bahadur Bista, writing many years later when my old findings should have been laid to rest or archived, Nepal, per se, has the specialty of being chronically fatalistic and self-defeatist in the hands of its powerful Hindu rulers and high-caste bureaucrats; and it, by its own inherent vices and baseless virtues, discourages introduction and development of anything new, fresh and timely. According to Hinduism, especially according to the apostolic brands of Brahmanism and Tantrism prevalent in Nepal, Life, as its nature has predestined it, is transitory, impermanent and illusory: So why improve it, pray? Why develop it, eh? What for, really? For whom? “I shall never pass this way again: So fuggeddaboudit, will you? Because it’s not for me, man – no way!” This is the mutually defeating mantra of predestinated fatalism and self-defeatism that stymies the dynamism that should accompany, per force, modern development in Nepal. These are the findings of Prof Dor Bahadur Bista.
Nepal, in those many sad ways, is no country for its young, either; their grandparents and parents have given up on them, and it shows to this day.
To my own argument, I add modern music, or the stifling of it, in old-fashioned Nepal. Radio Nepal was the barren barometer of the reverse development during my ten years there.
To be continued in the next edition of The Week.
The writer is the copy chief at The Week and can be contacted at pjkarthak@gmail.com
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