Emotion and Devotion, Lingering and Longing in Some Nepali Songs

Abstract

theoretical strand, I look to recent work on embodiment for help in reworking overly cognitive, symbolic, and functional descriptions of social and musical practices. Looped across my theoretical strand is some work designed to evoke a sense of how some Kathmandu valley musicians express emotion and devotion--especially in bbajan (praise or adoration) songs, but also in songs about love and longing. These threads can be torn apart, but they wrap around each other throughout the text in order to pull together some senses of how songs embody emotion and how singing makes experiences of sadness and pleasure reverberate with memories of fondness and loss. By traveling through some work on South Asian devotional song practices and stopping periodically at my own fieldwork in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 1987, 1994, and 1995, I investigate in this work the prospects for a richer language to describe the ways that sound works to affect its users.