I was 23 when I entered Radio Nepal as a session musician, and I was 33 when I exited its recording studios. The artistic dynamism of learning, unlearning and relearning never had a chance during my studio musicianship there, much less putting the knowledge and experience I had brought from Darjeeling to more challenging use. Instead, I got rustier by the year, and it became too late by 1976 to regain what I had lost. As progressive as I should have been, as a rule, as an active musician, I faced regression from day one at Radio Nepal. I was thus steadily way past new lessons and training as a guitar soloist or a bassist and cellist. And there was not a single teacher and trainer, either, in Kathmandu to steer me to more musical enlightenments.
No wonder it took a much younger and more versatile guitarist called Kishore Gurung to apply to a famed music conservatory in California where he was taught and trained hands-on by such classical guitar maestros as Julian Bream, John Williams and others who themselves were previously tutored by no less than the greatest master and experimenter of them all – Andres Segovia himself.[break]
By then, I would almost be a middle-aged teenager. I am glad I had no more illusions left in me; it was better that I found new avenues of self-expression, and I was well on my way to finalize my first novel in Nepali which, by the way, received the Sajha Puraskar in 1977.
Perhaps my conversion was accepted and forgiven. I take readers 25 years into the future, to March 14, 2001. The Classical Guitar Society of Nepal, headed by Kishore Gurung, Little Star Shrestha and others, held an event at the Hyatt Regency in Boudha to honor me. Apart from releasing the CD of classical guitar works rendered and recorded by Kishore, the other item on the agenda was to accept and recognize my decision to change, a quarter of a century ago, my Muse from music to writing. The citation, addressed to me, reads, “In recognition of four decades of contribution in music as a guitarist. We take pride in your artistic manifestation, both as a guitarist and an acknowledged literary figure. You have crossed the two boundaries of literature and music in a unique way, for hardly any other guitarists have been able to do that with such high levels of artistry and intellect. You have made us guitarists proud.”
Nothing could be so diplomatically said to mean, “You deserter! You turncoat! What an apostate, what a renegade!” I seemed to have betrayed our old beloved art form to embrace another medium of expression.
Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju
By now, I am well into journalism and creative writing while Kishore Gurung, with already a Masters in ethnomusicology from Hawaii, is pursuing his Ph D in Britain.
One last futile attempt to belong
My electric guitar and amplifier, with which I had arrived in Kathmandu, were a distant memory by the time I left Radio Nepal in 1976. I had lent it to some musicians playing in town, and the set disappeared from my sight and mind.
In 1978, having completed our highway construction project works from Narayangarh to the plantain plantations of Sunachuri, I rejoined my old Pulchowk Central Campus and its worsening anarchy among its ever more politicized student bodies.
At around this time, I visited Hong Kong once again and spent hours one afternoon on Nathan Road where I bought a sonorous 12-string Yamaha Jumbo guitar – no less! – made in Taiwan.
It was not an impulsive purchase but a deliberate decision to revamp my stalled guitar-playing. I chose a high-tension-stringed model which I would “tame” to a low-tension softness by regular playing. Popularized by George Harrison at that time, I thought the 12-string instrument would be ideal for most styles – folk, rock, pop, sing-along, Nepali folk and modern, and also for accompaniment as lead player and rhythm keeper. I spent some extra HK dollars for a heavy-duty case, a shoulder strap and extra sets of various types of strings (gut, nylon, flat-wound, stainless, etc), a fluted tuner (electronic tuner had not yet been developed), plectrums and other essentials. In near future, I dreamt of acquiring a suitably high-wattage amplifier – either a versatile Vox, or a fancy Fender, or a marvelous Marshall – with tremolo, reverb, vibrato, fuzz and wah-wah effects and other electronic modes for sounds.
Some six months passed, and nothing happened. I finally opened the case one morning on a holiday. The brass strings had started rusting. I cleaned them with gun oil and polished the brand-new instrument. After playing for some time, I again tucked it back in the velvet-lined case.
One year passed, and I still had no time to resume my guitar playing. Eventually, I gave it away to lyricist Kiran “Palpasa,” my sister-in-law, who had joined a group of singers and musicians, such as Manila and Uday Sotang and others, thinking and hoping my dear baja would be put to regular professional use by these performing and recording artistes. It was finally time to reckon that my guitar and I had reached an irreconcilable impasse: I had become a wordsmith, and I would not be dedicated to music and literature at the same time. One had to go, and I embraced my new love.
Nepali musicians of Kathmandu, Darjeeling, and Dehradun
Now since I am finally out of the box of the 1966–’76 decade of my essay, and after expending more than 20,000 words in the bargain, I think it is time to talk about modern Nepali music and its prominent pioneers who found fruition since the beginning of the 1960s, and compare it with today’s goings-on.
The Nepali modern-music generations of the two pioneers and contemporary composers – Amber Gurung in Darjeeling, and Nati Kazi in Kathmandu – had the same fate, in that the nearest access for their creative output to be “cut” into 78rpm vinyl discs for more exposure and wider publicity was in the distant city of Calcutta and its two recording companies – one at Dum Dum which had His Master’s Voice (HMV) studios and factories, while the other, a more modest outfit, was Hindustan Records in the city itself.
It also must be said that aspiring Nepali singers and composers of both Kathmandu and outside Nepal had an older history of traveling to distant Calcutta for recording their works. It began, as per known information, with Melba Devi Gurung, originally from Rumjatar and a court singer at the Rana Premier’s durbar in Kathmandu, and Mitra Sen Thapa Magar of Bhagsu-Dehradun and serving in the military band of the Imperial Army of India.
The two, while visiting many Nepali habitats both in Nepal and elsewhere to share their music with them, teamed up and visited Calcutta to have their songs recorded there at one now-defunct company. This pattern was followed by latter musicians, such as Ustad Setu Ram, Battu Krishna, and Master Ratna Das “Prakash,” all of them from Kathmandu, Dharmaraj Thapa of Pokhara, and other artistes from Nepal; and Navin Bardewa, Hira Singh and Urmila Devi et al from Darjeeling. That Calcutta was the only available and convenient destination for their purpose lasted until the times of Amber Gurung and others in Darjeeling and Nati Kazi, Bachchu Kailash, Prem Dhoj, Kumar Basnet and others from Kathmandu.
The travel itineraries of these Nepali musicians to Calcutta from wherever they were in South Asia are also interesting.
Prior to 1950, the “Gitangay” lot from Kathmandu obtained their travel papers and exit permits from the claustrophobic Rana rulers who had barricaded the Kathmandu Valley as their impregnable fortress for more than a century. They left home with their “jhinti-gunta” (beddings and stuffs) and “samal-tumal” (food and provisions) and crossed the Valley on a GMC lorry to reach Thankot in the west of the city limits to travel to the east and then southeast. From the Thankot entry-exit point, the travelers climbed up the Chandra Giri Range and walked down the Kulekhani valley down to the Bhainse Dovan and Bhim Phedi foothills. From there, they boarded the Nepali edition of a Wells Fargo Pony Express to reach Amlekhgunj via the Hetauda settlement, and went past Pathlaiya and Nijgarh. Perhaps a WWII-vintage Ford truck would be available there, and their ride would ensue through dense and dangerous tropical forests through Simra to deposit them in Birgunj, the Nepal-India border city. Thence they would perhaps take “tanga” rides to the Raxaul Railway Station for their train rides on narrow- and broad-gauge tracks to Calcutta via Barauni, Sugauli and other major junctions, too numerous to describe here, over the seamless horizons of the Ganga Plains.
The Darjeeling troupes would have an easier and shorter travel route. They would take Land Rover or bus trips from town to the City of Siliguri in the plains from where an express train service would be available for travel onward to Calcutta via the great railway junctions of Malda, Burdwan and other gigantic networks to the Hooghly River or the Howrah Station in Calcutta.
But there was the great stretch of sandy banks at a place called Farakka where trains stopped at dawn on either side and disgorged their passengers who had to trudge on slippery talcum-powder sand for quite a distance to reach the Ganga Riverfront on either side, their luggage lugged on porters’ heads and taking care not to be cleaned off by pickpockets. Then they boarded the waiting steamer that would ferry them across the vast waters to the other banks where a similar trek on the dry quicksand would ensue to reach and cram into the compartments of the other waiting train on the embankment, and jostle for seats and berths for the onward journey to Calcutta. I believe this most torturous stretch has now become the elaborate Farakka Barrage, minimizing the discomforts of the old days when we had to negotiate the whole hog of the sandy beaches on both sides of the Ganga at 4 o’clock in the morning.
For someone like Mitra Sen, his journey from his hometown in Bhagsu or Dehradun would descend to Delhi, then on to Gorakhpur next to the Nepal border across Sunauli and Bhairahawa. A connection through Nautanwa would lead him on to Muzaffarpur and across the vast eastern plains, finally to Calcutta.
These were the old travails of travel trends of Nepali musicians from Kathmandu, Darjeeling and Dehradun to reach Calcutta to record their songs into disc tracks or grooves.
But the recording equipments and technologies in the studios of Calcutta were of the same old pre-War and pre-Independence British vintage. When much of the world had adopted modern recording techniques with stereo and hi-fi multi-channel soundtrack functions and facilities, Nepalis were still forced to avail of obsolete systems available in India, and this inadequacy continued until the 1980s, until private-sector recording studios dotted Kathmandu, turning almost every street into a Tin Pan Alley and Nashville, with the latest recording equipment and systems.
To be continued in the next edition of The Week.
The author is copy chief at The Week, and can be contacted at pjkarthak@gmail.com
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