Abstract

This article examines how the interaction between the oral/aural and written aspects of language and song has shaped a modern Nepali-language public sphere and its uneasy relationship with the politics of difference and inequality in intimate life. To do so, it traces the history of the musical and poetic genre of jhyāure in Nepal and northern India, in music and literature from the early nineteenth century through the present, with a focus on how the demotic values associated with jhyāure and orality/aurality have come to hold a significant place in an idea of Nepali national public space.

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