Sounding and Staging Village Nepal

What is it about?

This chapter turns to how commercial dohori represents an idealized version of a rural hill village through music, lyrics, dance, and visual aspects, and how such representations contribute to dohori’s mediating role among social categories, spaces, and places. Looking at representations of the rural in songs, music videos, and urban dohori restaurant performance in Nepal and in the UK, it examines how a particular version of “the Nepali village” has been constructed as normative.

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Why is it important?

Building on the discussion in the preceding chapters, I argue that ways of staging the village as “country” in dohori come directly to bear on the issues of gender, caste, ethnicity, class, and region that currently dominate Nepali political discourse.

Perspectives