- 1 My choice to use ‘Christian Nepali’ instead of ‘Nepali Christian’ is a conscious one. As I show in (...)
1Between 2012 and 2014, every time I returned to Kathmandu from conducting doctoral dissertation research in Nepal’s western Tarai, I would attend a Christian Nepali1 youth fellowship on Saturday afternoons in Patan. After one of these fellowships, I was handed an invitation to a ‘coffee party’, sponsored by Top of the World Coffee – a local fair-trade coffee company – featuring the Christian Nepali band Hephzibah. This event turned out to be much more than an informal gathering. It was a full concert. The organisers transformed the drab brick-and-mortar church building in which it took place by hanging paper lanterns in warm colours on the metal beams across the ceiling and sprinkling lighting in cool colours across the stage (fig 1). While people sit on the floor for Nepali church services, plastic chairs were set up in rows for this event. Most of the audience members were young, urban Nepalis in their teens and early twenties. They arrived in groups of men or women. As promised, Top of the World served free, black coffee – no chia (N milk tea) was in sight!
Fig 1. Hephzibah performing at their ‘coffee party’ in February 2014
Photo: V Dalzell 2014.
- 2 In this article, I use first names only for all my interlocutors and other members of the Christia (...)
2Most of Hephzibah’s concert was a tribute to seminal Christian Nepali musicians like Kiran Pradhan2 who were active during the 1980s and 1990s. Kiran Pradhan is best known for writing the hymn ‘Sara Shristi’ (N all creation), made popular when it was incorporated into the Nepali-language Christian hymnal Khristiya Bhajan (N Christian song). During their concert, the members of Hephzibah – all young men in their mid to late twenties – performed this song with many of the women, now in their fifties, who sang on the album titled Naya Shristi (N New creation). Originally released in 1999, it featured songs for which Kiran Pradhan composed the music. Hephzibah encouraged audience members to sing this song with them. While Hephzibah had projected the lyrics to the previous songs on the screen behind them, they did not project the lyrics to ‘Sara Shristi’. Nevertheless, almost everyone present knew this song, as it is one of the most popular hymns in Kathmandu churches. At the end of the concert, the families involved with the Naya Shristi album were called onto the stage and given mayako chino (N tokens of appreciation) for their musical contributions to the Christian Nepali community. The local church pastor thanked the musicians for their legacy. They had not only given congregations one of their favourite hymns, but they were also an inspiration to a new generation of Christian Nepali musicians, such as Hephzibah.
- 3 This article synthesises some of the ethnographic research I conducted for my master’s thesis (sum (...)
3Two things struck me about this tribute concert. First, it showed how the Christian community in Nepal consists of more than entirely new converts. By honouring musicians within their own community, the organisers and participants recognised a short but significant Christian heritage in Nepal. Second, it illustrated how song performance is a link between multiple generations of Christian Nepalis. These two complementary aspects of Christian Nepalis’ experience resonated deeply with what I learnt from interacting with Christian Nepali youth in the Kathmandu Valley between 2009 and 2019.3 These interactions and my participant-observation and interview experiences were also influenced by my time in Nepal prior to 2009, upon which I also reflect in this article. From this research and personal experience, I argue that Christian Nepali youth use music to both negotiate belonging within Nepal’s Christian community and demonstrate belonging to Nepal’s wider society.
4I remember where I was when I heard the news that Nepal’s Hindu monarchy had been abolished. I was a graduating senior at a small liberal arts college on the east coast of the United States. I had just entered the college’s cafeteria when Puja – a first-year student from Nepal – intercepted me and gave me the news. We both understood what this political change meant: Nepal’s identity as a nation was changing from that of a Hindu kingdom to that of a secular republic. It was May 2008. I was graduating in a few weeks, then going on to start a Master’s in Ethnomusicology. Nepal would be my research focus.
- 4 In this article, I use the lowercase Nepali church to designate a specific congregation of Christi (...)
- 5 Mara Malagodi points out that the ‘right to religion’ clause (Article 19:1) in the 1990 constituti (...)
5But before Nepal was my projected research area, it was home. I had grown up in Patan, adjacent to Nepal’s capital city, during the 1990s. My parents were involved in the community development sector thriving in Nepal at the time. Because we were Christians, we attended a Nepali church.4 Within the Kathmandu Valley, Christian Nepalis could attend weekly church services without the fear of neighbours or family calling the police. Nevertheless, social derision and sometimes outright denunciation from Hindu or Buddhist relatives was a common experience for members of my church. Baptisms were never photographed; in fact, they were only announced in church after they had already taken place. According to the law, people could still be charged and arrested for changing their religion.5
6However, the atmosphere I experienced in the summer of 2009 and subsequent visits was very different. As a Hindu kingdom, the state had supported public rituals that reinforced the king’s power and upheld high-caste Hindu cultural norms. But after Nepal’s monarchy was abolished in 2008, Christians, Muslims and ethnic minorities frequently gathered in Kathmandu’s public spaces (Letizia 2012: 73–75). For the first time, in 2010, my Nepali church family was comfortable having me participate with them in the annual city-wide Easter rally; previously, they had worried that my Western family’s presence would garner suspicion from public authorities.
- 6 Therevada Buddhist monks and members of Nepal’s janajati (N indigenous groups) were at the forefro (...)
- 7 Bidushi Dhungel and Aastik Pokhrel, ‘Unearthing Shleshmantak: Unravelling the Kiranti-Christian Co (...)
7Overt public expressions of Christian faith in Nepal were new experiences for me, but they did not appear overnight. Even as a Hindu kingdom, religious practice in Nepal had never been monolithic. Nepal is home to over 125 different ethnic groups, many of whom characterise their practices as Buddhist. These ethnic groups claimed that state Hinduism was never adequately inclusive; hence, a secular state became a core constitutional demand from the 1990 jana andolan (N people’s movement) onwards.6 The interim constitution of 2007 first declared Nepal a secular, democratic state, a status that became official in the constitution promulgated in September 2015. While differentiation, privatisation or the eventual decline of religion are core tenets of many secularism theories (Casanova 1994, but see Cannell 2010), Chiara Letizia states that most political movements in Nepal since the 1990s have framed secularism as a way not to ‘banish religion from public life but…recognise religious diversity and bring an end to Hindu high caste domination’ (2012: 72). During the time of Nepal’s interim constitution (2007 to 2015), alongside reports on ethnic minorities’ demands for equality, the newspapers ran stories on the Christian Nepali community asserting their rights to publicly practise their religion too.7 Even though the state continued to manage Hindu ritual events and institutions (Letizia 2012, 2013), public expressions of belonging and the desire to belong on the part of diverse religious groups seemed to be a growing hallmark of Nepal as a new republic. Yet open religious pluralism has encountered resistance, especially when Christians are concerned.
8Hinduism, as well as resistance to Hindu norms, shaped Nepal’s character as a country. Because religion and state authority were historically one entity in Nepal, especially during the Panchayat years (1960–1990), the government saw conversion to a new religion, such as Christianity, as a challenge to the state’s authority (Turner 2009; see also Malagodi 2013: 149–153). This form of nationalism was also tied to cultural expression, ensconced in the national slogan ‘ek bhasa, ek bhesh, ek desh’, or ‘one language, one dress, one country’ (Hangen 2007: 12). In a letter to the editor of the English-language South Asia magazine Himal in 1993, one writer claimed that Nepalis who converted to Christianity lose ‘their special spiritual practices in exchange for the sanitized and de-contextualized religio-cultural world of Western Christianity’ (Pahari 1993: 2), summarising the perception that Christianity was foreign thus antithetical to a Nepali cultural identity. Recent political changes have reconstituted the concern with conversion to Christianity being regarded as an impingement on Hindu religious freedom. Luke Wagner explains how recent Hindu nationalist rhetoric weaves Christian conversion into conspiracy theories of foreign powers’ desire to overtake Nepal (Wagner 2018; see also Letizia 2016: 53–55). Indeed, Ian Gibson encountered this rhetoric during his research work, overtly expressed in public songs sung during the Newar festival of gai jatra in Bhaktapur (Gibson 2019: 54). While it has taken different forms over the past few decades, the narrative remains that conversion to Christianity rejects a Nepali identity.
- 8 Rajendra Rongong, personal communication, 3 December 2012; Robert Karthak, interview, 17 July 2013 (...)
9Despite these viewpoints, the number of Christians in Nepal continues to increase. According to Nepal’s 2011 census, Christians constitute 1.4 percent of Nepal’s total population (a mere 375,699 persons), but the Christian Nepali community actively contests this number. When I interviewed prominent church leaders in 2012 and 2013,8 they estimated that Christians may have constituted up to five percent of the population (or about 1.3 million members), ranking Christians above the number of Nepali Muslims (which constituted 4.4 percent). In a historically Hindu kingdom, where over 80 percent of the population still identifies as some form of Hindu, such figures remain small. Nevertheless, Christianity’s exponential growth since its official arrival in 1951 and growing public presence since 1991 has attracted the attention of both the state and civil society as well as academics.
10This concern with conversion came to the fore in a talk I attended in November 2012 given by historian John Whelpton on the growth of Christianity in Nepal. It was sponsored by the Social Science Baha, one of Nepal’s well-known social science organisations. In that talk, Whelpton first outlined the early presence of Christianity in Nepal with Jesuits passing through in the 17th century as they went to and from Tibet, then the Capuchin missionary presence in the courts of the Malla rulers in Kathmandu Valley in the 18th century and their subsequent expulsion from Nepal after Prithvi Narayan Shah conquered the valley. But then Whelpton posited that three foreign missions organisations were the primary reason for Christianity’s growth in Nepal after 1951. This argument greatly offended the Christian Nepali leaders in attendance, especially Rajendra Rongong – a pastor and academic – who publicly chastised Whelpton for overlooking the indigenous nature of the growth of Christianity in Nepal. In his talk, Whelpton had mentioned Scottish missionary activity among Nepalis in Darjeeling in the 19th century; in his response Rongong made the connection that many of those Christian Nepalis from Darjeeling and Kalimpong started churches in Nepal after its political restructuring in 1951 by evangelising their friends, family and neighbours (see also Rongong 2012, Perry 1990).9 Rongong specifically took issue with Whelpton’s choice of the term proselytise to reference Christian Nepalis’ witness to the work of Jesus Christ in their lives. As Rongong described it, this term is often equated with conversion by force, not by faith. Given that the Nepali Constitution of 1962 forbade any kind of conversion – including of one’s own free will – and the pattern of social and political persecution that Christian Nepalis experienced, in Rongong’s opinion, ‘proselytising’ hardly represented the activities of Christian Nepalis inside Nepal.10
- 11 In both his writing and conversation, Rongong never denied the presence or influence of Western mi (...)
11Whelpton suggested that foreign missionary activity accounts for the growth of Christianity in Nepal,11 but other Western scholars have observed that Nepalis from across the social spectrum have converted with very little foreign contact (Fricke 2008: 37–38; Gibson 2017, 2019: 54–55; Poletti 2021, 2022). Recent societal changes may have made conversion appealing (Leve 2014; Gibson 2019: 55), but these scholars have noticed that Nepalis convert for existential reasons (Poletti 2021) and to resolve existing relational crises (Gibson 2019). Through their conversion stories, or gavaahi (N witness or testimony), Christian Nepalis highlight themes of inner peace followed by healing and freedom, even if physical manifestations of that healing are not immediate (Gibson 2017a, Poletti 2022) or circumstances are slow to change. These narratives show how conversion cannot be attributed only to foreign forces (Fricke 2008: 56) and corroborate Rongong’s observations about the role of both local community and individual faith in conversion.
12This research focuses on new converts, yet Poletti acknowledges that ‘talking about converts, however, is no longer always appropriate, since there is an increasing number of second-generation Christians in Sinja who were born into this congregation’ (2021b: caption to fig 6, emphasis in original). In reality, multiple generations of Christian Nepalis already reside in Nepal. When I returned to Nepal in 2009, I noticed how the people with whom I had grown up were increasingly in church leadership roles and a large number of young men and women in secondary school and college were heavily involved in our church’s life. As largely evangelical, Christian Nepalis often reject that someone is Christian because they were born into a Christian family; rather, someone is a Christian when they have made an individual profession of faith in Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, many of the Christian Nepali youth whose interviews I include here claimed to have been ‘born Christian’ in the sense that they grew up in Christian households rather than Hindu or Buddhist ones. Poletti identifies the limitations of ‘abstract tropes of “cultural identity”’ as an analytical lens to understand how Nepali people address a range of challenges (2022: para 11); however, the cultural remains a relevant question, for how do people meaningfully live as Christians in their local community after conversion – or in the case of second-generation Christians, how is the state of being both Christian and Nepali entirely natural?
13Beyond Nepal, research shows that Christian conversion does not merely result in cultural imposition; rather, conversion can bring cultural adaptation, often termed indigenisation (Kaplan 1995; McNally 2000; Sherinian 2014). This literature demonstrates how indigenisation is an ongoing process in which multiple generations participate, using local cultural forms to make Christianity contextually meaningful for practitioners. Christian liturgical practices, especially those involving music, are a place where Christians can not only draw on but also transform local cultural forms (Ingalls et al 2018). This literature demonstrates that part of belonging to a Christian community involves identifying with a culture beyond it. Recent research on Christian congregational music shows how examining musical style in congregations can reveal how local Christians identify with wider cultural settings (eg Butler 2019, Jarjour 2016, Sherinian 2014). Here, creative acts are one way to constitute belonging.
14While identity connotes difference, belonging is about commonality. I have demonstrated elsewhere how belonging does not negate identity but rather complements it (Dalzell 2020). Floya Anthias defines belonging as ‘about experiences of being part of the social fabric and the ways in which social bonds and ties are manifested in practices, experiences and emotions of inclusion’ (2008: 8). Belonging as an analytical lens emerged from studies on migration and diaspora, where disrupted social ties and ways of identifying have to be reconstructed and renegotiated, not just by individuals (hooks 2009) but also by states (Ross 2009, Yuval-Davis 2006). Music has a place in these negotiations, both to affirm existing identities, such as ethnic or national origins, in a new place (Ramnarine 2007) and constitute new social ties (De Martini Ugolotti 2022). What this research shows is that belonging can be ‘a dynamic rather than fixed social fact, which can also be rooted in choices and experiences rather than in imposed identities, genealogies, and positionalities’ (Youkhana 2015: 15). Creative acts can therefore be an important site for collective action to realise belonging (Youkhana 2014: 178).
15These ideas about belonging being dynamic and constituted by choices, like creative acts, resonated with me because of my interactions with second-generation Christians in Nepal. I found that these Nepalis who grew up in churches negotiate through music what Christian practices should look like both inside and outside the Church in relation to the changing social, cultural and political contexts in which they live. Observing their activities, I was drawn to how these Christian youths employed musical style, actively drawing on Nepal’s wider cultural milieu as they led diverse Nepali audiences in Christian worship. Their musical activities contributed both to the life of Nepal’s Christian community as well as to Christianity’s public presence in Nepal.
16Salvation Worship Ministries (SWM) is a parachurch organisation – a faith-based organisation that helps individual churches to engage in a specialised activity that may be difficult for them to do on their own – that aims to equip church musicians. Located in the city of Patan in the Kathmandu Valley, they accomplish this goal through a music school (which trains anyone, regardless of religious background, interested in learning how to play Western musical instruments), a school of worship (to train worship leaders), weekly Bible studies and regular fellowship opportunities. Several worship teams are at the core of the ministry. While its volume of activities has fluctuated over the years, SWM annually organises several concerts and weekend conferences, often in conjunction with local churches, in addition to producing music albums containing original arrangements of songs commonly sung in Nepali churches as well as their own compositions or translations. Engaging in these activities, these men and women receive both leadership and theological training, equipping them to be music leaders within their own churches, which represent a range of denominations.
17I have remained in contact with the organisation’s members and followed their activities since my initial work with them in 2009. At that time, I was teaching Western music theory classes at the music school and participated in the organisation’s other activities as I conducted research for my master’s thesis. I got to know my interlocutors as students on the courses I taught, as fellow musicians through my involvement in church worship teams, and as friends by attending the weekly youth fellowships. Each of these men and women remain involved in music scenes within the Kathmandu Valley. Some have performed with rock, punk and other popular music bands. They sing or play on their own church’s worship teams as well as perform with SWM. After interacting with them over a span of eight years, I formally interviewed them when I returned to Nepal in the summer of 2016 and over Skype when I was in the States in the autumn. Following our established relational pattern, we conducted these interviews in English.
18For these men and women, Christianity is both part of their family heritage and a personal choice. Some – like Jesmine and Subhekchya – came from multiple generations of Christians; others – like Arun and Santos – were old enough to remember when their families started attending church because of a health crisis or relatives’ persistent evangelism. While they all grew up attending church, each of them remembers specific experiences that propelled them to choose Jesus as saviour for themselves, and each of them took believer’s baptism after making a personal confession of faith. Because all of them come from Christian families, I got the impression from their interviews that their conversion experiences did not matter to them as much as their discipleship experiences, where they continue to learn what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Music has an integral role in those experiences.
19For some, song is a part of personal devotion. For Subhekchya, song is a way for her to express adoration to God. She offers praise to God as part of her discipline of prayer: ‘when I’m praying … I can just sing out to Him because I think I can express better [by] singing’. She draws on songs she learned growing up in church, commenting that she would ‘just sing when I was little and then, after so many years, they actually made sense, and those [songs] are so impactful’. Subhekchya described song both shaping her faith and enabling her to worship God: ‘I’ve always had this faith, being born into this Christian family, so it [is] more than songs influencing my belief, I think. The source of music is more me giving back to the Lord, and that definitely enhances my relationship with God’. Apart from music’s role in personal devotion, playing music as a worship team member provided leadership lessons. Jesmine remembered having an ‘aha’ moment when she first started at SWM. She realised that ‘it’s not just about me singing and “aaah” [sings pitched note], you know? … [it’s about] bringing people together, and being close to God and just glorifying Him together’. In this regard, being on a worship team helped her realise that her musical abilities were about more than just herself and they channelled her abilities for the benefit of others. Both Jesmine and Subhekchya are often lead female vocalists on worship teams, so their voices receive a lot of attention from listeners, yet in their interviews, they emphasised that, for them, music is not an end in and of itself but a means by which they worship God and lead others to worship him.
20For many of my interlocutors, musical participation was also key to their involvement in church life. Arun learned guitar from church friends who brought their personal instruments to play in the worship services. Santos already had an interest in guitar and drums, so when he saw these instruments used in church worship, they excited him. His church supported his desire to learn how to play these instruments by covering the tuition costs at a secular music school for a short time. Similarly, Biju’s church sent him to a music institute to learn electric bass guitar so that he could play it in church.
21Despite coming from different church backgrounds, everyone grew up with similar instrumentation accompanying congregational song. Subhekchya, Jesmine, Biju, Santos, Arun and Sharad grew up in Kathmandu Valley churches while Ashis and Prakash grew up in village churches; all of them remember instruments like madal (N double-headed folk drum), kaijadi (N tambourine), conga and harmonium or a Casio keyboard creating the backbone of instrumentation that accompanied congregational singing. For each of them, songs from the Khristiya Bhajan dominated their church soundscape.
22The Khristiya Bhajan is at the centre of musical activity in Nepali churches. This hymnal was first published in 1980, but the songs were originally sourced from church practice in Nepal in the preceding decades, then later revised to include songs sung in churches in the decades thereafter. Some songs originally came from Darjeeling church hymnals, including translations of English-language hymns and devotional songs from other South-Asian Christian traditions. Others are authored by Nepalis from Darjeeling who moved to Nepal, including Kiran Pradhan (introduced at the beginning of this article) and Dibya Khaling (who worked with Radio Nepal and composed for prominent Nepali singers like Narayan Gopal). The Khristiya Bhajan is no longer the only source for songs in churches, but it remains the central one (Dalzell 2010).
23Songs from the Khristiya Bhajan are sung in churches throughout Nepal, no matter their affiliation or denomination, during weekly worship services, prayer meetings and Bible studies. My interlocutors listed the following as other times when music, including congregational song, was integral to church gatherings: inter-church gatherings and rallies during national festivals like Dashai or Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter; seasonal activities like carolling at Christmas (popularly referred to as karol keldai; Dalzell forthcoming); and life-cycle events like weddings. While musical participation was an important component of my interlocutors’ church involvement, a large portion of any Christian Nepali community event is devoted to music, especially participatory singing.
24The Khristiya Bhajan may be a printed collection of songs, but its practice is decidedly oral: singers draw from familiar musical styles as fits the metre of the lyrics. The most popular editions of the Khristiya Bhajan are pocket-sized, lyrics-only editions. People often fit the lyrics printed in their song book to folk tunes they already know. Thus, the way songs are sung can differ dramatically between congregations or regions of the country. For example, the church that I regularly attended in Patan would sing bhajan 500 as an anthem or a march. But the youth of a village church in Nepal’s western district of Kailali, who were all of Tharu ethnic background, sang it to the melody and arrangement of the maghauta – a Tharu song and dance genre consisting of a call and response sung during Maghi celebrations (Dalzell 2020; see also Dalzell 2017). These musical styles reveal the multiple cultural contexts in which Christian Nepalis live.
25While music was integral to my interlocutors’ church life, their musical experiences were not insular to church. Ashis, who grew up in a village in eastern Nepal, remembered hearing Nepali popular music on the national radio station from wealthier village members’ homes. Biju and Sharad’s older siblings included them in their own listening practices of Western rock music and taught them how to play guitar. Arun’s grandfather was a dhimay (a Newar barrel drum) player; he also remembered listening to neighbours practise Western guitar and drums as members of a local cover band. For Sharad and Prakash, school provided opportunities for formal instruction, participating in cultural drama teams and performing in programmes. Jesmine’s father had a personal interest in Nepali folk music, so he regularly invited Gandharva musicians to come to his home and teach him sarangi (a four-string bowed fiddle). Subhekchya comes from a very musical family: her mother is a well-known singer, and her uncles and grandfather are all composers and instrumentalists active within Nepal’s Christian community; they draw on both Western and South-Asian musical styles for their works. Consequently, Subhekchya started participating in recordings and live performances at a very young age. For everyone, Hindu and Buddhist ritual festival music was part of the sonic landscape of their neighbourhoods even though their own families’ religious orientation prevented their participation in the seasonal festivities. These experiences with Nepal’s wider musical milieu influence their musical arrangements of devotional songs when they lead worship.
26Within Nepal, young people are a formidable demographic. In 2016, Nepal’s Ministry of Youth and Sports reported that 40.3 percent of the country’s population was between the ages of 16 and 40 (as cited in Snellinger 2016: 154). Colloquially, the term youth denotes an age group of people who have yet to take on full adult responsibilities – usually teenagers, perhaps college students (Liechty 2009). However, Amanda Snellinger observes that, within Nepal’s politics, ‘youth’ does not indicate a specific age group but a hierarchy of influence (2018: 77, 85–86). While I am not examining politics, I find Snellinger’s concept of youth as a hierarchy of influence a helpful framework to understand some relational aspects between generations within Nepali churches.
27While not powerful in the traditional sense, young people remain influential and are thus still agents of change in their respective church communities. Within the literature on Christian Nepalis, scholars have noticed the roles of youths in Christian communities. Ben Campbell (2016: 417) argues that youths are more tolerant, if not accepting, of Christianity because their formal education exposed them to ideas of secularisation. Blandine Ripert (2014) observes how church pastors are often younger men because they are literate, thus church leadership contrasts with leadership in other Nepali communities. Ian Gibson (2017: 191) describes the role of youths in the Nepali Church in this way: ‘youths usually act as MC at church services and provide the worship band; they do much of the legwork for church programmes; they are among the most active church members in outreach and evangelism’. The work of these young people makes possible the very gathering of the church as a religious body. As Gibson’s description suggests, much youth activity is related to music. Thus, looking at the musical production of Christian Nepali youths provides insight into some of the ways that these second-generation Christian Nepalis exert influence within their church communities even though they may not always be in traditional church leadership roles. In the following sections, I show how the musical activities of Christian Nepali youths contribute to the life of Nepal’s Christian community and to Christianity’s public presence in Nepal.
28Two notable contributions from youths to the Nepali Church are the presence of worship bands and the use of amplified musical sound at church services. Historically, not all Nepali churches had a divide between a worship team and the congregation. In my Nepali church when growing up, one person played a Casio keyboard that was not connected to external amplification, and people in the congregation passed around and played instruments like the madal, kaijadi and acoustic guitars; someone recognised as a strong singer often began songs (N git uTaunu) from their seat in the congregation. Amplified sound became more common in individual Nepali churches in the early 2000s. For large churches, amplified sound allowed for better communication of the spoken word between the pastor and congregation. But amplifying music was a different story. When young people in Biju’s church wanted to introduce amplified instruments, they had to negotiate the change through a series of meetings between younger congregation members and church leadership:
We wanted to add new instruments, not just play acoustic all the time, and it was tough because my pastor – previous pastor – was from Shillong [India] and in Shillong, generally at churches, people give more priority to vocals rather than loud sound systems or music, so, he used to say ‘worship God just with guitar’…which is right, but at the same time, from a younger generation – from our perspective – we wanted to add new things and at the same time worship God… We had to request [to] our leaders, elders, and they used to have a meeting; it used to take us some time…they also heard from all the people [congregants]…even after bringing drum set to church, our pastor used to say ‘don’t play loud’, which we understand… So, the transitional period was tough…but slowly, they are adapting. (Biju, 14 July 2016)
29Arun’s church consists of a large hall that other churches and Christian groups rent for events, but for a long time they did not have a sound system that adequately supported a fully amplified music band. When SWM brought their own sound system to conduct a concert, the pastor realised how amplification could benefit musical communication within a service:
I remember one Saturday – I guess it was Salvation – that had all the sounds and systems; they brought [them] on Friday and they had all the set ups. So, on the Saturday service, all the members of church saw how a good sound systems looks like…everybody was so impressed about the drums, the quality, and the speakers that was there, and our pastor was like ‘Yeah, let’s have a sound system like this. This sounds so good!’ (Arun, 14 July 2016)
After that, the church purchased their own, more powerful system. These examples demonstrate how moving from unamplified to amplified musical sound was a significant transition for many churches and how youths often initiated these developments, either by conversation or example.
30Some resistance to these changes rested on the volume of the amplified sound. The instrument that received the most resistance from leaders and congregants was drum sets. Both Arun and Santos play the drums; both relayed instances where congregants closer to the stage complained about the volume emanating from the drum set in particular. Yet I believe that resistance due to volume is only part of the story.
31‘Loud music’ is not new to Nepal. Many traditional instruments have resonant, buzzy timbres and are performed outdoors. The Newars in Kathmandu are famous for their dhimay ensembles, which consist of barrel drums and brass cymbals (Wegner 1986, 2009). Pancai baja – a ritual music ensemble that often performs at weddings – traditionally consists of shrill reed instruments and various sizes of drums and cymbals (Tingey 1994). Thus, congregants and church leaders’ resistance does not likely stem from aesthetic aversion to loud volumes or shrill timbres. Rather, I think church leadership wants to stay away from the uncontrolled euphoria associated with this loud music. The following example illustrates this point. In an interview, one Tharu pastor from Dang district in western Nepal relayed to me that when some of the youths at his church performed a song they had written as a maghauta and began to increase the tempo near the end and jump around, as is typical during performance, church leadership asked them to stop because they believed the youths appeared too unruly. As alcohol consumption is a common part of maghauta performances, church leadership feared that other villagers would assume the youths had been drinking. This association with unruliness that these musical traditions featuring ‘loud music’ have may partly be one reason church leadership initially resisted amplified sound.
32Objections to drum sets may also have rested on cultural associations. Ashis relayed how many church leaders still associate the drum set with rock bands and an aggressive musical sound, so they question its appropriateness for use in church worship services:
The leaders think that loud [music] is devil’s; it may be because of how they have been hearing those loud music. They might have heard some of those loud musics, specially rock music or metal music, maybe on the radio, FM, or maybe watched [on] television... I think that’s one reason why our pastor and our leaders still think that loud music is not that good. (Ashis, 19 July 2016)
In some regard, foreign missionaries’ own cultural biases may have played a part. Prakash grew up on a mission hospital compound in far western Nepal; he suggested that many of those missionaries’ own cultural preferences may have influenced the thoughts of their Nepali colleagues:
This is my thinking...missionaries who came in, they just sing songs – I mean, I’m not against that thing [but] they didn’t play drums... They were used to singing in four parts and those kinds of stuff, and I think when things started changing, there was a concept of people in the way they were taught...they’d say things in the church, like, ‘that’s the instrument of the devil,’ in metal bands...I think that was the only reason why they were saying that. Even in Kathmandu, not just in villages. (Prakash, 19 July 2016)
33These cases show possible reasons why leadership at my interviewees’ churches told them ‘loud music comes from the devil’ and first resisted including amplified musical sound and instruments like Western drum sets in worship services. Yet Sharad’s experience demonstrates how some of this resistance may have been generational. Sharad grew up listening to rock music and described SWM’s musical arrangements as ‘just normal rock music…not heavy at all’, yet when he told members of his church – who were perhaps no more than ten years his senior – that he was attending SWM’s weekly fellowships, he described their reactions as ‘oh, why are you going to that place? They’ve got loud music; loud rock music!’
34Apart from these cultural obstacles, moving to amplified sound changed the dynamics of sung worship in Nepali churches. A worship team did not always lead congregational singing. Instead, people led from their seats in the congregation. But instruments like electric guitar and drum sets require more technical skills; therefore, the contexts in which most people encounter these instruments are presentational – a situation where a visible division exists between musicians and their audience (Turino 2008: 26). Hence, church leadership believed that these instruments and their associated musical forms were not conducive to the participatory ethos of a worship service. One of the complaints from leadership at a large church at which SWM led worship during the summer 2009 was that their musical interludes – which often consisted of extended electric guitar solos – were too long, preventing the congregation from singing and thus impeding their ability to participate in worship. Consequently, many Christian Nepali musicians have had to learn the difference between leading hymns for congregational worship and performing songs in concerts even though both rely on popular music forms.
35With growing congregations in urban areas, church leadership realised that corporate singing needed more definite leadership, and amplifying musical sound and using a worship band were two ways to ensure that people could sing together. Introducing presentational elements into participatory singing practices stretched churches’ philosophies about music in worship and likewise caused musicians to re-evaluate the suitability of some popular music conventions to congregational singing. These experiences demonstrate how traditional church leadership and youth relied on each other: leadership relied on youth for knowledge, skill and footwork to enact change, and youths needed the blessings of leadership to successfully implement those desired changes. Negotiation between generations helped determine what would be appropriate not just for Christian worship but also for congregations including people of all ages. In these cases, youths led by influence and example rather than raw power, showing their church leaders what was possible with amplified sound and worship bands.
- 12 These weekly fellowships became monthly fellowships around 2016 and were then suspended during Cov (...)
36Christian youths are an integral part of churches in Nepal, yet creating their own space to worship with other Christian youths is still important, partly so they can employ musical styles that many Christian leaders deem inappropriate for use in worship. For several years,12 one of the core activities of SWM’s worship teams was running a Saturday afternoon Bible study fellowship for other Christian Nepali youths. These fellowships featured pop and rock arrangements of a variety of Christian devotional songs. SWM included songs beyond the Khristiya Bhajan, yet these songs continued to form the core of songs that were sung. In 2009, one of the more frequent songs sung during SWM’s Saturday afternoon youth fellowship was bhajan 505. The song itself is an outpouring of adoration to God (fig 2). SWM’s arrangement featured heavy metal idioms, including heavily distorted guitar and backbeats on the snare, especially in the musical introduction (audio example 1).
37Listen to bhajan 505
Fig 2. Lyrics to bhajan 505 and translation
Chorus
mahimaa maarieko Thumaalaai
prashansaa prabhuharukaa prabhulaai
jaijaikaar raajaaharukaa raajaalaai
Verse 1
dhanyavaad stuti aadar ra bhakti
maarieko Thumaalaai ati
ijjat maan vaibhav ra shakti
lauchhau vijay, vijay, vijay iswar pratia
Verse 2
hosanna amen gaurav ra giti
maarieko Thumaalaai ati
pranaam Dhog dandavat drishti
Lauchhau vijay, vijay, vijay iswar prati
Chorus
Glory to the lamb who was slain
Praise to the lord above all lords
Homage to the king above all kings
The triumphant God receives it all
Verse 1
Excessive thanksgiving, prayers, respect and devotion
To the lamb who was slain
Honour, majesty and power
Verse 2
Much hosanna, amen, glory and song
To the lamb who was slain
Bowing down, we adore and worship you
The triumphant God receives it all
a. In printed versions, the first verse ends with the line ‘Ati pabitra, pabitra, pabitra iswar prati’ (to the holy, holy, holy God), but in this performance, SWM ended both verses with the last line of the second verse.
38A heavy metal arrangement of a devotional song focused on adoration is congruous with heavy metal as performed in Nepal in the 1990s. In his research, ethnomusicologist Paul Greene found that Nepali youths did not hear heavy metal as transgressive; rather, this genre’s dependence on technologically produced sound made it into a prestige marker for upwardly mobile urban youth who used it to experience catharsis, expressing emotions ranging from happiness to anger and grief (Greene 2001: 174, 176; Greene 2011: 115). Greene’s later research shows that transgression, including rage, emerged as a factor in Nepali heavy metal in the 2000s (Greene 2011). SWM’s heavy metal arrangement of bhajan 505 – which is a release of heartfelt devotion – is thus connected to a much wider musical youth culture within the Kathmandu Valley. Considering how many youths came to SWM with existing musical skills gained by playing in punk bands (Biju), in cover bands performing a variety of musical styles (Sharad) and in metal bands (Arun), such connections are not farfetched.
39During the fellowship, bhajan 505 was sung alongside other Khristiya Bhajan songs, original Nepali songs composed by SWM members, and contemporary English-language worship songs. This combination of musical styles and languages reflected the middle-class urban youth demographic in Kathmandu, represented by those who attended the fellowship. The majority of Nepali youths in attendance belonged to middle-class families, attended English-medium schools and listened to popular music in multiple languages, including English. They were at ease in expressing themselves on a daily basis in English, Nepali and often a third language (such as Nepal Bhasa). The songs sung during the fellowship reflected their fluency with multiple languages and musics as well as revealed the urban subcultures to which they belonged.
40The musical and linguistic diversity within these youth fellowships contrasts with the musical and linguistic tenor of weekly Nepali church worship services. When Prakash leads worship at SWM’s fellowships, he includes both Nepali and English-language worship songs. Yet when he leads worship at his own church, he chooses to omit English-language songs because some members of his church only speak Nepali, even though most attendees are young and would be comfortable singing English-language songs. In an effort to include everyone, he chooses to exclude English-language songs when he leads worship.
41These situations demonstrate how second-generation Christians’ musical experiences outside church influence the worship experiences they prefer when worshipping with others closer to their own age. Many youths are aware that, outside their demographic, these musical styles or linguistic choices may not benefit everyone attending their church’s worship service. Nevertheless, as the above sections demonstrate, including some musical sounds to which they relate is one way for youths to feel part of church worship services.
42Youths are not only musically active within their churches; they also often represent the Christian community to the Nepali public through music activities. Concerts are one way that Christian Nepali youths make the Christian community’s presence felt in public. Many of the young people who came to the youth fellowship also attended SWM’s concerts, but the presentational rather than participatory nature of the event meant they were more likely to invite their non-Christian friends to come with them. Because these events reached an audience beyond their immediate Christian community, and to a degree beyond just young men and women, SWM chose songs to which a more diverse audience could relate. Concerts therefore featured a wider range of musical styles than the Saturday afternoon fellowships. In addition to the pop and rock arrangements of Nepali and English worship songs, SWM always included at least one song within the Nepali popular music genre of lok git (N folk song).
43The commercial genre of lok git was developed and popularised by Radio Nepal from the 1950s onwards. Arrangers combined musical elements from Nepal’s various folk music traditions, translated song lyrics into the Nepali language and fit them into strophic forms. In the studio mix, folk instruments like madal and sarangi were foregrounded against Western strings. This genre was for popular consumption through the radio, but people incorporated these songs into numerous areas of social life, either as recorded versions or live covers (Grandin 1989; Henderson 2002–2003; Stirr 2012).
- 13 Personal communication, Sunil, 9 Feburary 2016.
44Consequently, composing and performing lok git is one way for these Christian youths to incorporate markers of pan-Nepali culture that are not related to a particular religious practice. In 2012, SWM’s autumn concert featured one such song referred to as ‘Lai Bari Lai’. This song was composed by one of SWM’s founders, Sunil, and arranged by a fellow cofounder, Kiran. Having grown up in Gorkha district, Sunil borrowed a melody used by the Gandharvas in his area, which he described as featuring a slower khemta taal combined with the faster, danceable metre of jhyaure. Both metres consist of six beats and, when combined, they create a typical folk song arrangement (Stirr 2009: 10). Apart from these musical elements, Sunil explained to me that many of the songs in khemta taal he was familiar with were melancholic, usually recounting instances of heroism and sacrifice. His song’s verses in khemta taal recounts how Jesus came down to earth as the Son of God but was not recognised or accepted as such. The chorus, employing jhyaure, is a joyful invitation for those who wish to accept Jesus Christ as their personal saviour.13
45Normally, such a performance features a sarangi and a madal. When SWM first performed this song in 2009 at an outdoor concert in eastern Nepal, they did not have these Nepali instruments on hand, so they approximated their timbres by manipulating the sounds of the electric and bass guitars. But in the 2012 concert performance, they placed the sarangi and madal at the front of the stage alongside the lead singers (fig 3). When SWM sang this song, the audience clapped along and got up and danced in the aisles of the auditorium, as they would in any other performance of this genre. Including songs written in Nepali popular music genres – which are not ritually marked – was one way that SWM incorporated familiar markers of Nepali cultural identity to which Nepalis of other faiths could relate. Through such musical choices, SWM connected Christianity to forms of national understanding, making the Christian message meaningful for themselves and their audiences.
Fig 3. The sarangi (left) and madal (centre) at the front of the stage during the Salvation Worship Ministries concert in November 2012
Photo: V Dalzell 2012.
46Before Whelpton gave his lecture on Christianity in Nepal, sociologist Rajendra Pradhan gave some preliminary remarks. He stated that the topic of Whelpton’s lecture was interesting because it was controversial. This lecture was the first that the Social Science Baha sponsored on Christianity, which in Nepal was viewed as ‘very foreign and very Western’. Thus, openly talking about the subject that day was a test of Nepali tolerance towards other (read, non-Hindu) religions. What Pradhan saw as a test of tolerance, Rongong told me after the talk was a missed opportunity. For him, rather than highlighting the voices of Christian Nepalis, the talk only reinforced fears about Nepalis converting to Christianity for material gain and conspiracies about Western hegemony undermining Nepal’s cultural base. In other words, the question of how Christian Nepalis situate their belonging within Nepal is still pending.
47My attempt here has been to foreground the lived experiences of second-generation Christian Nepalis to better understand what being a Christian in Nepal means for them. Examining their musical experiences and practices is one way to see how they remain connected to the country’s social fabric. First, it demonstrates a short but significant Christian heritage in Nepal. In the Khristiya Bhajan, Christian Nepali youths work with a devotional song repertoire that shaped their faith as they grew up in Christian households and made them a part of their churches. Second, for their musical arrangements of these songs, Christian Nepali youths draw on a musical palette that includes Nepali popular music from a global, youth-based music scene as well as ones moulded from musical elements originating in Nepal. The musical performance choices of Christian Nepali youths connect them to both previous Christian Nepali generations and Nepal’s society at large, making their practices meaningful for themselves and their chosen audiences.
- 14 This article highlights differences between generations of Christians primarily within urban conte (...)
48The musical activities of Christian Nepali youths both contribute to Christianity’s public presence in Nepal as well as the life of Nepal’s Christian community. The use of amplified sound and worship bands in congregational worship demonstrates how these youths are agents for change within the Nepal’s Christian community. That these practices had to be negotiated between generations of Christians shows how the Christian community in Nepal is not monolithic.14 The presence of these negotiations within congregations shows that belonging is not a one-time, top-down event but a process that continues across generations of Christians as they determine what their practices should look like in relation to the changing social, cultural and political contexts in which they live. Christian Nepali youths’ musical activities demonstrate how belonging within and beyond the Church in Nepal constitutes their identity, for in their experience, being Nepali and being Christian, far from being mutually exclusive, constitute each other.
Acknowledgements
Material in this article was first presented as conference papers at both the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies bi-annual conference in 2016 and the International Council for Traditional Music’s World Music Conference in 2017. Discussions from those presentations shaped the present article. I am grateful to the members of Salvation Worship Ministries, who generously shared their experiences with me and enriched my own experience of the Nepali Church, as well as three anonymous reviewers. Any shortcomings within the article remain my own.
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