My teaching career at the Pulchowk Central Campus continued, in spite of the regular strikes called by students with allegiances to their respective underground political parties, despite the autocracy of the one-party Panchayat system which struck down mercilessly on multiparty political activities.
Meanwhile, teachers of English at colleges were reoriented to teaching of English language in place of English literature. At the Institute of Engineering, I was the first teacher of English to adapt to scientific English teaching, and then introduce overseer diploma students to learning engineering and technical English to help them in their future careers in respective specialized fields, such as civil engineering, architectural draftsmanship, electrical and electronic engineering, and other disciplines in the pipeline. My position as Assistant Lecturer was confirmed by the Tribhuvan University Service Commission in 1973, and I was promoted to Lecturer in 1978.[break]
Equally importantly, I had completed my novel in Nepali in two drafts, and worked further in making the third copy better.
Another great change took place in my life in 1975. A Thai benefactor discouraged me to continue teaching in a strike-torn campus. He offered me a job with a Bangkok-based construction corporation which had won one of the three contracts to build a section of the Hetauda-Narayangarh Highway in the Chitwan Valley. I applied for a leave-without-pay sabbatical for four years from the Institute.
In my new job, I was out of Kathmandu half of every month. This was the last major disconnection between Radio Nepal and me. Therefore, instead of music, I continued working on my Nepali novel wherever I happened to be in my line of highway building works: Bharatpur, Narayangarh, Birgunj, Khasyauli, Butwal, Bhairahawa, and Kathmandu and later Bangkok.
Readers must be aware by now that I am jumping over many phases in a hurry and I am describing things merely cursorily. The deliberate reason behind this glossing over is that this period was less musical for me and more academic and involved in creative writing. Now I had entered another phase: that of solid development works in Nepal, a series of new experiences that taught me many unprecedented life lessons.
Here, I take the opportunity to describe two musical experiences in Kathmandu which were ambitiously different and fulfilling for me from the mostly mundane, one-track and monotonous life as a session musician in the studios of Radio Nepal.
One was a long work by Gopal Yonzon entitled “Danfe Chari” about the sojourns of a Himalayan Pheasant all over the longitudes and latitudes of Nepal, from the alpine heights to the lowland Tarai. The “Giti Natak” or operatic work was commissioned by Padma Kanya Campus where Gopal was a senior Lecturer in Nepali and Culture. The rehearsals and recording of the musical play’s movements took place over many days in the studios of Radio Nepal, and it was a fruitful undertaking where the girl students of the PK Campus were artistically conscripted and inducted for various roles and volunteer works. In it, I played guitar and double bass and lent my voice to a couple of couplets assigned to a companion bird of the Danfe protagonist in the cast of characters.
Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju
The work suggested the passing of the old decade of the 1960s and giving way to the new one of the nascent 1970s, and the reign of the realm passed from the Old Order of King Mahendra to King Birendra’s youthful New Frontier that would bind Nepal together like never before. The concept of Nepal’s high Pahads and Parbats with that of its flat Madhesh was already cemented in 1973 or thereabouts by Gopal Yonzon; that its actualization was floated only in the first decade of the New Millennium is something of historical significances by which time, sadly, Gopal Yonzon had already passed away.
The other musical event was a multiple-stanza Cantata written and composed by Amber Gurung for many male and female roles. This was not a Radio Nepal project but one that was under the auspices of the Royal Nepal Academy, to celebrate King Birendra’s auspicious birthday or the Academy’s own nth anniversary or something this or that. As a command performance, the cantata was rehearsed on the stage of the Academy’s principal auditorium for many days and evenings and would be presented for the royal pleasures of the monarch and his consort and their feudal fraternity that followed and fawned on them everywhere. The cantata would reaffirm the arrival of King Birendra as the new shepherd of the Kingdom of Nepal, and the musical celebration noted the pros and cons of Nepal, its peoples and their dreams and aspirations and the national path that lay ahead in the new scheme of things under the young king.
It was all very well, but there was one hitch. When Amber Gurung conducted the orchestra with his baton, the Academy’s royal appointees objected to his hindquarters being turned to the regal fronts of His Majesty and Her Majesty and Their Royal Highnesses in the front row of the Academy Hall. The conductor would face the orchestra and singers on the stage from the front semicircle of the stage’s outer rim, and the audience would be at the back of the conducting maestro.
“This is nothing but directly positioning your butts – your ‘chaak’ – to the royal countenances of the Sovereigns of the Kingdom!” was the Academicians’ unanimous verdict and objection. The Etonian and Harvardian and Tokyo University alumnus that King Birendra was, he would clearly understand and accept the modern way of guiding an orchestra and ensemble arranged in his honor. Well, how the imminently imagined and dreaded lèse majesté was dealt with by the Academy’s able and ever-improvising administration is altogether another story.
By the way, I played double bass in the Cantata, clad in mandatory white daura and suruwal and topped by a black jacket and a Bhadgaunley topi, looking like a groom ready for his wedding ceremony. I looked funny, to say the least, but I was at the back of the orchestra pit and more than half of my front was hidden behind the huge instrument.
I have another impression as well, a better one at that, of the event. The Cantata had a formal dress rehearsal before the royal command performance took place the evening after. It was a ticketed show, and more than half in the audience were foreigners, including Japanese, South Koreans and other Asians, along with mostly white westerners. After each movement of the Cantata struck the final note, they heartily applauded, leaving the Nepali audience shocked and dumbfounded at the reception. Mr. Gurung, familiar with such gestures at public performances, took his bow graciously and began the next movement. It was indeed gratifying to be acknowledged by a knowledgeable audience, and their automatic and collective ovation taught our Nepali brethren in the audience a thing or two in open and unchecked and spontaneous artistic appreciation.
I have cited Radio Nepal’s Panchayat-propelled patriotic panegyrics of 1970, Gopal Yonzon’s musical epic on Danfe Chari in 1973, and Amber Gurung’s Nepali Cantata in 1975. On all three musical occasions, I did not fail to notice the chronic dearth of adequate number and kinds of musical instruments and musicians. Radio Nepal, Royal Nepal Academy, and the Rashtriya Nach Ghar were the three national repositories of Nepali music, and all three active institutions had shortage of musicians and musical equipments throughout my decade as musician at Radio Nepal. The situation never improved, and the old got older and more worn-out, and nothing new and innovative were added to their stocks and repertoire.
This decay was personally and professionally evident in my own self, too. I never progressed as a guitarist and bassist in Kathmandu, nor at Radio Nepal, or in any club or hotels that would have me, In fact, instead, I got regressive, retrogressive and worse: Challenges rarely came my way, nor did I set any goalposts for myself. Avenues never broadened and new visions never appeared, and not a single epiphany sounded for me. With every year, I was going from bad to worse; no viable greater guru was ever sighted in Kathmandu for me to learn more from while world music was developing by leaps and bounds, branching into different schools, genres and minute subgenres.
It was time for me, therefore, to call it quits, and that was very shortly what I did, indeed.
In retrospection and self-examination, even the guitar chords I played and the bass notes I struck were never clarified on the mono tape tracks and disc grooves. This was understandable because there were only two microphones in the recording studios: one was expressly for the singer/s, and the other stood in the midst of the main orchestra. As a guitarist, I sat near the singer’s microphone for proximate sonic register on the soundtrack, and as bassist I stood at the back, near the studio wall. If I happened to be loud, the recording engineer muffled my volume to accommodate the other sections of the ensemble.
But I always had the satisfaction with the fact that my accompaniment on guitar and bass actually galvanized and animated my fellow musicians in the percussion and orchestral sections. This was one of the nice things about assembly recording in the old days, now just a memory of the past.
My final recording at Radio Nepal took place one autumn day in 1976. I was back in Kathmandu from Bharatpur and I received the summons for a recording session of Gopal Yonzon and Narayan Gopal. I remember the three songs we recorded: “Lau suna ma bhanchhu, mero Ram kahani,” “Yeti chokho, yeti mitho diunla timilai maya,” and “Piunda piundai jindagi yo.”
While leaving Radio Nepal for the last time, somebody told me at the door that Gopal Yonzon and Narayan Gopal were no more on speaking terms. It was a sensational piece of news for me, so unexpected, yet not unbelievable in human relationships.
“Then, how come Narayan Dai learnt the songs?” I wondered. “The recordings went well.”
“Well, Gopal Dai sent the cassettes of the songs to Narayan Dai,” he said. “And the rest we did in the studio during rehearsals, as you know.”
So that was that! We were going away in our own ways. Gopal and Narayan were Miits – ritualized blood brothers whose relations as families would perpetuate to the next seven generations, as Nepali customs have it – and they had decided to break their relationship and their decades-old musical alliance.
The reasons for the breakup are speculated on to this day, but the truths have never been revealed. It must be some old wives’ tales that created the rift, and the breach was never repaired, either personally or professionally.
While I was leaving the recording studios of Radio Nepal and walking to the gates, I saw the young singer called Udit Narayan Jha on the other side of the compounds. This handsome and smartly dressed singer from the Madhesh Tarai of Nepal had been knocking at the doors of some composers for a recording “date.”
Eventually, he recorded the music of Nati Kazi and Gopal Yonzon, resulting in some hits, before leaving for Bombay to become what he eventually became in renamed Mumbai.
By the way, I never collected my last fees Radio Nepal owed me as my recording wages for the last Narayan Gopal-Gopal Yonzon session. I let the money lapse because I never went back to Radio Nepal again. Highway construction and novel writing were my new projects in life.
Thus ended my uncountable recording sessions at Radio Nepal with them all: Nati Kazi, Amber Gurung, Gopal Yonzon, Narayan Gopal, Shiva Shanker, Tara Devi, Janardan Sama, Koili Devi, Gyanu (Thapa) Rana, Meera (KC) Rana, Fatteman, Prem Dhoj, Yogesh Vaidya, Manik Ratna, Panna Kazi, Pushpa Nepali, Ruby Joshi, Deep Shrestha, Bhaktaraj Acharya, the Lekalis of Ganesh Rasik, Hiranya Bhojpure, Urmila and Nirmala Shrestha, Indra Narayan et al, Tara Thapa, Omkar Gadtaula, Mala Sinha, CP Lohani and many other singers.
The songs we recorded can still be heard on the radio – SW, MW and FM – and many in CDs. Perhaps my guitar chords and bass notes can also be heard, however faintly, on the mono tracks. That is all there is to it, in the final analysis.
Well then, what can I really say in the end? I can readily say: “My goodness, it was indeed a great lark!” And I have no regrets or sense of loss or waste whatsoever! I learnt so much about the inner working worlds of most of the artistic lives I encountered at Radio Nepal. It was a place of much fear and loathing, more uncertainties than assurances, small rewards and permanent retribution, hollow sycophancy and empty gainsay in survival politics and pretentious polemics. These were great lessons I received, and the pittance I was paid was extra bonuses.
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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