“The bus doesn’t stop for us”: Multilingualism, attitudes and identity in songs of a Tibetic community of Nepal

2.1 Data used in this paper

The songs on which this paper is based are part of two Syuba corpora, archived as open access collections online. When referenced, each of the songs is cited with a file name and, where specific lines are quoted, a starting time code. The file name can be used to retrieve the original recordings, including video (where available), and transcripts. All recordings are available through PARADISEC.^[8]

The majority of songs come from the Gawne (2009) corpus (citation prefix SUY1) (for more details see Gawne 2018). There are 11 song recordings in Syuba in the SUY1 collection, made with seven participants.^[9] These include traditional folk songs, Buddhist chants, and songs authored by their singers. Seven additional original compositions and traditional folk songs come from a corpus of Syuba recordings made by the Mother Tongue Centre (Nepal) (2013) (citation prefix MTC1). There is only one song performed by the same singer in both collections, but as he includes different verses in each rendition, we include both (Pasang Lama: SUY1-140126-03 and MTC1-AY17).

In both archives, songs are transcribed and translated, and ELAN^[10] (Lausberg and Sloetjes 2009) transcription files are available. Some transcripts include translation into English, and others into Nepali. A small handful of the MTC1 songs do not have written transcriptions. Instead, they have been transcribed using the Basic Oral Language Documentation (BOLD) methodology (Reiman 2010), with Syuba translators recording careful respeakings and Nepali translations. Supplementally, we draw on Monika Höhlig’s collection, recorded between 1972 and 1980 (Höhlig 1972). This collection has 10 song recordings, which remain untranslated, but we draw on them to explore what types of songs were performed 40 years ago. A full list of the songs used in this paper, and the archive in which they are located, is given in Appendix A.

2.2 About the songs

The songs in these recordings fall into three genres: individual compositions, traditional folk songs and Buddhist prayers.

The first genre includes those songs that individuals create and sing themselves. These songs are often composed as people go about daily tasks. Some of the songs Gawne, such as those performed by Pasang Maya Lama, show careful structuring, while others, such as Kabire Tamang’s song, demonstrate a degree of improvisation in the performance.

The second genre of songs is folk songs. The term Syuba speakers use to describe folk songs is shipru (Yolmo 2018, 15). These are known by mostly older Syuba speakers, to varying degrees of proficiency. These songs are traditionally sung by with accompanying dance groups at festivals and events, accompanied by the tamyang (Tib. sgra snyan), a stringed wooden instrument. No one still plays the tamyang in Syuba villages. We know that the instrument was available in the village in the 1970s, thanks to a single historical recording of a man playing the instrument in accompaniment to his own singing (Höhlig 1972, MH1-T001-17). Shipru have lyrics, but these can vary from performance to performance. For example, in two recordings of Pasang Tamang singing a particular song (SUY1-140126-03, MTC1-AY17) the lyrics and the order in which they appear are different. When a group of women came together to sing another song, three of the four were clearly following the lead of the women who knew the song the best (SUY1-140129-03).

Within the broader Tibetan Buddhist tradition, folk songs are often divided into those that approach religious topics (often designated by the honorific term mgur or gur) and those that deal with secular topics (which are called a broader variety of names including glu or lu, bshad or shè, and dbyangs or yang). In practice, however, there is much crossover between these two groups; nominally designated religious songs contain secular themes and humour, and secular songs contain religious themes (Gamble 2018, 77–80). The tradition of singing folk songs at large gatherings has a long history across the Himalaya. Historical records suggest that they were promoted during the Tibetan Empire during the sixth to ninth centuries (Dotson 2013). These songs were primarily oral compositions, composed to be sung by groups, and included memorisation aids such as repetition and rhyming. The use of folk songs within the religious tradition—and particularly during religious gatherings—was encouraged by the Tibetans’ Indian tantric gurus during the tenth to twelfth centuries and is most associated with the famous poet-saint Milarepa (Quintman 2008). The singing of folk songs on religious topics was one of the ways that Buddhist teachers used to adapt teachings to local contexts, and this adaptation meant that the songs often included local references, interactions with subaltern interlocutors, localized vocab, and non-standard language (Gamble 2018, 77–80).

The third genre includes both prayers composed for specific purposes within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and those taken from rituals that are repeated in daily life (roughly covered by the term molam, Tib. smon lam). Like elsewhere across the mountains and Inner Asia, these prayers are all said with accompanying tunes. Their frequent recitation is a result of the focus within the Buddhist tradition on orality, with transmission from a qualified teacher and the repeated recitation of prayers as a way to attain merit (Klein 2003). The focus on orality is shared with other parts of the broader Sanskrit cultural tradition, including Hinduism, and derives from these traditions’ pre-literate roots (Taylor 2012). The emphasis within this broader tradition is to repeat faithfully the sounds that were handed down to the practitioner from their guru, in the belief that the mere utterance of this sound carries metaphysical power (Ellingson 1979; Klein 2003). Within this belief system, understanding of the words is secondary. With a lack of focus on meaning, songs are often performed in a form of Tibetan that is incomprehensible to those performing it (Ramble 2007 discusses a similar case from another community in Nepal).

In this paper, we mostly focus on the themes that emerge in songs that people have composed themselves, to understand best what Subya speakers value and perform. We also draw on the traditional songs as these show similarities and differences to the songs composed by individuals, and Buddhist ritual songs as they reflect the centrality of Buddhist practice in Syuba life.

Syuba speakers recognize the centrality of songs to the documentation process. Tsiring Lama, who gave an oral history of the Syuba community, mentions songs and stories as part of the way to maintain language use:

The Syuba songs recorded to date cover a range of themes. None of the recorded songs touch on romantic love. Romantic love is, by contrast, a common feature of the nationally popular dohori genre, which is the most common Nepali-language genre in Syuba communities (Stirr 2017).

Dohori and the Syuba songs do, however, share some commonalities. Stirr (2017) observes that sad Dohori songs show “the poignancy and bittersweet nature of villagers’ hard lives in the hills of Nepal” (p. 116), which parallel the themes of hardship and suffering in the Syuba songs. This song type is part of a larger genre of dukha ko katha ‘suffering stories’ in Nepal (in narratives see Jacobson 1999: 40–48; Hutt 2009: 32, in songs see Yolmo (2018: 20ߝ24); Skinner et al. 1994: 265; Stirr 2017: 4; March 2002: 61). The tradition of suffering songs has, furthermore, a corollary in the Tibetic language oral song and literary traditions. Many of the oldest extant central Tibetan songs are laments (Dotson 2013; Uray 1972), and even contemporary Tibetan pop songs deal with themes of sorrow (Warner 2013) and nostalgia (Makley 2007).

In the Syuba songs, foregrounding suffering is a way to establish your authenticity and your ability to survive. We not only see it in the song texts but also in narrative and discourse.

Even though people speak of suffering and sing about it—as discussed below—this does not mean that Syuba-speaking people are always unhappy. By contrast, within the Buddhist tradition, recognizing the suffering inherent in life is said to be the way to develop contentment and even happiness (McRae 2018). The same recording demonstrates this when Jit Bahadur acknowledge that the village is a good place to live (Jit Bahadur code-switched into Nepali for the segment in square brackets, Sangbu Syuba provided a Syuba translation tèsa tɕòŋra yàabu):

It is with this understanding of Syuba speaker’s nuanced attitude to their cultural identity, their language, and their relationship to the hardships in their lives that we look at the content of the song texts.

3.1 Identity

As discussed above, Syuba speakers see themselves as Nepali citizens, practising Buddhists of the Tibetan tradition, and Syuba speakers who are aware of their Yolmo heritage. This multilayered identity is apparent in the song texts.

In his song about life in the village, Kabire Tamang frames the hardship of daily life (discussed in more detail below), with reference to the Syuba’s identity as Tibetan people or pèepa (SUY1-140127-04: 030), the Syuba cognate with the Tibetan term Bod. In the recent past, this term referred primarily to Central Tibetans, but in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it has been more commonly used to describe a pan-Tibetan identity. In the same song, Kabire refers to the village as being Yolmo (line 078). The only identity term that Kabire—or anyone in the lyrics of any of the songs—does not regularly evoke is Syuba. They only use this word in conversations before songs or with specific reference to their language.

The Syuba speakers are keenly aware of the general lack of awareness about the Syuba language amongst people outside their community. As Norpu Tamang notes in the preamble to his song:

Suyba speakers are increasingly focused on a Syuba identity, as evidenced by Jit Bahadur’s observation:

This focus on the Syuba identity is in part due to local discussions about identity and reconnection with linguists (Gawne 2016). It is also, however, part of the larger janajāti movement in Nepal, which emphasizes local identities (Shneiderman 2015).

Although people spend a lot of time talking about being Syuba, there are scant direct references to this identity in the songs. By contrast, there is a strong grounding in Tibetan religious identity in the lyrics. One traditional song text (SUY1-140129-03) is full of Buddhist imagery, including a reliquary stupa or chorten (028), a monastery or gompa (056), Tashi Lama’s ceremonial scarf or katha (064) and more figurative Tibetan imagery such as a golden bridge (022), an image that is often used to designate the journey from one life to the next (Rig ’dzin bstan srung 2006).

Both Karbire (SUY1-140127-04, 70-77) and Jit Bahadur (SUY1-140127-05) sing of the role of the pòmpo in village life. The pòmpo in these songs is mentioned particularly in his role as a village healer. In Kabire’s song, he is paid in rice for his attendance and the healing he brings. Throughout Jit Bahadur’s song, the pòmpo is there with his drum, helping cure people and talking with the villagers. In both songs, the pòmpo is identified as the main healer in the village in the absence of a medical clinic or doctor. Neither man is a member of one of the village Lama households, and Jit Bahadur does practice a small amount of the medicine associated with this tradition. Songs composed by individuals contain either references to pòmpo or Buddhism, but never both. Although neither Karbite nor Jit Bahadur’s songs refer to Buddhism, as mentioned above, Karbire does identify the people in his song as Tibetans, indicating that the pòmpo practice is not, for him at least, in tension with his Tibetan Buddhist identity.

Syuba identity also includes their place as Nepali citizens, as expressed through geography. One of the points of intersection is in Syuba speakers’ relationship to Kathmandu, which is both the capital of Nepal and a venerable Buddhist pilgrimage site. Kabire Tamang (SUY1-140127-04: 027), Jit Bahadur Tamang (SUY1-140127-02: 37 and SUY1-140127-05: 081), Bhaire Lama (MTC1-BA06) and Pasang Maya Lama (SUY1-140128-05: 01) all mention travelling to Kathmandu. For many villagers, Kathmandu represents a site of consumption; it is the place from which people can obtain goods that are not obtainable in the village. It is, furthermore, viewed as a site in which they can connect with wider society.

Bhaire Lama includes a description of his visit to Boudhanath Stupa in his song. Boudhanath Stupa is situated in the suburbs of Kathmandu and is one of the most important sacred sites in the Himalaya. It has a long history; there has been a building on the site since the middle of the fifth century CE, and the building has been repeatedly enlarged and repaired (Ehrhard 1990). The stupa was supported by and acted as a terminus for the trans-Himalaya trade network (Ehrhard 1990), and the nearby carpet trade (O’Neil 2005). Visitors to the stupa usually circumambulate it, which Bhaire Lama mentions, and light candles at its base. In the song, Bhaire Lama lights candles for his deceased parents. The inclusion of Boudhanath Stupa and the visit to family members means that Kathmandu is not imagined as hostile or unrelatable, but as part of their Buddhist cultural landscape.

Even within those songs that are in the traditional Tibetan shipru style, Kathmandu is a focal point. In the shipru sung by a group of women, which—as discussed above—is full of Tibetan lyrical imagery, there is the following line:

We also see mention of Kathmandu in both versions of a traditional song sung by Pasang Lama (SUY1-140126-03 and MTC1-AY17). Kathmandu is presented as a place of contrast, where there is a different, unequal, kind of suffering compared to life in the village:

Kathmandu is almost always oriented ‘down’ in the song texts. Hill-dwelling Syuba speakers see themselves oriented within a vertical relationship to the Kathmandu valley:

In the traditional songs, this slope-based orientation is reoriented to a larger focus on east/west:

That these songs demonstrate less of a vertical orientation and more of a cardinal focus may illustrate their position as part of a larger Tibetan areal song tradition.

The only clear geographical reference to anywhere north of the Syuba villages is in a song composed by two young women in their late teens (SUY1-140127-14), who sing about the historical trade in wool and salt between Tibet and the flatlands of Nepal’s Terai region.

This song references a historical trade that existed between Nepali wool and Tibetan salt as part of the same trans-Himalayan trade system that supported Boudhanath Stupa. The villages in this area and many others across Nepal did graze sheep historically; the Tibetan name for Nepal is pè yùl (bal yul), the ‘land of wool’. Tibetan traders would collect salt from dried lakes across the Plateau and carry the salt down to Kathmandu to exchange for wool (Harris 2013: 107).

Like the song about travelling to Kathmandu, this song combines several geographical imaginaries. It includes the economic geographies of trade routes that underpin the nationalist geography of Nepal, and these geographical imaginaries intersect with the wider, Tibet-centred religio-cultural sphere to which the Syuba speakers belong.

3.2 Relationships

As mentioned above, there is a lack of overt reference to a Syuba identity in these songs. The individual compositions are, however, grounded in the sense of coherent group identity, negotiated through constant reference to relationships. Both Jit Bahadur (SUY1-140127-05: 62) and Kabire (SUY1-140127-04: 34) refer to the villages as ɲìi yùl ‘our village’. Within many of the songs are references to kin relationships, on which most aspects of village life, obligation and interaction are predicated. The narrator often aligns these relationships with the relationship between them and their audiences, or participants in the songs’ actions. For example:

Several of the songs also make reference to rò ‘friends’, in the context of people who are pleasing work companions:

These friends are still drawn from the extended network of familial relationships but provide a contrasting and larger group than those evoked in kinship networks.

The landscape, furthermore, mediates relationships. The songs all evoke a consistent geography. It is part of affirming their identity as hill-dwellers, and their evocation of the mountains in the songs blends the region’s physical geography with their cultural geographies. The broader, intersecting physical and cultural geographies they evoke in the songs link them into their other identities as Nepali citizens and Tibetan Buddhist practitioners. The hilliness of the terrain is a recurrent theme:

Further, Pasang Maya Lama sings about the path stretching above and below (SUY1-140128-05: 2) and Jit Bahadur Lama sings about the sandy rivers in the lowlands that only move through valleys, not high up in the hills (SUY1-140127-02: 28). Jacobsen (1999, ch 2) notes the pervasiveness of the landscape in the narratives of Tamang and Sherpa speakers with whom she worked, not just as a material terrain to be navigated, but as a poetic tool. We read this as an articulation of cultural geography. The landscape is not merely the songs’ setting. Instead, the singers incorporate the landscape into their songs as a character. They have a relationship with it, and it operates within people’s lives to shape their relationships with each other.

Several of the Syuba songs mention marital relationships, and the negotiation of these, both by the individuals and families. Families generally arrange marriages, but these days, the individuals who are to be married are actively involved in this process. Syuba speakers have patrilineal groups, with women marrying outside of their group and moving into their new husband’s house.^[11] As in many cultures ‘cross-cousin’ marriage is considered the ideal, although these days direct-cousin marriage is not common. The line in MTC1-BA07 in which Norpu Tamang sings about negotiating marriage refers to this practice:

Syuba speakers overwhelmingly state their preference is for marriage within their own linguistic and cultural group. Mitchell and Eichentopf’s (2013: 13–14) survey of linguistic vitality and community attitudes amongst Syuba speakers found that three-quarters of the 49 participants preferred not to marry out of the Syuba-speaking community. Only three of the participants had done so, with the overwhelming majority married to, or intending to marry, another Syuba speaker. Karma Tamang describes the ideal marriage partner as fitting within these patterns and being from a nearby village. There are, however, other elements of the songs that place these marriages within broader Nepali ideals such as the wearing of bangles and gold earrings at the marriage ceremony (MTC1-AY01: 05).

Conversation is key in the negotiation of a marriage, with the families exchanging multiple visits to establish an engagement and marriage:

Sabina and Muna Lama sing about the courtship process from the perspective of the potential bride (SUY1-140127-14). They sing about walking through the forest with close female relatives as they do necessary domestic tasks like gathering firewood. As they walk, they see men from another village looking at them (lines 12–17). This song reflects a growing awareness that younger members of the community prefer to discreetly negotiate their own feelings before the formal negotiations between families occur. They still know, however, that this attention only has meaning if the men from the forest come to talk with their family:

Studies of Indigenous multilingualism have shown that the relationship between marriage, exogamy, and language maintenance is far from straightforward. In some cases, linguistic exogamy is integral to maintaining linguistic diversity (Aikhenvald 2002). But in the Syuba case, the ongoing vitality of Syuba language is likely, in part, attributable to the maintenance of communal and familial relationships through marriage.

The importance of talk and language more generally, is discussed in the next section.

3.3 Language

Using discussion to establish mutual trust in the negotiation of a marriage is only one of the roles that conversation plays in these songs. The importance of talk is pervasive in many of the songs. Within the theme of language, we begin by looking at the ways Syuba use talk to demonstrate social cohesion and shared thoughts and feelings, before turning to the way people specifically discuss the Syuba language.

When Bhaire Lama (MTC1-BA06) sings of travelling to Kathmandu, he reflects on how his brother-in-law enquires after life in the village:

Sharing news from the village is how his urban-living family can stay connected to the community. There are multiple other examples from these songs in which sitting and talking are seen as a positive way to spend time together with close friends and relatives, even in difficult times.

Along with talking, the songs show singing as an act of companionability as well. We see Subina and Muna Lama describe companions singing while working, while in another brief song, Kamichhiring Tamang depicts a group of men who want to sing after a day of labour:

Although the singers do not mention explicitly the language in which these conversations and songs occur, the implication is that it is Syuba (tám means both ‘talk’ and ‘language’, which enforces this implication). It is, in other words, naturalized and, therefore, not worthy of comment. The Syuba’s articulated relationship with their Syuba identity follows a similar expressive paradigm; it too is naturalized and not worth passing comment on like the other identities which are overtly mentioned and reinforced.

There are a handful of instances in which the songs pivot into more direct meta-commentary about language. These instances are not as frequent as the more implicit theme of the centrality of in-language conversation, but they provide an insight into speaker attitudes that builds on explicit interviews about language attitudes. These meta-commentaries are particularly evident in individual compositions, in which the singer is free to improvize and tailor the song to a specific audience. Towards the end of one of his songs, for example, Jit Bahadur Tamang sings:

He is aware that this song will only be understood by people outside of the Syuba community with the intervention of translation, but he is keen to share his experiences of the challenges of daily village life.

In the second half of a song, which begins by describing marriage negotiations, Norpu Tamang sings directly about the transmission of language to children. The transmission of language, he sings, leads to the singing of songs.

These songs demonstrate that Syuba speakers generally have highly positive attitudes towards their language and strong desire for intergenerational transfer of language to children. This supports from a 2013 language usage and attitudes survey (Mitchell and Eichentopf 2013), which found generally positive attitudes towards Syuba language use.

The speakers also discuss the importance of language in some of the preambles to their songs. In the examples below, Jit Bahadur and Norpu Tamang both discuss the importance of documentation.

The Syuba speakers are aware, through their NGO connections, that this kind of language development work is also happening in other communities across Nepal.

The use of language, through talk and song, is central to Syuba relationships. In these song texts, Syuba speakers construct their identities as Nepali nationals, Tibetan Buddhists, ethnically Yolmo and linguistically Syuba, but even more centrally they see themselves as members of a tightly-knit smaller, more intimate, home community.

3.4 Development

Unlike the positive representation of conversation and language the song texts suggest a more complicated relationship between the Subya and development. For Karbire and Jit Bahadur, a lack of development is the primary reason for suffering in the village. In their songs, they both observe the lack of health clinics in the area, while Karbire also despairs the lack of roads, buses and electricity. They both reflect on the difficulties of ploughing by using the traditional agricultural practices that the inaccessible terraced terrain still requires.

Bhaire Lama’s song (MTC1-BA06) provides us with a detailed illustration of the isolation of Syuba villages from Kathmandu; the whole of Bhaire’s narrative is about travelling to, staying in, and returning from Kathmandu. In this song, the narrator takes the bus to Kathmandu and clearly identifies the stops they take on the way. This is not an imagined journey, but the route all Syuba speakers take when travelling to the city. They must first walk to Delauri and try to get a ticket. From there, they take the bus along treacherous mountain roads through Dhobi and Mude before arriving at the Bhote Kosi river, and then Koteshwar in the Kathmandu Valley. In the song, when Bhaire arrives in Kathmandu, he stays with members of his family, other Syuba people who have made a permanent move to Kathmandu. Bhaire contrasts the lack of development in the village with the impressive state of his brother-in-law’s house in Kathmandu. When he had last visited his brother-in-law, his house had only one floor, but now it has three.

This example does not mean that development has a single narrative in these songs. Kathmandu is seen as a place of opportunity for some, but not for all. Pasang Lama’s discussion of Kathmandu as being a place of unequal opportunity (MTC1-AY17)—discussed above—makes this clear. Kabire also sings:

Pasang Maya’s two songs suggests that it is the life without development that provides an idealized world in which groups of women can sit on a ridge, watch the goats graze and chat:

In contrast, a journey to Kathmandu involves tears and pain (SUY1-140128-05). In these songs, development and suffering go hand in hand. This focus on development is a thematic link with Jacobson’s (1999) analysis of Tamang and Sherpa texts from two decades earlier. Jacobson (1999: 153) also observes that Nepali hill villages are acknowledged to be a place without development, and that this lack of development is part of the suffering of village life. Development arrives incrementally and is always aspirational.