Talk by Anna Stirr

Gokul Joshi (1930-1961) was a radical progressive poet and singer who was born in poverty and lived an itinerant life in Nepal and India in the 1940s and 50s, performing his songs and poetry and organizing workers and peasants against their exploiters wherever he went. He was an exceptionally talented exponent of the tradition of extemporaneous poetry and song in folk poetic meters, which at the time was strongly associated with the lower classes and disparaged by elites. Those elites who were beginning to broaden their outlook, like the poet Laxmiprasad Devkota, recognized in Joshi a talent rivalling their own, and many tried to get him into national politics. Yet Joshi had no patience for intellectual society, employment, political institutions, or the householder life, and preferred direct political action and the life of the road. Because of his ascetic-like lifestyle, his rejection of institutions, and the suppression of his works by his rivals, the details of his life are somewhat of a mystery and his works have been hard to find for decades. This has allowed a mythology to grow up around the figure of Gokul Joshi: the “true people’s singer,” a modernist ascetic dedicating his life to improving the lot of the people through poetry and song. In this presentation I look at how stories of Gokul Joshi’s life have influenced the careers of subsequent radical progressive performers, and how the idea of the “true people’s singer” has developed, in light of masculine traditions of Hindu asceticism, communist New Man theory, and changing political-economic conditions in Nepal. I address how the idea of the “true people’s singer” may have contributed to a constrained recognition of performers whose contributions did not fit that mold. I argue that Gokul Joshi may have created the role of the folk-style people’s singer in the drama of Nepali progressive politics, but that others now have the opportunity to expand it to newer ways of being revolutionary.

Dr. Stirr is Associate Professor in Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Anna’s research focuses on South Asia, particularly on Nepal and the Himalayan region. She is currently working on two projects that deal with love, intimacy, and politics in Nepal. The first looks at improvised dohori question-answer songs as culturally intimate, gendered expressions of ideas of nation and heritage, within a cycle of migration and media circulation that spans the globe. The second chronicles the history of Nepal’s politically oppositional “progressive song” from the 1960s to the present, with a focus on ideas of love, development, and communist thought as interrelated ways of imagining a better future. Articles from these projects have appeared in various journals and edited volumes. Anna also maintains an active research interest in the relationship between music, religion, politics and public culture in South Asia and the Himalayas. Along with teaching and researching about music, Anna is also active as a performer. After a bachelor’s degree in western classical flute performance, she has studied Hindustani classical bansuri flute with Steve Gorn and Jeevan Ale, and has learned the folk style of bansuri performance through musical interaction with many Nepali performers during her fieldwork. As a singer, she has studied the Hindustani classical tradition with Prabhu Raj Dhakal in Nepal and Ustad Mehboob Nadeem in London, and she learned Nepali folk and dohori song as she learned the flute styles, in the informal oral tradition. Her formal instruction in Nepali folk music has been with Khadga Bahadur Budha Magar on the madal drum, and she believes that knowledge of percussion provides a firm foundation for a broader grasp of any musical style. She is working on compiling and translating the Nepali folk music teaching materials created by her teachers as well as the late musicologist Subi Shah.