Dr. Anna Stirr is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii Manoa. She is the author of Singing Across Divides: Music and Intimate Politics in Nepal (Oxford University Press, 2017), which won the 2019 Bernard S. Cohn Prize for first books on South Asia from the Association for Asian Studies. She is the co-director, with Bhakta Syangtan, of the documentary film Singing A Great Dream: The Revolutionary Songs and Life of Khusiram Pakhrin (2020), which won Best International Documentary and Best International Director at the Darbhanga International Film Festival in India. Dr. Stirr holds a BA in music and religious studies from Lawrence University in Wisconsin, and an MA, MPhil, and PhD in ethnomusicology from Columbia University. She has also taught at Oxford University, Leiden University, and the New School. Her research focuses on music, dance, language, intimacy, and politics in South Asia, particularly in Nepal and the Himalayan region. She performs Nepali folk music as a singer, flutist, and percussionist. She is currently working on two projects that deal with love, intimacy, and politics in Nepal.
Interview with Anna Stirr, Ph.D. by Himanshu Kunwar
When did you first visit Nepal and why?
I first visited Nepal in 2000, as an undergraduate study-abroad student with the School for International Training (SIT). I decided to study in Nepal because I had a scholarship to study abroad, and wanted to go somewhere that was very different from the US, and which I knew very little about at the time. I was interested in learning a new culture and being in a place that I had always heard was beautiful. And it was! The School for International Training had a great program. We learned Nepali language, lived with Nepali families, had classes about Nepal’s history and current issues, and did independent study projects. I did my project about music and religion because I was a music major and also a religion major. I interviewed classical musicians about whether or not their musical practice was related in any way to their religious practice. I did this because I had always heard, from Indian classical musicians and their promotional materials, about how performing music was a means of worship. But I learned that not all classical musicians are Hindu or particularly religious and that while some see their music practice as related to their religious practice, others don’t think about it in that way.
You speak and sing Nepali so perfectly. How did you learn and perfect the language?
Thank you! I feel like I am always learning and definitely still perfecting the language. I first learned Nepali with SIT. They sent us cassettes to listen to before we came to Nepal, then we learned with excellent language teachers once we were there. I also learned through speaking with my host family and with friends I made in Nepal. Later, I took Nepali classes in the US and tuition in Nepal, to get better at reading and writing. My favorite experience was reading Muna Madan and learning the folk poetic meters (asare jhyaure, in that case) and the way of writing within those poetic meters. That probably influenced my interest in folk poetry and song.
Why did you choose Nepali folk songs for your Ph.D.?
I wanted to research something about music and language, and I wanted to do so in Nepal. I had an internship in Nepal doing research on panchai baja for the Spiny Babbler arts organization, but I didn’t want to do my PhD about panchai baja because I was most interested in songs. So while I was there doing that internship, I looked around to see what other interesting musical things were happening. I also took bansuri flute lessons, and another flutist named Mitra Magar worked in a dohori restaurant. He said I should come to see what it was like, so I did, and I found it both enjoyable in itself, and a fascinating topic for a PhD about music and language. The reason it was so interesting as a research topic was that all aspects of social-political difference seemed to come together in dohori, as singers negotiate the potential for love through their songs, across various social divides.
What is your favorite aspect of Nepali culture?
All of the arts, from music and dance to culinary arts!
Have you noticed any differences in contemporary versus classic folk songs?
Folk songs, by nature, keep changing with the times. So, of course, there are differences! All of the differences would fill multiple books.
Are you still doing any work with Nepali folk songs even after completing your Ph.D.?
As you can see from my interviews on YouTube, the multiple articles posted on my website, the books I have contributed to, the book on dohori that I published, and the documentary film that Bhakta Syangtan and I made on revolutionary singer-songwriter Khusiram Pakhrin, I have been quite busy doing research on Nepali folk songs since I received my Ph.D. 11 years ago. My current project focuses on progressive and revolutionary songs and dance. I am also interested in instrumental music, dance, and drama, and other types of songs beyond folk songs. But, I am especially interested in things outside of the urban mainstream, so I keep coming back to the diversity of folk songs in Nepal. I think they have a great deal to contribute to contemporary music-making and the continued vitality of all the cultures found in Nepal.
What difficulties did you face during your study?
As I write about in the Preface to my book on dohori, Singing Across Divides, I faced similar difficulties to those faced by any woman who wants to live alone and work at night in Kathmandu. One of these was that I had a hard time finding an apartment initially because people were worried about me being out at night—they weren’t just worried about my safety, they were also worried about what kind of person I was, if I was a respectable enough woman. I did eventually find a place to live with an understanding family who supported my research and was very interested in it!
What similarities and differences do you notice between Nepali folk songs and folk songs of other regions?
It would take many books to answer this question just for the songs found within Nepal. Songs from regions that cross borders—like Mithila for example—are quite similar in Nepal and India. Lately, I have been researching about Tamang songs, and while there are many differences among them in different places in Nepal, they also share themes with places in Tibet like Kyirong. More broadly, Nepali folk music is part of a modal tradition, and modal musical styles can be found in many places. There are folk songs from Europe and the Americas that can be easily integrated into Nepali performance styles. The instrumental band Kutumba has done this with Irish and Galician tunes. The tradition of improvising poetic sung conversations, as in Nepali dohori, can be found in many other places as well. As far as I have read, the place where it is most like dohori is in Bolivia. There, people sing coplas in which men and women flirt during festivals. I have also been introduced to similar traditions from Ethiopia. Some other dohori-like traditions don’t have the associations of flirting; many are performed as conversations between two men or two women, on myriad topics. In Cuba, men have song duels where they insult each other in the genre of son.
What kind of impact have you seen folk songs have on culture and society?
The words of folk songs can spread messages, entertain, and inspire, and the musical sounds of folk songs and their accompanying dances also have an impact. They produce particular moods, from the contemplative mood of a far-western thadi solo song to the festive mood of a jhyaure dance song, to the patriotic mood of a national song, or the revolutionary energy of a revolutionary song. Singing and playing together, along with listening and dancing, bind performers and audiences together in shared experience. These are the actual important impacts of songs. Certain songs come into controversy, exposing social fault lines. For example, in 2019, people were angry at lok dohori singer Pashupati Sharma about his satirical song Lutna Sake Lut. Those who were angry were either people who took it literally and thought Pashupati was encouraging looting, or people who believed that the government shouldn’t be criticized. Those who were not angry, didn’t care, or supported Pashupati openly were those who understood that it was satire, and believed that the people have the right to openly criticize the government. The song itself didn’t cause the controversy; the fault lines were already there. But, this does demonstrate that the words of a song can have an impact on people and move them to act in certain ways, so the power of messages that songs convey should certainly be respected.
What actions should the Nepali people and government take to preserve folk songs?
I think everyone is naturally attracted to new things, and we may not see the importance of what is closest to us. This advice is for anyone, not just the Nepali people: we should value the things that our ancestors have developed, as these have contributed to our own existence, and we should maintain what is good within them, while also developing our own innovations and excising what is bad or no longer needed. For example, we should abjure racism, casteism and patriarchy to promote equality, and we can do that in the case of folk performance with words, gestures, and dances, and also the structure of the economy of performance. This has changed drastically in the past thirty years. While I cannot provide a full set of policy recommendations here, I think the Nepali people and government need to do whatever they can to demonstrate and support the contemporary value of local performing arts, whether or not the word folk is used to describe them. As I have mentioned in articles before, a small grants program for artists and institutions to support the vital continuation of performing arts in all communities would be a great policy. And, performing arts education should promote local songs, in local languages, and local instrumental, dance, and drama traditions, in addition to and with equal prestige to any other genres being taught such as the classical musics of the subcontinent or the West.