Balaram Academic Paper

Gendering Geography: Space Politics in Nepali Tīj
Balram Uprety
Feminist Formations, Volume 29, Issue 3, Winter 2017, pp. 80-109 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2017.0031
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/679802
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Gendering Geography:
Space Politics in Nepali Tı̄j
Balram Uprety
The cultural idiom of Tı̄j has acquired a canonical status in Nepal. The archetypal
Tı̄j can be seen as a metaphor of patriarchal space politics: patriarchy naturalizes
women’s displacement from their biological family to the conjugal one. This paper
seeks to critically examine Nepali women’s relationship with androcentric spatiality.
In the classical Tı̄j songs, women’s critique of patriarchal spatiality is ambivalent:
their critique is caught between conformity and contestation. The critique of patri-
archal space in classical Tı̄j songs can be seen as an indigenous canon of women’s
articulation and protest. In the contemporary songs, Nepali women’s radical remap-
ping of the physical as well as the cultural geography underscores the distance of Tı̄j
from the archetypal to the feminist—creating a distinctive gynocentric spatiality.
As we further examine recent tectonic shifts experienced by Tı̄j under the impact of
globalization and global consumerism in the first decade of the twenty-first century,
we can see Nepali women moving away from the fight to create a feminist space to
the celebration of a distinctive female space: the spatial shift of Tı̄j from the original
patriarchal to the feminist to the urban female enacts Nepali women’s ability to
transcend and subvert the patriarchal spatiality inherent in the originary Tı̄j.
Keywords: alternative spatiality / female space / indigenous feminism / space

politics / Tı̄j songs / urban Tı̄j
Location of the Problem: Situating the Silence
Tı̄j has become a central cultural metaphor in Nepal. In contemporary aca-

demic, popular, and journalistic discourse, it is invariably constructed as the
idiom of Nepali woman. The leading daily, Gorkhapatra says “Nepali mahilā
©2017 Feminist Formations, Vol. 29 No. 3 (Winter) pp. 80–109

Balram Uprety · 81
(woman) cherishes the festival of Tı̄j because Tı̄j is related to the māitı̄ of Nepali
mahilā” (P. Regmi 2011). Another national daily, Kantipur states that “myriad
songs of the Tı̄j are hitting the market on the occasion of Haritālikā Tı̄j; the
mahān (great) festival of Nepali mahilā” (L. Regmi 2009).
Celebrated annually from bhādra, śukla dwitı̄yā to panćamı̄ (mid-August
to mid-September), married Nepali women are taken to their māita, the natal
home, for the celebration of Tı̄j. Many Tı̄j songs address women’s anguish and
anger when they are not taken to the māita for Tı̄j. On dwitı̄yā, the first day
of the celebration, women indulge in the dar feast in their māita. Dar means
sustaining—it is a feast that is expected to sustain women for fasting on trtı̄yā,
˙
the day following dwitı̄yā. On trtı̄yā, women go to the nearest river to bathe.
˙
Tritı̄yā oscillates between the sacred and the profane: married women undertake
a ˙rigorous fasting for the longevity of their husbands’ life. Unmarried women,
who have started menstruating, undertake fasting in order to obtain “good”
husbands. Resplendent in red sāris and decked out in their best, women go to
the local Shiva mandir and sing songs and bhajans (hymns) and dance. This
forms a strange paradox: women’s androcentric ritual of fasting for the long life
of their husbands is encircled by the counterhegemonic critique of patriarchy
in Tı̄j songs. On panćamı̄, the final day of the festival, women go to the river
and worship risis, the seven mythological sages who are taken to be the source
of the Hindu˙ spiritual
˙ pedigree. Before worshipping the sages, women under-
take an elaborate ritual bathing to atone for the sins they may have incurred
inadvertently by touching men when they were menstruating.
Nepali Tı̄j can be seen as a micro history of Nepali women’s resistance
seldom recognized for its articulation of an indigenous or local tradition of
voice. The indigenous tradition of women’s articulation predates the arrival
of feminism in the 1980s and 1990s, with its distinctive vocabulary of polem-
ics and protest that gradually emerged in Nepal following its exposure to the
project of development and modernity after the end of its isolation in the
1950s. Tı̄j has mostly remained out of the bounds of academic theorizing and
canonization as an alternative mode of women’s articulation and agency. In
Nepali vernacular discourse, Tı̄j songs are mostly seen as Nepali women’s genre
of lamentation and helplessness, victimhood and despair. The local academia
equates Tı̄j with Nepali women’s vulnerability and victimhood, and it thereby
denies its transgressive potential, especially in the songs. A refusal to see Tı̄j
as an indigenous or local form of protest, and not merely a genre of anguish
and lamentation, perhaps springs from the patriarchal desire to reinforce the
image of women’s victimhood, voicelessness, and lack of agency. Hence, the
local academia’s dismissal of Tı̄j as āimāiko rãdı̄ruwāı̄ (i.e., hag’s wailing in the
wilderness) is neither politically neutral nor surprising.1
82 · Feminist Formations 29.3
Spatialization of Tı̄j: The Erased Gender of Geography
In the evolution and perpetuation of Nepali patriarchy, the creation of a spatial

epistemology was a significant ideological weapon. One way to read Tı̄j is as an
expression of patriarchal space politics. I therefore locate the origin of Tı̄j in the
patriarchal politics of space. In a patrilocal matrimonial system, Nepali women
are displaced from their biological family, ghar, into a conjugal one, thereby
opening the binary between the ghar and the māita, the natal home. Arche-
typally, Tı̄j is seen as a festival that allows these dislocated women to reunite
with their māita. While Tı̄j originates in patriarchal spatiality, it paradoxically
becomes a potent weapon in women’s hands as a critique of patriarchal space
politics—in its originary form as well as the transformations that it undergoes
during the politically centrifugal decade of the 1990s and later. This paper
seeks to map the spatial journey of Tı̄j from the originary patriarchal to the
subversive, from the archetypal to the contrapuntal, and from conformity to
the carnivalesque.
Marking my departure from Nepali folklorists who romanticize Tı̄j as
a metaphor of lyrical journey and homecoming and celebration of reunion
(Parajuly 2007, 176–77), I locate the origin of Tı̄j in the androcentric politics
of space. Let us examine the Tı̄j convention to understand this. During the
Tı̄j festival, married women are taken to their natal family. Women cannot go
alone; they are taken to their māita either by their father or brother. They are not
allowed to go if they are not accompanied by a male relative. In its archetypal
form, Tı̄j constructs space as essentially masculine and hostile toward women.
Nepali writings about Tı̄j, both academic and popular, fail to raise another
fundamental question: what necessitates women’s going to their māita on Tı̄j?
In the vernacular/local discourse, the māita and the ghar are seen as natural
ontologies. In the popular and collective understanding, Tı̄j is seen as a trope
of lyrical and celebratory reunion between the married woman and her natal
family. A large corpus of Tı̄j songs as well as local writing on Tı̄j articulate
Nepali women’s romanticization and idealization of their reunion with māita.
Such romanticization and idealization of women’s act of going, meeting, and
reuniting on Tı̄j fails to see that this trope originates in the violence embedded
in patrilocality2 that creates and legitimizes the gendered binary spatiality, the
māita for women and the ghar for men. In a way, Tı̄j can be seen as an annual re-
enactment and celebration of this patrilocal violence without understanding it
as such. By making māita the locus of their celebration and idealization, Nepali
women unconsciously participate and perpetuate their own victimization. Their
uncritical celebration and romanticization of homecoming and reunion can be
seen as the spatial triumph of patriarchal space politics that lies at the center
of the archetypal Tı̄j.
However, in the act of participating in this festival that creates them as the
objects of patriarchal spatiality, Nepali women have simultaneously conformed
Balram Uprety · 83
and contested, subscribed to and subverted the androcentric space politics that
marks the original Tı̄j. Though the Tı̄j convention underlines women’s passivity
and powerlessness in space, the songs that accompany the celebration suggest
women’s understanding and articulation of empowering women-centric spati-
ality. Further, the counterspatialization of the urban Tı̄j as it moves from the
androcentric māita/mandir to the marketplace and public square underscores
the creation of an alternative gynocentric politics of space. This fundamentally
paralyzes not only the originary spatial architecture of Tı̄j but also problematizes
the tendency to erase the indigenous tradition of protest and polemics that solely
seeks to associate the emergence of Nepali women’s protest with the influence
of the international, predominantly Western feminism and its politics of protest
in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s.3
The Tamed Transgression: De-spatialized Mythology
Tı̄j has a mythological origin. A synoptic reference to its mythological origin

would be important to underline the space politics embedded in Tı̄j. The most
significant myth about Tı̄j is the story of Parvati’s marriage with Lord Shiva.
In Hindu mythology, Parvati is the divine consort of Lord Shiva. She is the
reincarnation of Satidevi. The myth of Satidevi as well as Parvati is important
for understanding space politics in Tı̄j. Once upon a time (so goes the myth),
Satidevi’s father, Daksha Prajapati, performed a huge sacrificial ceremony in
which he invited all divinities except his nonconformist son-in-law, Shiva.
Satidevi was Shiva’s wife. She went to attend the ceremony in spite of her hus-
band’s restriction. As Daksha Prajapati did not like his ascetic and nonconform-
ist son-in-law, he humiliated Shiva in front of all divine guests present in the
sacrificial ceremony. Unable to bear the humiliation of her husband, Satidevi
immolated herself in the sacrificial pyre. She did this because she felt she had
no place to go: she had lost her husband’s place by violating his command of
staying at home. She had already lost her father’s place after her marriage to
Shiva. In a sense, Satidevi understood that she had become a “spatial anomaly.”
This violation of patriarchal spatiality could only lead to her suicide in rebellion
in her father’s sacrificial pyre. Her spatial rebellion, therefore, ends in tragedy.
If Satidevi’s myth is used for highlighting the inviolability of patriarchal
spatiality, the myth of Parvati shows the possibility of spatial transgression. In
the mythology, Satidevi is reborn as Parvati. Parvati’s parents, Himalaya and
Menaka, wanted to marry her to Lord Vishnu, whereas she was deeply in love
with the ascetic Shiva. She ran away from home, went to the jungle, and prac-
ticed severe penance and austerity and finally obtained Shiva as her husband. In
the contemporary reception of this myth, Parvati’s spatial rebellion is silenced
in rendering it suitable for androcentric spatial control. In its articulation of the
politics of gender, the reception and interpretation of this myth requires some
annotation. It can be seen as a trope of Parvati’s spatial rebellion—her running
away into the jungle to escape the oppression of forced patriarchal marriage
underlines her spatial rebelliousness. The mapping of the jungle as the “other”
of the patriarchal civilization hardly requires interpretation here. What is more
interesting, however, is the way the myth is received by the collective. During
my fieldwork from 2008 to 2011 in Nepal, all respondents emphasized Parvati’s
one-sided penance, sacrifice, and austerity in marrying the man of her choice
and not the man of her choice, thereby privileging Shiva’s persona over Parvati’s
quest for matrimonial autonomy. The spatial remapping of her transgression can
alert us to the counternarrative of subversion inherent in the myth.
From Dissent to Deconstruction:

Women’s Contrapuntal Construction of Space in Rural Tı̄j Songs4
Before discussing the spatialization of gender and the gendering of space, it

is important to mark the temporal embeddedness and transformations of Tı̄j
songs. To capture the temporal trajectory of Tı̄j, I use the word “archetypal”
to describe its original form. “Archetypal” refers to the ritual complex of the
original Tı̄j, while the word “classical” refers to the songs of Tı̄j. I use “classical”
to denote the old folk/Tı̄j songs produced before the politically loaded decades
of the 1980s and 1990s, decades of mass democratic mobilizations and inter-
national feminist influence in Nepal. The word “classical” is used as a marker
of antiquity to denote the songs produced before the overt onset of modernity
and democracy in Nepal. In classical Tı̄j songs, women’s protest is ambivalent,
oscillating between conformity and critique, resignation and resistance. The
classical phase is the first phase of Tı̄j songs. The second phase of Tı̄j songs
may be said to have started in the 1980s and 1990s under the influence of lib-
eral Western democracy. The songs of the second phase were produced in the
politically charged phase of Nepali feminism, when the vocabulary of protest
became overt and self-consciously political. At this time, Tı̄j songs became
important instruments of the international feminist movement in Nepal. The
songs of this phase show the direct impact of international feminism. The urban
or “carnival songs” denote the production of songs in the decade of 2000 and
later, when the imprint of globalization and market economics became the
catalyst for subversive articulation. The songs produced during this period move
away from the emancipatory politics that Tı̄j had become synonymous with
at the democratic turn. In classical Tı̄j songs, Nepali women’s registration of
complaint, discontent, and anger cannot be seen as voicelessness. Those who
do not regard complaint and criticism as forms of protest only articulate the
desire of patriarchy to deny women a genealogy of voice.
There are two things that help us understand the subversive potential of Tı̄j
songs: when international feminist ideas came to Nepal in the 1980s and 1990s,
feminists found Tı̄j as the most apposite idiom for articulating feminist politics
in Nepal. The feminist appropriation of Tı̄j as the most potent weapon for its
Balram Uprety · 85
politics only underlines the fact that Tı̄j always contained counterhegemonic
insurrectionary potential. At this time, Tı̄j became the most natural idiom
for feminist articulation because it already had an archive of women’s protest,
ambivalent though it is, in the old/classical song. More importantly, the rural
songs were not allowed to be sung beyond the Tı̄j season, which lasted only for
a few days. To enforce this, metaphysics of sin and retribution were invoked by
the community patriarchs.5
There are varieties of Tı̄j songs: songs of sorrow, songs of protest, songs of
politics, (affiliated to political parties), and songs of celebrations. However, these
songs are not bound by the context in which they are performed. For example,
a song of celebration and a song of protest or celebration can be sung one after
the other during performances. This open-ended context of Tı̄j songs is also seen
in the issue of authorship. Most Tı̄j songs were produced by unknown authors.
The classical songs as well as contemporary ones, especially those produced
in the decade of democracy, do not have authors. The notion of authorship
became significant when Tı̄j became part of the market in the first decade of
twenty-first century. In this period of copyright and patents, Tı̄j songs became
tied to specific authors.
Tı̄j songs are embedded in the spatial politics of the private and the public,
a geography invested with the ideology of gender creating a natural affiliation
between woman and the home, and of man and the world. Patriarchy’s feminiza-
tion of space as an entity beyond the home that must be explored and mastered
is related to its domestication of space and its mastery of women within domestic
space. The home and the world are strongly pronounced in the rural archive of
Tı̄j songs. Men seamlessly traverse the home and the nonhome, thereby render-
ing the division redundant for them. In the patriarchal cartography of space,
the nonhome retains a threatening quality for women. The space beyond home
becomes a no-woman’s land, a forbidden territory full of unspeakable dread and
nameless terror: venturing here would render the woman “unfeminine” and
“dangerous/endangered.”
On Tı̄j, the māitı̄, either the father or the brother, must go to bring the
daughter or sister home. Since the space beyond the home was conceptualized
as inherently hostile for women, male kin are needed to traverse and escort
them through “alien” territory.
From the corner of the courtyard crows the black crow,
O black crow, what news have you brought?
First comes a bit of paper,
Second, a plea to take you home.
If he loved me, father would have come [to take me home],
For a piece of paper alone, I shall not go. (Acharya 2005, 225)
The speaker in this Tı̄j song is not intimidated by the alien space. The viola-
tion of the Tı̄j convention—father and brothers do not come to bring her
home—has turned into a test of love. Patriarchy depends upon the creation
of spatial dependencies in women. The song’s lyrics, “I shan’t go for a piece of
paper,” underscore this internalization by women of patriarchy’s desire to create
dependence. Another song maps out the territorial anxiety of a husband when
the wife tries to re-draw the boundary of “home” and “away” by navigating the
“other side of the globe.”
Wife: On the other side of the globe,
They say, lives my father,
O to meet my father, shall I go my lord, my husband?
Husband: Your heartless father loves you not,

Do not go, O Grhalakshmı̄, to meet your father.
˙
Wife: Even though he loves me not,
My love for him is intact.
O to meet my father shall I go my lord, my husband?
Husband: I shall not allow this at any cost,

How you dare defy me, I shall see! (Acharya 2005, 225)
In this song, the anxious husband seeks to counter the proposed transgression
of the spatial boundary by harping on the failure of “the heartless father” who
has violated the spatial convention of Tı̄j, as he seems to allow his daughter
to navigate the beyond. The husband exhorts his Grhalakshmı̄ (the goddess of
the house) not to go. As Grhalakshmı̄, she is expected˙ to embody the prosperity
˙ in the house, her “natural space,” that empow-
of the house itself. It is being
ers her and transforms her into the Goddess. The sacralization of the woman
empowers her in the domain of the ritual and the symbolic, but her voice is
denied in financial matters and domestic decision-making (Bennett 1981, 235).
The “goddess of the house” is not allowed to participate in the rituals of Devali
Pūjā and Durga Pūjā, the two dominant ritual celebrations of Nepali patrilineal
organization (Bennett 1983, 128–47). The unexpected verbal violence at the
end of the song by the husband requires further interpretation. In this song,
the wife’s persistent use of argument must be contrasted with the husband’s
persistent use of authority. By making argument her major weapon, and being
willing to traverse half the hemisphere, the wife has intended to violate not
only the geographical space, but also the cultural one, and the resulting threat
must be neutralized.
The location of the speaker’s father “on the other side of the globe” also
requires comment. The phenomenon of the Nepali traveler reaching the “other
side of the globe” is a very recent one. Since this is a classical Tı̄j song, “the
other side of the globe” is either a distant part of Nepal or some place in India.
Most probably, the speaker means India, for Tı̄j songs contain geographical
references to India as Muglan. India as “the other side of the globe” can only
Balram Uprety · 87
underscore the mapping out of a subjective geography of women opposed to

the objective geography predominantly controlled by men. A relatively small
distance between Nepal and India almost becomes an infinite space problematiz-
ing the attempt at spatial transgression. The woman’s subjective expansion of
the beyond shows that, even when radically challenged by women, the “outside”
retains an intimidating quality for women as a no-woman’s land.
Even when the “outside” is merely the neighborhood or a nearby grove,
words of caution are given to women in such a way that spatial transgression
becomes a metaphor for physical vulnerability or even sexual transgression:
The fragrance of the blooming hazārı̄ [a fragrant blossoming plant]
intoxicates me
O my mother, I shall go to pluck it.
Unseen lurks a snake,
Beneath the hazārı̄ tree
Do not go my daughter to pluck the flower. (Acharya 2005, 226)
This song ambivalently oscillates between the desire for moving outside the
safe space of the home and the desire of her āmā for safety and conformity. The
daughter wants to venture into the “unseen.” Implicitly opening up the binary
of the seen (home) and the unseen (beyond, other, non-home), the mother tries
to save her daughter from the bite of the snake.
In this song, the mother tries to socialize the daughter into the domi-
nant ideology of domestic confinement for women. The nature of the threat
emphasized by the mother is significant here. The phallic subtext of snakebite
as a metaphor for sexual intercourse or even sexual violence is quite common
among Nepali people. The beyond thus operates as a sexual threat for the
daughter whose virginity must be protected. The song contrasts the snake wait-
ing “unseen” in the wild (representing the centrifugal drive of male sexuality)
with the centripetal move to contain female sexuality.
Women’s multiple displacements seem to be written into the very idea and
practice of the Nepali marriage itself. At one level, matrimony can be seen as
the originary or the foundational movement of a series of displacements that
emanate from it. The symbolic and ritual displacements precede the geograph-
ical ones. In the symbolic culmination of matrimonial rituals, the woman is
dis-placed outside her father’s thar6 and gotra7 and placed into the thar and gotra
of her husband. What the rituals navigate within a few hours may take a woman
a lifetime to cope with: healing the gap between the symbolic and the real, the
ritual and the emotional, the existential and the everyday.
The rituals of marriage enact symbolic devaluation: the marriage “unmakes”
her sacredness.8 To the in-laws’ family, she is not a sacred being. Matrimony
displaces her from the worshipped ćelı̄ to the worshipper. She occupies the lowest
and the most unenviable symbolic position in the ghar. This locational fluidity is
seen to generate trauma, a disquieting existential crisis. As in the following song,
spatial displacement operates as a trope of the symbolic and real displacements

that occur in the life of a woman sent off from her parental home:
My māitı̄, alas! Loves me no more
Across nine hills have they flung me
From the Sindūre stream and my birthplace
A curse forever, is the birth of a daughter
May none face this, my mother.
Alas! My māitı̄ loves me no more. (Parajuly 2007, 318)
The sense of being flung, being sent away, being married away, across the hills,
sometimes seven hills, but mostly nine hills, recurs in many Tı̄j songs. In these
songs, women perceive the “beyond” as essentially dominating and overpower-
ing. The nine or seven hills function literally as well as metaphorically. Like
many communities in northern India, the Parbatiya Brahminical patriarchy
promoted the practice of distant matrimonial alliances for several reasons.9
Firstly, the complete geographical dislocation would generate emotional and
psychological dislocation, thereby making the woman vulnerable. Vulnerability
allowed the bride-takers total control over the woman far away from any poten-
tial intervention by her natal family. Since most families believed that “a curse
forever is the birth of a daughter,”10 geography spared them the pain of having
to witness her suffering every day. In a society in which the physical geography
is intimately intertwined with the cultural one, the spatial dislocation prefigures
women’s containment.
Women’s spatial dispersion into vast stretches of what is for them insur-
mountable space renders them emotionally and politically vulnerable. In one
song sung by Hari Maya Ghimire, sisters lament that because they are divided
in the same way as the sky and the netherworld are separated, their only hope of
meeting would be if their father ever performed a near-impossible sacrifice, the
Aśwamedh Yajna.11 Skinner, Holland, and Adhikari record a song in a similar
vein, in which former girl friends are separated by formidable geographical bar-
riers after their respective marriages. The last line of the song simultaneously
invokes solidarity and defeat:
My friends are scattered east and west.
. . . I remember my best friends and cried, for I couldn’t cross the river.
When the Sisā river rises during the monsoon it seems as big as the
Gandaki.
Friends, we have done all we can do; our lives are finished.12 (Holland, Skin-
ner, and Adhikari 1994, 279)
The construction of a feminine space is inhibited by the way in which the river
operates as a metaphor of regimentation and containment. Many folk songs
document the gendered complicity of rivers in the construction of a hostile
beyond. Thus, the woman does not desire to be married across the river, as she
Balram Uprety · 89
might “be drowned in the dark in the river” (Thapa 1959, 239) while trying
to return to her natal home for Tı̄j. Remarkable for its dark imagery is the
following Tı̄j song:
On the eve of Tı̄j, you sent for your daughter,
Alas! The dark river has drowned her.
. . . The floating boat in the raging river,
My death was destined in the middle [of the river].
When my bābā will know of it, he will cry endlessly.
. . . The ornaments given by my father,
Swirl around in a whirlpool. (Sharma and Luitel 2006, 118)
The spatial patriarchal ideology mediates women’s perception of rivers as

dangerous and threatening spaces. The moment women internalize a river as
a dangerous space—even an antagonist—that keeps them from their parental
home or friends, their navigation of this space in praxis is rendered impossible.
In another song, authors write, “On the annual festivity of Tı̄j, bābā has come
to take me home, / Pāpı̄, this river would not allow me to go” (Sharma and Luitel
2006,18). These songs use the term “dā˜ d ā kat āko” quite frequently. In Nepali,
˙ means
˙
dā˜ d ā kat āko is an idiomatic expression that to drive someone away across
˙ ˙
the hills. The idiom springs from the widespread ancient Nepali practice of
hounding criminals across the hills. An awareness on the part of the singer
of the metaphorical implications of the colloquial term generates a strident
critique of patriarchal spatial politics. In such songs, the speakers are critical of
the tendency to drive them away across the hills like criminals or cattle:
When a minor daughter is married away across the nine hills,
The māitı̄ earns dharma.
Traded away like cattle across many hills. (Acharya 2005, 226)
Women’s passivity in the outside space / the beyond is scripted in language. The
beyond is the masculine domain where women do not act but are acted upon.
Fathers and brothers escort women to their homes; after marriage, women are
“flung” or “herded” across the hills. Language denies women any agency in the
beyond.
The celebrated folk song of Harimalla rājā and Bhavamalli rānı̄ is a classic
example of patriarchal space politics.13
Twenty five years old was Harimalla rājai [king],
Five years old was Bhavamalli rāni [queen],
When these two got married.
Harimalla: “Neither can I keep her in my hands, O āmai [mother]!
Nor can I keep her in my lap, O āmai!
When I keep her on the head, she becomes a pillow,
And a doormat when she is placed at my feet.
O my āmai! Send her to her māiti-deś [land of her parents].”

Harimalla’s mother: “Neither has she māiti [people of māita], nor any māwali
[maternal uncles],
She was orphaned in her mother’s womb, O Harimalla rājai,
Where can I send her away?
You study for twelve years,
And a book-reciting pundit you become,
Then return home, O Harimalla rājai.
The ripeness of youth would bend her body down,
And she would be able to touch the feet of her lord.
Bhavamalli would have turned seventeen.”
The rājai who left [his house] then,
Reached the āśram [hermitage] of the Goswāmi.
In the company of saints and celibates.
Harimalla: “My home—I have abandoned,
In this garb of ascetic, study shall I here.”
Goswāmi: “You may have a mahtāri [mother] at home,
Your rāni must be wailing thinking of you,
Lie not to us, Harimalla rājai,
This ascetic garb does not become [a married man].”
Harimalla: “A mahtāri at home—I have not,
Nor do I have a loving rāni,
I shall stay and study—in this garb,
O sādhu bābā [ascetic]—a pandit shall I become.”
As the study period is completed and Harimalla returns home, the song
continues:
Harimalla: “This cultivation of the Jeth [the second month of the Nepali
˙
calendar] month—
Whose cultivation is it? Whose workers are these?”
Bhavamalli: “How should these things concern a confirmed ascetic?”
Preceded by a musical procession,
And followed by a train of maids,
Bhavamalli rāni distributes the midday meal.
Seated on an āli [raised mud edge of a paddy field to contain water], Harimalla
rājai,
Is enjoying the spectacle.
The rāni sees the shyām-sundar [dark-skinned and charming] yogi,
The confirmed ascetic.
Bhavamalli: “Listen, o listen! O sādhu bābā! [o mendicant]
Please accept this mid-day meal.”
Harimalla: “O my rāni—container I have naught [to accept the midday meal],
Balram Uprety · 91
Give me your pachyouri [loose end of a draped sari] [to keep it].”
Bhavamalli: “Terrifying, coarse, confirmed ascetic—
How, on earth, do I give my pachyouri to you!”
Having supplied the meal,
And after ending the work,
Returned the rāni home.
The kāncire yogi [ascetic with a slit ear] followed the rāni to her home.
She reached home in the evening,
The palanquin-bearers brought her down.
Bhavamalli rāni entered the palace,
Near the courtyard the kāncire yogi sat
And begged for shelter.
Bhavamalli: “Why would an ascetic require a shelter?
Go back to where you have come from.”
Harimalla: “Say not so to a guest of the dusk,
My rāni shelter me in your verandah for a night,
It shall not do you any harm.”
Bhavamalli: “The corner of a courtyard I would not give you,
The lout aims at the verandah.”
Harimalla: “Give me the bed in your inner chamber,
Comb and braid and cook some buckwheat for me.”
Bhavamalli: “O my! O my! Come down! Come down O my bajai! [generally
means grandmother but means mother-in-law here]
This terrifying coarse kāncire yogi,
Aims at the inner chamber.”
Down came āmā [mother-in-law] thereafter,
Scrutinized she the kāncire yogi,
Harimalla rājā smiled to see his āmā,
Āmā recognized, this is Harimalla.
Earnestly did she hug and caress him.
Tears gush down her cheeks in sheer amazement.
She caressed the cheeks and head of Harimalla.
Harmalla’s mother: “Listen, O listen, O my badhu [daughter-in-law]!
He is your husband, Harimalla rājai.
Urgently bring a golden bowl—clean and unsullied,
Wash his feet and drink the ćaranāmrt [the water that would turn ‘holy’ after
˙ ˙
washing Harimalla’s feet].”
Bhavamalli: “Kāncire yogi, terrifying and coarse,
How would I know him!
I was merely five when he left.
O my very lord!
How would I recognize him!” (Parajuly 2007, 329)
The opening of the song dramatizes Harimalla’s troubled and anxious gaze:
the rānı̄, as more of a baby daughter, has undermined the culturally assigned
female sexual role of the wife. He is advised by his mother to go away for studies
until his wife is sexually “ripe.” The mother’s mind sexualizes the child’s body by
projecting it into the future, but not without moralizing it: for “youthful ripe-
ness” would not make the rānı̄ wanton or narcissistic, but “weigh her down” so
that she “would be able to touch the feet of her swami.” The ideal female body
that fits the symbolic order of patriarchy is sexually ripe but morally innocent.
Such bodies have their own gravitational logic in space: laden with morality
and humility, they move downward “to touch the feet of her swāmı̄.”
Harimalla’s willful and deliberate lie to his teacher regarding his matri-
monial status deserves close scrutiny. Harimalla as a married man cannot be
admitted into the celibate educational hermitage. He therefore lies and denies
his marriage to the baby queen. His lie is a verbal, symbolic, and enunciative
banishment of his mother and wife from his place of knowledge. It is a space of
learning and therefore must be purged of any association with the female sex
and sexuality. This space of knowledge as the hub of rational patriarchy must
erase women not only physically, but also symbolically. The rāja’s acquisition
of cultural capital, then, is predicated upon the symbolic death and erasure of
the mother and the rānı̄. Harimalla returns home as a pandit during the peak
period of cultivation to find the rānı̄ distributing the midday meal to the labor-
ers in the field under cultivation. The text gradually and implicitly builds the
rānı̄’s centrality in the agrarian domestic space through the repeated reference
to her distribution of the midday meal. While her centrality in the domestic
domain, especially in the absence of her husband, can be taken for granted, the
dominant ideology also goes unchallenged. For the production and circulation
of what counts as culturally and politically meaningful—the acquisition of
knowledge—takes place beyond the home. To access this, one must be allowed
to navigate the educational institution, a space out of bounds for the rānı̄. The
rāja has empowered himself culturally; he has meaningfully travelled in space
as well as in time. He has control over his body—he can play both ascetic and
husband, but his child-bride is literally reared only for her biological destiny.
The rānı̄ has also grown—but only to attain a “ripeness” needed for the repro-
duction of patriarchy. She has travelled only in time; she has remained static
in space, not allowed to go beyond the agricultural land of her in-laws’ home.
Most songs discussed so far are classical Tı̄j songs. As we move from the
classical to the Tı̄j songs produced in the 1980s and 1990s, the contours of wom-
en’s consciousness of space undergo a marked shift. As opposed to the classical
Tı̄j songs where we needed to retrieve and resurrect women’s spatial rebellion
and resistance from the subtext, these relatively recent songs overtly manifest
women’s contrapuntal consciousness about spatiality and their consequent
attempt at redrawing and realigning the borders of geography.
Balram Uprety · 93
All my sons have gone abroad, says father.

The thrilling world of vehicles, all for my brothers,
You indulge at our cost.
Day after day, the sons are coddled by teachers,
For us perilous jungles for bringing firewood and fodder,
We were sent to work when it was time for learning.
Domesticity cheated us of self-development.
Sisters are married off with an empty jholā [bag].
Brothers’ claim to inheritance is backed by right and might. (Parajuly 2007,
182)
The speaker shows her awareness that the home and the world are not discon-
nected spaces. Spatial politics depend upon the cultural production of the world
as the dominant category with its effective exclusion of women. In the binary
of the home and the world, the latter, privileged as the site of power, author-
ity, and meaning, overdetermines the dependent and marginal category of the
home. Subverting such a binary, the speaker emphasizes that the power of the
world is actively produced by women’s domestic labor. The speaker unravels the
exploitative nature of the brothers who “have gone abroad” and who “indulge” in
“the thrilling world of vehicles” “at our cost.” Men’s mobility and their leisurely
conquest of the cultural domain are predicated upon women’s nonvolitional
availability as labor.
For women’s spatial emancipation, such an essentializing binary of the
private and the public needs to be exploded. Thus, in the following song, the
speaker’s tone is quite satirical when she says,
Household work never leaves us,
Our bodies are weathered by the hot sun.
Sometimes we stir rice,
Sometimes we stir burning wood,
A mother has to always comfort the children. (Holland, Skinner, and
Adhikari 1994, 283)
The tone of the song makes it clear that these functions are not seen as natu-
ral. The speaker questions what is essentially feminine about chores such as
cooking and childcare. The speaker here realizes that the realignment of the
domestic geography is the necessary first step for the realignment of the cultural
geography.
Our life goes round and round like a sāri being draped,
Who kept us in this narrow enclosure?
Who gave us this kitchen work as part of our inheritance?
When did our world become separate [from men]? (Holland, Skinner, and
Adhikari 1994, 283)
This song also incorporates the speaker’s reflection on the nature of

women’s movement in space. “Our life goes round and round, like the sārı̄”
underscores the woman’s examination of the circumscription and repetitive-
ness that define her life. The rigid circularity of women’s movement can be
compared with the spatial elasticity and fluidity of men’s movement. The logic
of domestic circularity, which leads women from one routine act to the other,
ad infinitum, preempts any attempt at the violation of the binary. The speaker’s
radical rejection of the “inheritance” of the hearth, “narrow enclosure,” and the
separate world is an attempt at engineering an alternative space. Such radicality
culminates in a question: “Women have reached the moon and climbed Mt.
Everest. / What have women not accomplished in the world?” (Holland, Skin-
ner, and Adhikari 1994, 283). This marks the demystification of the world as a
male domain. By breaching the barrier between home and the world, women’s
folk lyrics are in a position to inaugurate a poetics and politics of spatial and
cultural deconstruction. As we move from the rural to the urban Tı̄j, we take
an epistemic leap from political to carnival, from resistance to revelry, and from
feminist anger to female anarchy.14
Feminist to Female: Carnival Counterspatialization
The decade of predemocracy in the 1980s and the decade of democracy in the
1990s did to the rural Tı̄j what globalization would do to the urban Tı̄j; they
affected a paradigm shift in the production of Tı̄j. The political mobilization of
this period effected corresponding social mobilizations. Along with the radical-
ism of the decade, the project of development and the developmentalist moder-
nity that had started with the opening of Nepal in 1951 and intensified in the
1980s, also played significant role in effecting an epistemic shift in the trajectory
of Tı̄j. The articulation of domestic power politics was largely replaced by the
articulation and documentation of state power politics and the understanding
of their mutual embeddedness. The globalization of the polity and culture as
the gradual culmination of democracy can be seen as the second turning point
in the production and consumption of Tı̄j. Though the Nepali democracy was
established in 1990, the impact of globalization on Tı̄j took almost a decade
to be seen. The metropolitan versions of Tı̄j can be roughly traced back to the
first decade of the twenty-first century.
The urbanization enacted a corresponding shift in gender roles and ideolo-
gies. The impact of women’s education, the mass migration to the metropolis
of Kathmandu (due to the Maoist movement in the hinterland), the growth of
mass media and communication technology, the rise of popular culture, the
emergence of the New Nepali woman willing to break the gendered construction
of Nepali femininity, and the pressures of the market economy and consumerism
all helped to effect a shift in gender and sexual politics in Nepal. Tı̄j played an
interesting role during this time. It shaped and it got shaped by its time, and
this dialectic problematized the patriarchal spatiality of the original Tı̄j.
Balram Uprety · 95
The narrative of the urbanization of Tı̄j falls within the realm of contem-
porary cultural historiography. Theorizing the historicity of the present does not
come without pitfalls: in the absence of vernacular or other academic theorizing
of the urban Tı̄j, the researcher must use popular paraliterary and oral sources
for the construction of a discourse about urban Tı̄j. This section of the paper
endeavors to map the urbanization of Tı̄j using such diverse sources as the
journalistic archive on Tı̄j, interviews with Tı̄j participants, research journals,
and actual Tı̄j songs produced over several years.
Carnivalization/Cannibalization: Urban Adaptations of Tı̄j
To unpack the politics of space in urban Tı̄j, I investigate how Tı̄j has trans-
gressed its androcentric roots. Bakhtin’s concept of carnival would, to a large
extent, help us make sense of the urban unfolding of Tı̄j. The Bakhtinian car-
nival principally involves the inversion of canonical truth, the celebration of
the materiality of the body, and the subversive potential of the carnival speech
genres, language, and laughter. The medieval carnival for Bakhtin in Rabelais
and His World was a unique time that
offered a completely different, non-official, extra ecclesiastical and extra
political aspect of the world, of man, and of human relations. . . . As opposed
to the official feast, one might say that the carnival celebrated temporary
liberation from the prevailing truth and from established order; it marked
the temporary suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and
prohibitions. (Bakhtin 1984, 6)
I use the analytical framework of the carnival to examine women’s creation

of an alternative gynocentric spatiotemporality, and Nepli women’s writing of
Tı̄j in the idiom of bawdy female bodies and the invention of feasting as the
carnival antiritual and inversion of the patriarchal invitational system.
The spatial as well as the religious underpinnings of Tı̄j undergo a seismic
shift as we journey from the originary to the urban, from the purity of the folk
to the hybridity of the metropolitan. Firstly, with mass mobility due to the
introduction of the modern means of transport and communication, space sheds
much of its oppressive quality for women. When the context that underpinned
the spatial axes of Tı̄j, that is, the vast distance between parental home and
the in-law’s home, has changed, urban Tı̄j often expresses these standard tropes
almost as anachronisms and contradictions. The imbrication of Tı̄j into glo-
balization and global consumer culture, as has already been stated, effects the
locational shift of Tı̄j from the māita or mandir in the premise of the māita to
the marketplace and public-square. The implication of this shift is far-reaching.
It radically alters the textuality of Tı̄j: the locational becomes the ideological.
This locational shift alters the essentially patriarchal metaphor inhering in the
festival and gives us a liberatory glimpse of an alternative that would always
problematize the archetypal patriarchal nature of the festival.
De-spatializing Patriarchy
Understanding the transformation of space in urban Tı̄j is fundamental for

understanding the transformation of Tı̄j from patriarchal archetype to the
female carnival. Rural Tı̄j is rooted in the patriarchal politics of space. Women’s
movement in space pertains to their journey from the ghar to the māita, mostly
accompanied by a male relative. The route is spatially predetermined: from the
māita to the Shiva mandir on trtı̄yā, from māita to the river on panćamı̄, and
finally from māita to the ghar. In˙ the urban context, a month-long celebration
inevitably implies a spatial reconfiguration—more than a month-long celebra-
tion that spreads out over larger areas, including nontraditional sites such as
hotels, markets, and city squares. Women’s limited māita-centric spatiality in
rural Tı̄j is replaced by a staggering range of sites:
Nepali women host and participate in numerous Tı̄j parties in the five-star
hotels and party palaces, often accompanied by parties in friends’ and rela-
tives’ homes, the celebrations organized by the numerous “mother’s groups,”
neighborhood “resident’s associations,” clubs, schools, colleges, hospitals,
worker’s unions and the media. (Baduwal and Anmol 2011)
Many shopping excursions to specially organized Tı̄jé Bazārs, shopping malls,

and markets punctuate the visits to the Shiva temple on Tı̄j. In urban Tı̄j, spa-
tial relocation of the festival from the mandir to the marketplace, from ritual-
patriarchal to the carnival public square, the presence of men as participants
requires investigation in order to understand the new emergent politics of space.
Men remained peripheral in the production as well as consumption of the rural
Tı̄j. It was seen as an archetypal feminine space, and its de-feminization was
seldom attempted. In the metropolitan urban Tı̄j, men are invited or “taken”
for the dar feasts that are organized in public spaces by institutions or social
groups. In the feasts organized familially or privately at homes, men, as the
family members of the women who are invited are also invited and “taken” to the
feast. In the domestic invitational system, men are invited primarily in their
capacity as their wives’ husbands: “since it somehow feels strange to invite the
bhānjı̄ and leave her husband uninvited.”15 From the politics of space, we see an
interesting transformation: in rural Tı̄j, as already discussed, it is men who took
women to their māita for the celebration of Tı̄j. In urban Tı̄j, women take men
to the space of celebration. The passivity of men in the celebratory carnival
space of the urban Tı̄j problematizes patriarchy’s creation of Tı̄j as a metaphor
of patriarchal spatiality.
Transgressive Female Temporality
The urbanization of Tı̄j has been marked by the stretching of the festival in
terms of both space and time. As space and time cannot be separated, any
Balram Uprety · 97
spatial change would inevitably mean corresponding temporal transformation.

I consider how the spatiotemporal shift of Tı̄j affects the ideological politics
of the festival.
In the rural context, Tı̄j is contained within the “officially” sanctioned
temporal framework: a four-day-long combination of religion, revelry, purifica-
tory penance, and indulgence. The four-day structure continues to remain the
primary core of urban Tı̄j, but urban women push the temporal boundary to its
limits. Referring to a particularly extravagant dar feast organized at the Solti
hotel in Kathmandu in 2010, Kalpana Gimire states that in the name of Tı̄j,
the dar feasts have become “extravagant and financially outrageous for the past
few years in the capital. This year, in comparison to the last year, such feasts
abound two months before the actual festival of Tı̄j.” (Ghimire 2010)
In the evolution of Parbatiya/Nepali civilization, time became a patriar-
chal construct. Men’s conquest of the cultural realm was largely predicated
upon their ownership of time. Women’s emergence as objects was predicated
upon their loss of temporal autonomy. In the agrarian political economy, men
controlled women’s bodies by owning their time. The laboring female body
providing free labor and being subjected to forms of violence and exploitation
needed temporal respite for renewal, recuperation, and rejuvenation. The four
days of Tı̄j can be seen as a release from patriarchal temporality so that the
body that returned home from Tı̄j was the recuperated body, ready to re-enter
the field of labor.
The urban Tı̄j is, however, temporally transgressive: it sets its own temporal
limits; sometimes it lasts for one month, and sometimes two or a little more.
The urban Tı̄j that refuses to recognize the sanctity of patriarchal temporality
inherent in Tı̄j can be seen as the nemesis of the official temporal politics. A
more than a month-long carnival of Tı̄j cannot be seen as a temporal release
given by patriarchy; it is a transgressive extension achieved by women. The
urban women too come out of this more-than-a-month-long extravaganza
renewed and recharged. This renewal and revival is, however, independent of
the patriarchal labor politics that sanctions only four days for “rest.” Moreover,
women’s carnival time problematizes the metaphysical aspect of the temporality
so central to Brahminical frameworks where the “hereafter” underpinned the
“here.” The carnival of the urban Tı̄j is, however, sacrilegious: in its reverse
hierarchy, the mundane, the profane, and the worldly is crowned empress. The
carnival time is “a respite from the relatively closed and rigid historical patterns
that dominant ideologies impose on time’s flux” (Clark and Holquist 1984, 302).
Carnival time tries to empty patriarchal time of its religiosity, metaphysical
aspirations, and monastic underpinnings. In the androcentric Brahminical
framework, women’s pleasure is negated and silenced: women’s pleasure lay
in ensuring men’s pleasure. The carnival time of the urban festival inscribes
pleasure in women’s lives by extending the period of self-indulgent feasting and
socializing indefinitely.
From Māita to the Marketplace
Tı̄j is fundamentally connected with māita. Patriarchy originally creates Tı̄j by

creating the māita. In the collective cultural imagination, the festival of Tı̄j
would be synonymous with the māita. The carnival counterspatiality unsettles
such an innocent association. The urban Tı̄j enacts the spatial dethroning of
the māita as the territory of lyrical longing, unmitigated female nostalgia, and
utopia. In the rural Tı̄j, māita is seen as a space of emotional healing, renewal,
and rebirth; on the other hand, while there are critiques of the patriarchal setup
of the parental home, it is not women’s condemnation but the consecration of
the māita that is privileged. In the patriarchal discourse, māita emerges as an
idealized ultimate space of fulfillment and plenitude. Because of such an ideal-
ization, Tı̄j and māita become synonymous. The idealization of the māita seeks
to erase the violence encoded in the patriarchal gendering of space. Even when
women critique the māita as an originary metaphor of patriarchal oppression,
it continues to remain the most central space in their emotional geography.
Criticism is a signifier of their engagement, not withdrawal and indifference, and
the centrality of māita is reinforced not by the absence of its criticism but by its
presence. Refusing to go to the māita on Tı̄j, therefore, would be inconceivable
and blasphemous.
Urban Tı̄j enacts a carnivalesque debunking of the māita’s “halo”. In
urban Tı̄j, there is a gradual snapping of the umbilical cord of Tı̄j with the
māita. Women’s construction of alternative celebratory spaces in party venues,
in auditoria, and in each other’s houses undermines the site of the māita as an
indispensable existential signifier. It is difficult to imagine the māita without
the Law of the Father: going home on Tı̄j is going to the home of the Father.
In conducting celebrations in auditoria and friends’ homes, women move away
from the phallocentricism of the māita, rendering it less important. The birth
of the māita as a space is predicated upon the symbolic and ritual death of the
daughter in marriage. The urban women’s moving away from this place is thus
the inauguration of new spaces outside the māita that are life-affirming and
existentially celebratory. The women’s relocation of Tı̄j is symbolic of their
empowerment. If the ghar is conceived as a space of drudgery and tyranny, the
māita is conceived as a space of recuperation, renewal, plenitude, and fulfilment.
The ćelı̄ needed periodic rescue and recuperation at the māita. In women’s
realignment of space in urban locations, they have created new spaces of renewal
and recuperation, enacting a rejection of their vulnerability and victimhood.
Women’s compulsion of going to the māita on this festival was also related to
the issue of inheritance. In the past, women had no right over the parental
inheritance. No matter how affluent a family a woman belonged to, it was
commonly perceived that in order to wear a sārı̄ or have a sumptuous meal,
she had to go to the māita. Women were kept in others’ control. At present,
Balram Uprety · 99
the law that would give equal rights to the son as well as to the daughter over
the parental inheritance has already been legislated. Therefore, a daughter
need not fall on the feet of her māitı̄ to enjoy a feast of dar. (N. Sharma 2011)
The Bawdy Body
As the space explodes in urban Tı̄j, the androcentric body politics that marks
the original underpinning of Tı̄j is undergoing complex transformations.
Bakhtin’s carnival strives to reclaim the body from the medieval (anti-)body
politics that saw the body as a disruptive site of corruption, libido, and license
that constantly threatened the vertical aspiration of the spirit.
The essential principle of grotesque realism is de-gradation, that is, the
lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the
material level, to the sphere of earth and body. . . . To degrade also means to
concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and
the reproductive organs. (Clark and Holquist 1984, 19–21)
In the asceticization of the body, the existential profundity of the mundane—

eating, drinking, and copulating—are erased. The Brahminical narrative of the
body shares some fundamental assumptions with the “transcendental ascetic
worldview” of the Middle Ages that Rabelais seeks to subvert. The transcen-
dence of the body—release from the biological cycle of birth and death—was
the metaphysical function of the body. The body was a means to an end: the
existential goal of the body was to help the soul become permanently disem-
bodied. In Brahminical imagination, the profane life of the “lower stratum” was
erased in favor of a body that was uncomfortable with its own biology. Further-
more, the emergence of the male body as the normative existential center was
predicated upon the biological “othering” and marginalization of the female
body. In Parbatiya patriarchy, premised upon the superiority of the purus over
prakr ti (the male over the female principle), women’s identification with˙gross
˙ does not come as a surprise. After conceptualizing the other biologically,
biology
the female-as-flesh becomes problematic. The female, once it was biologically
“embodied,” needed to be disembodied. For the spiritualization of the flesh and
the moral co-optation of the female body into its reproductive politics, patriar-
chy invented the ideological weapon of pativratādharma, or the transcendence
of the female body through fidelity and service to her husband-god.
From the perspective of body politics, rural Tı̄j underscores a tug-of-war
between the social and the ritual: the social strives to em-body the female
body; the ritual strives to disembody it. The social—the gluttonous female
feasting on dar on dwitı̄yā—celebrates the biological. Feasting, however, is
merely instrumental: women feast in order to fast. The journey from feasting
to fasting is a journey from the biological to the spiritual, from the lower to
the higher. The central rituals of rural Tı̄j—fasting rigorously for the long life
of one’s husband, washing the feet of one’s husband, and drinking ćaranāmrt,16
˙ ˙
and performing purificatory bathing on panćamı̄ 17 enact the ritual devaluation
of the female body. 18
If the accent in the rural Tı̄j was on the ritual, it shifts to the social in
the urban. The ritual does not disappear altogether; the social takes prece-
dence over the ritual. Consequently, the urban Tı̄j undergoes some interesting
transformations from the transcendental to the erotic, from the cosmological
to the carnivalesque. In this journey from mandir to marketplace and public
square, from fasting to feasting, the body becomes “bawdy” and boisterous. In
the insurrection of the erased female body, the body does not merely seek an
apologetic permission to exist; its celebratory excesses can make the norma-
tive ludicrous.
The officially “approved” female body in Brahminism lacked genitals; this
body without a belly and “lower urges” seemed ashamed of its own fundamental
biological ontology. In Bakhtin’s carnival, “the body is literally opened up in
order to demonstrate its complexity and depth . . . to uncover a new place for
human corporeality” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 437). His carnival celebrates
a body that eats, drinks, and copulates. The urban Tı̄j not only centralizes the
female body but also opens up the body. In the shift of accent from ritual to
social, bodies that were sealed in the gendered construction of pleasure assert
their insurrection in several ways.
The phariā 19
song is interesting in that it clearly shows the carnivalesque
as a form of critique:
Oh! Oh!! My phariā,
The more I pull it up
The more it slips down,
Oh! Oh!! My phariā
O my mother,
What a house your darling daughter
Has been married into!
My ample body of those days
Has become a mere skeleton.
The more I pull it up,
The more it slips down.
I want to see this time,
How you dare stop me at home.
I will go to māita this year,
Even if I have to walk with my head.
Balram Uprety · 101

Oh! Oh!! My phariā
This desire of going to māita
and feasting on dar
Destabilizes my mind
With dysentery I might suffer for a night
For that I care not.
Oh! Oh!! My phariā.
At māita, five mānās20
Would satisfy my hunger not
No matter how I lied,
All of would you know, dājai
If your sister got drunk
Oh! Oh!! My phariā.
(Majhi 2013)
This song is important for several reasons. Produced in the era of globalization
and the market economy in Nepal, it shows the integration of Tı̄j with the
forces of mass media and communication technology. It further shows the shift
of Tı̄j songs from the conventional mode of circulation to the virtual mode of
circulation. The songs produced in the preglobalized period were contained in
space: the writing and singing of songs was contained and restricted by the audi-
ence physically present during the performance. From the perspective of space
politics, such globalization of songs through mass media has two fundamental
implications. It shows the spatial explosion of women’s means of transmitting
songs. The movement of Tı̄j songs from the real to the virtual audience shows
the erosion of patriarchal spatiality in the transmission of songs. Such redraw-
ing of lyrical boundaries must be seen as empowering and enabling for women.
Equally importantly, the shift from a known, real, and immediate audience to
the unknown virtual audience allows songs to be more transgressive and radical
in their critique of patriarchy. The phariā song discussed here epitomizes such
transgressive freedom.
The song is the narrative of the sāri that suffers from a strange gravitational
logic to always slip down! Capitalizing on the strategy of doublespeak, the song
thrives on the interplay of opposites—the repeated slipping down of the phariā
has sexual connotations that celebrate the unleashing of the dancer’s sexuality
in public. However, the lyric gives a rationale for this “wardrobe malfunction”:
patriarchal oppression through the denial of good food in the in-laws’ home has
reduced the speaker to a skeleton; hence the sārı̄ keeps slipping! In the constant
oscillation between the sexual and the sociological—an epitome of double
entendre—the sociological is used merely to narrativize and incite the sexual.
The rural repertoire of patriarchal oppression—the narratives of gastronomical
exploitation, matrimonial displacement, and the opposition between the ideal
māita and the oppressive ghar—is used merely as a textual-sexual trope that
allows the speakers to sing of the transgressive phariās that have a tendency to
slip down. The legacy of patriarchal oppression is subjected to libidinal mockery
and carnival laughter. More than a denial of an oppressive patriarchal history,
it is a carnival rewriting of a feminist sociology of sexuality in the language of
the transgressive phariā.
“Something Rich and Strange”: Feasting as Ritual
The locational shapes the gastronomical too: the mundane takes precedence
over the metaphysical as women hijack Tı̄j from its patriarchal pedestal. Dar,
or the feast that heralds the fasting, literally means strong and sustaining—a
strong and sustaining dar on dwitı̄yā was seen as a preparation for fasting on
tr tı̄yā. Women feasted in order to fast: feasting for fasting, as it were. The spa-
˙
tiotemporal expansion of the urban Tı̄j to a month-long celebration leads to
the parallel expansion of dar. The original dar on dwitı̄yā does not disappear;
there is an additional month-long feast of dar. The urban metropolitan dar is
not conceived as a means to an end. It is an end in itself: feasting is done for
feasting’s sake, as it were.
In the shift of emphasis from fasting to feasting, the purity of the sātvik
(food that is considered purest in the Hindu ritual hierarchy of food) vegetarian
dar is replaced by the tāmasik (the most impure food) impurity of the nonveg-
etarian dar.21 The rural feasting “spiritualized” the food by leaving out animal
flesh from the vegetarian cuisine that contained delicacies such as d hakané (a
˙ sticks to
sweetmeat made from rice and butter), kuraunı̄ (the layer of milk that
the utensil in which it is boiled), lat t e-ko sāg (a kind of leafy vegetable), sabjı̄
(vegetables), milk, butter, curd, and so˙ ˙forth. The exclusion of animal flesh from
the feast would complement the erasure of female flesh in fasting. The absence
of meat is as exceptional in the urban dar feast as the presence of it is in the
rural. In urban Tı̄j, women abstain from nonvegetarian food only on dwitı̄yā as
a preparation for fasting on tr tı̄yā. In the month-long urban carnival, animal
flesh, predominantly mutton, ˙is consumed in large quantities. This shift to the
compulsory inclusion of flesh is a shift to the secularization of Tı̄j: from the
terror of tāmasik to a celebration of the tāmasik.
The use of liquor in the month-long dar celebrations further shifts the
focus to the profane from the sacred. The free flow of liquor makes the urban
performance of Tı̄j a radical realm of carnival. The consumption of liquor by
women in urban Tı̄j is more transgressive than the eating of nonvegetarian food.
Drunkenness is both an act that hitherto only men could perform in public as
well as a license to behave in transgressive ways. The ontological superiority
and the ritual purity of the Brahminical self was predicated upon the impurity
and inferiority of the matwālı̄—the liquor-consuming, impure female other of
the lower castes. In the conventional Brahminical society, liquor operates as a
potent taxonomic trope for the distribution of the people between religious and
the worldly, the chosen and the fallen. The consumption of liquor by a Bāhun
or Brahmin male would undo his “Bāhunhood.”
The sociology of drinking is altered in the context of globalization, moder-
nity, and consumerism: what was essentially anti-Brahminical has become
unfeminine, as the clandestine as well as the open consumption of liquor by
Bāhun men is openly condemned but secretly condoned. The consumption
of liquor would go against the aesthetics of femininity within patriarchy. The
consumption of liquor by the urban woman is, then, the carnivalesque reversal
of upper caste femininity—the Bāhun or Chhetri woman becomes indistin-
guishable from the matwālı̄.
Subversive Invitations
The locational change is obvious: in the rural context, a father or a brother or

any other māitı̄ would take the ćelı̄ to her māita for the dar on dwitı̄yā. There is
a fixity or rigidity in the invitation system: the invitation flows unidirectionally
from the māitı̄ to the ćelı̄, from the thūlā (placed higher up in the hierarchy of
relationships) to the sānā (placed lower in the hierarchy of relationship), and so
on. But māita is no longer the central locus of dar in the urban Tı̄j. The month-
long sequence of dar parties are held at party venues and glitzy hotels, and hosted
by organizations, institutions, corporate houses, associations, women’s groups,
clubs, schools, colleges, and others. The invitational system is undermined: the
invitation becomes multidirectional. Institutions and organizations and profes-
sional bodies and corporate houses invite women and men. The invitation flows
from thūlā to sānā as well as from sānā to thūlā; the patrilineal invitational
system gradually becomes a matrilineal one as sisters invite sisters and the
people related through them, and women invite women and men. Vishnu Prasad
Dahal feels that the rural paramparā of inviting the pitrnātā, that is, patrilineally
related female relatives such as āmāju (husband’s elder˙ sister), nanda (husband’s
younger sister), phupusāsu (sister of husband’s/wife’s father), bhānjı̄ (daughter of
a man’s sister), has been replaced by the paramparā of inviting the matrnātā,
that is, matrilineally related women, or women friends (Dahal 2011). The ˙verti-
cal hierarchy in the invitational system—the thūlā, or the higher, inviting the
sānā, or the lower, has been horizontalized as decorum is violated. The urban
“matrilineal” invitational system may be seen as a reorientation that scripts a
carnivalesque space of female bonding, de-hierarchization, and transgression.
This new practice is inherently horizontal in its circulation of power: subversive,

democratic, and unpatriarchal.
From Circular Sārı̄ to the Slipping Phariā: Some Concluding Remarks
In the rural Tı̄j songs, Nepali women question the patriarchal construction
of space: in the old or “classical” songs, women’s criticism can be seen in their
understanding and articulation of an unjust spatial order. Here, Nepali women’s
understanding and articulation of their problem problematize the myth of the
silenced native subaltern—waiting for its moment of articulation in the idiom of
international feminism—a myth carefully constructed and perpetuated by the
indigenous and liberal Western epistemology. Though it cannot be denied that
the vocabulary of democracy and international feminist movement gave Nepali
women a new idiom and polemic, it would be equally wrong, as we have seen, to
deny the indigenous genealogy of protest and polemic inscribed in the old Tı̄j
songs, much before the arrival of developmentalist modernity and feminist ideas
in Nepal. The spatiotemporal journey from the classical and contemporary to
the carnival is also the journey from the quest for celebration to the celebration
of transgression, autonomy, and empowering disorder.22 From the circularity of
sārı̄ in the rural,23 to the anarchic phariā in the urban,24 Tı̄j songs complete a
long spatial journey from the circular fold and plaits of sārı̄ in the rural Tı̄j song
to the sociology of phariā that has its own gravitational logic.25 The slipping
down of the phariā is the celebration of female space. There is no angst, anger,
and alarm when the phariā slips down; there is no desire either to fasten it tight
to its right place. There is no right place! There is a celebration of its anarchic
slips. The phariā that slips down unveils things that are erotic and phobiac.
The unveiling of the veiled enacts the female jouissance. The gravitational slip
enacts the ideological breakdown: the patriarchal spatial ideology attempts to
“fasten” women to “feminine” space as the legacy bearer of the inner sanctum
of domesticity and tradition. What “orgasmic” celebration of slipping down! It
enacts the journey from the feminist circularity to the “female” anarchy. The
celebration of the anarchic slipping down of the phariā enacts the slipping
down of the patriarchal spatial order embedded in the politics of archetypal Tı̄j.
Balram Uprety is an assistant professor of English at St. Joseph’s College, Darjeeling,

India. His research interest lies in the epistemology of the oppressed. Mr. Uprety is
working on the erased subjectivity of orphans in the Indian religious orphanages and
the fictional narratives. Mr. Uprety’s book of poems in Nepali, Subaltern Suseli, is
forthcoming. He may be contacted at balauprety@gmail.com
Acknowledgments
The author wants to thank Dr. Nilanjana Deb of the Department of English,
Jadavpur University, Kolkata, for her comments and incisive feedback on this
paper; Mrs. Smriti Singh Uprety of Darjeeling Government College, Darjeel-
ing, for her invaluable help in the translation of the songs; and the anonymous
reviewers for reviewing this article and adding depth and nuance to this paper.
Notes
1. The legacy of enlightenment knowledge formation also plays a significant role in

denying value to such an archive of women’s songs The patriarchal bias of the Enlighten-
ment paradigm that plays a central role in the creation of “knowledge” in Nepal does
not require emphasis. The collusion, conscious/unconscious, of the native patriarchy
with the eurocentric Enlightenment paradigm that ignores, elides, and devalues women’s
voice and perspective can be seen in the systematic academic othering of Tı̄j.
2. System of matrimony that requires a woman to leave her house permanently
after she gets married and live in her husband’s house.
3. Though never directly colonized, Nepal became the object of international aid
and benevolent paternalism following her opening to the outside world in 1951 with the
overthrow of the repressive Rana regime and the establishment of democracy. Nepal’s
brief stint with democracy, however, came to an end in 1960 when king Mahendra
overthrew the democratically elected government and established a monarchy and the
Panchayat rule. In spite of this political transition, international patronage continued
to define Nepal’s dependence. During this period, Nepal became the laboratory for
experimenting with the viability of the developmentalist welfare scheme of the inter-
national donor nations. The woman’s question that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s
was, therefore, largely framed within this developmentalist discourse as the problem of
development. The women’s movement that emerged in Nepal in the 1980s and later was,
therefore, largely influenced by this international paradigm of development and moder-
nity. Though the discourse of development and developmentalist modernity influenced
the politics of Tı̄j songs in 1980 and later, the older songs can be seen as a testimony of
Nepali women’s tradition of protest that existed independent of such outside influence.
4. It is imperative to present a synoptic survey of literature on Tı̄j. In spite of its
centrality as the festival of Nepali women, Tı̄j has always been treated as a “footnote”
in the Nepali academia. There are several problems with the Nepali writing on Tı̄j:
the most fundamental problem with the indigenous/Nepali writing is its epistemic
paradigm—its univocal, archetypal, and androcentric constructions of Tı̄j miss the
pluralities and ambivalence that make Tı̄j simultaneously a complex site of conformity
and contestation, hegemony and counter-hegemony, patriarchal ritual and the carnival
antiritual. American anthropologist Lynn Bennett’s chapter on Tı̄j (1983) is impor-
tant for its documentation and reading of this cultural metaphor as an expression and
endorsement of Brahminical patriarchy. By excluding Tı̄j songs from her ethnographic
practice, however, Bennett misses Nepali women’s complex contrapuntal conceptualiza-
tion of Brahminical patriarchy. Dorothy Holland, Debra Skinner, and G. B. Aahikari’s
paper on Tı̄j (1994) and another paper by Dorothy Holland and Debra Skinner (1996)
read it as Nepali women’s expression of alternative femininity and counterhegemonic

subjectivities. Skinner, Holland and Adhikari however, limit their analytical canvas to
a cursory examination of a few issues such as inheritance, alcoholism, education, and
matrimony. The urban Tı̄j is also left unexamined in their writing. For a detailed review
of literature on Tı̄j, see Uprety 2013.
5. For detailed discussion on the banning of the songs, see Holland and Skinner
1996.
6. The ancestral name that runs in the family since the beginning of the family
lineage.
7. The seven mythological sages who are taken to be the source of the Hindu
spiritual pedigree.
8. To encode the complex status of the Nepali women, Lynn Bennett comes up with
a binary: the filiafocal and the patrifocal. The filiafocal model designates the sacraliza-
tion and worshipping of the daughter and sisters by the father(s) and the brother(s),
while the patrifocal designates the ritual devaluation and the low status of the married
woman among her affinal relations. See Bennett 1983.
9. The issue of caste in Tı̄j has not received the attention that it deserves. Lynn
Bennett (1983) regards Tı̄j as an expression of upper caste sexual politics. For Holland,
Skinnner, and Adhikari (1994), Tı̄j represents the subjectivity of all Nepali women. To
me, Bennett seems to be right, though she draws her conclusion without examining
the corpus of Tı̄j songs. The ritual complex of Tı̄j and the oeuvre of songs express the
upper-caste subjectivities and concerns. Socio-culturally, the issues specific to the Nepali
dalit women—their subjection to the caste system, the upper-caste male stereotyping of
dalit women as easily “available,” and the upper-caste female construction of dalit women
as their impure and inferior alter-ego, the double bind of the upper caste, and the dalit
patriarchy unambiguously show the upper caste orientation of Tı̄j. Economically, the
economic erasure by the upper caste and the dalit patriarchy, the relative spatial as well
as economic freedom of dalit women because of the conventional nature of jajmāni (riti-
bhāya in the Nepali context) production and distribution system in which women play
key role in the generation of the household economy show the complex simultaneous
marginalization and relative empowerment of dalit women. Moreover, the diminished
obsession with the notion of honor and izzat because of dalit women’s relative distance
from the Brahminical cosmology and epistemology (in spite of the continuous process
of sanskritization) do not find expression in the corpus of Tı̄j songs. It would be wrong
to say that dalit women do not sing Tı̄j songs. However, their erasure and othering is
scripted in the very act of their singing songs that do not represent their subjectivity.
10. This is a well-known Nepali proverb, still in circulation today.
11. “O the didi from ākāsh, and the bahini from patāl, / When shall we meet again? /
When our father will perform the Aśwamedh Yajna, / Then shall we meet again.” Hari
Maya Ghimire, in private conversation with author, August 2011.
12. The corpus of Nepali Tı̄j songs exists in Nepali. In this paper, I have translated
and quoted extensively so that the folk corpus becomes accessible to those who are not
acquainted with the source language. All translations are mine except the quotations
from Skinner, Holland, and Adhikari 1994.
13. The song of King Harimalla and Queen Bhavamalli is often seen as an arche-
typal Tı̄j song. The king, having married a baby queen, leaves for his studies; he is
allowed to study in a celibate hermitage once he lies about his marital status. He returns
home after twelve years to find his wife distributing the midday meal to the paddy culti-
vators. The king, in the garb of an ascetic, makes several erotic overtures to the queen
to test her fidelity. The queen’s anger and alarm at the king’s erotic advances finally
brings the mother to the setting, and the story ends with the reunion of the couple.
14. The Tı̄j songs of the 1980s and 1990s, as already stated, clearly show the impact
of feminisms that became prominent in the 1980s and1990s, indicating a marked shift in
women’s politics from the home to the world. The feminist movements in South Asian
and Western countries helped produce this epistemic shift. During this phase, women
became politically conscious and consciously political in their demand for gender justice
and female empowerment. The female phase that became visible in the first decade of
2000s to the present is the celebration of women’s experience, their femininity. The
apparent de-politicization in the female phase is not the loss of the political, but the
articulation of the political through carnivalization. My ideas of the feminist and female
phase are largely influenced by Toril Moi.
15. Manju Khatiwada, interview with Balram Uprety, Kathmandu, August 11, 2010.
16. Ćaraṅāmṙt literally means the elixir of the feet. Women wash the feet of their
husband and “drink” the water. The ritual of drinking ćaranāmr t while ending the fast
underlines the impurity of the female body in the biological˙ hierarchy.
˙
17. The menstruating female body is here seen as a source of pollution, defilement,
and degradation. The menstruation is seen as a biological manifestation of the innate
sinfulness and depravity of the female body: the fallen female body needs to be periodi-
cally reclaimed and redeemed by rituals and symbolism that reinsert and reinscribe the
degenerate into the bio-metaphysical map of purity and redemption.
18. Fasting can be seen as a trope of biological erasure: the female body ritually
erases itself so that the male body can live longer.
19. Sārı̄ draped by women in traditional Nepali fashion.
20. Utensil that measures out roughly half a kilogram of cereals.
21. It must be remembered, however, that in the Bāhun community, the consump-
tion of what was considered to be “pure,” clean flesh, such as the flesh of goats and
pigeons, was socially acceptable. The exclusion of flesh from dar feast was more ritual
than social: the consumption of tāmasik āhār in feasting would undermine the sanctity
of fasting.
22. The carnivalization of Tı̄j does not come without some “cannibalizations”—
carnival is a condition of being in “two worlds” and is therefore ambivalent. In a way,
women’s transgressive consumerism in Tı̄j can be seen as their co-optation by the forces
of corporate patriarchy. Their consumerism, however, unsettles the patriarchal ontologi-
cal as well as the epistemological construction of women as bhogyā—the archetypal
consumable. The carnival journey from bhogyā to bhoktā, from being the consumable
to the consumer, is the journey from objecthood to subjecthood, from “otherhood” to
selfhood.
23. The reference is to the circularity of sari discussed in our analysis of women’s
movement in space in rural Tı̄j songs.
24. See the phariā song.
25. It can be argued, and perhaps rightly, that such transgressive carnivaliza-
tion is metropolitan and classist. The gradual “hijacking” of Tı̄j by the upper-caste,
middle-class, urban, heterosexual women cannot be denied. The journey of Tı̄j as a

self-conscious space for feminist politics to classist global consumerism is often seen
as a betrayal and aberration. Seductive though the argument is, we cannot overlook
the fact that most feminist subversive and emancipatory politics in history have spatial
as well as class biases. Firstly, carnivalization is not so much the loss of the feminist
political as it is a differential articulation of the political in the idiom of celebration
and transgression rather than slogans and placards. Also, the carnival cultural agenda
set by the metropolitan middle class is slowly enveloping the whole country as well the
Nepali diaspora abroad, thereby fundamentally paralyzing the patriarchal economy of
space embedded in Tı̄j. The efficacy of the carnival can be seen by the reactionary and
right-wing patriarchal vilification of the urban Tı̄j as a trope of cultural degeneration
and dystopia. Culture perhaps degenerates when the consumable becomes the consumer,
and the food, the eater. The discourse of degeneration is an oblique acknowledgement
of the subversive potency of the carnival.
References
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Bandhu, Chudamani. 2001. Nepali loksāhitya [Nepali folk literature]. Kathmandu: Ekta
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Ghimire, Kalpana. 2010. “Tijko tadakbhadak” [The glamour and glitter of Tı̄j]. Kantipur,
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ate]. Gorkhapatra, August 29.
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Gendering Geography: Space Politics in Nepali Tīj

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Keywords: alternative spatiality / female space / indigenous feminism / space

Location of the Problem: Situating the Silence

Tı̄j has become a central cultural metaphor in Nepal. In contemporary aca-

©2017 Feminist Formations, Vol. 29 No. 3 (Winter) pp. 80–109

Spatialization of Tı̄j: The Erased Gender of Geography

In the evolution and perpetuation of Nepali patriarchy, the creation of a spatial

The Tamed Transgression: De-spatialized Mythology

Tı̄j has a mythological origin. A synoptic reference to its mythological origin

From Dissent to Deconstruction:

Before discussing the spatialization of gender and the gendering of space, it

Husband: Your heartless father loves you not,

Husband: I shall not allow this at any cost,

underscore the mapping out of a subjective geography of women opposed to

spatial displacement operates as a trope of the symbolic and real displacements

The spatial patriarchal ideology mediates women’s perception of rivers as

O my āmai! Send her to her māiti-deś [land of her parents].”

All my sons have gone abroad, says father.

This song also incorporates the speaker’s reflection on the nature of

Feminist to Female: Carnival Counterspatialization

Carnivalization/Cannibalization: Urban Adaptations of Tı̄j

I use the analytical framework of the carnival to examine women’s creation

Understanding the transformation of space in urban Tı̄j is fundamental for

Many shopping excursions to specially organized Tı̄jé Bazārs, shopping malls,

Transgressive Female Temporality

spatial change would inevitably mean corresponding temporal transformation.

From Māita to the Marketplace

Tı̄j is fundamentally connected with māita. Patriarchy originally creates Tı̄j by

The Bawdy Body

In the asceticization of the body, the existential profundity of the mundane—

The more it slips down.

“Something Rich and Strange”: Feasting as Ritual

The locational change is obvious: in the rural context, a father or a brother or

This new practice is inherently horizontal in its circulation of power: subversive,

From Circular Sārı̄ to the Slipping Phariā: Some Concluding Remarks

Balram Uprety is an assistant professor of English at St. Joseph’s College, Darjeeling,

1. The legacy of enlightenment knowledge formation also plays a significant role in

read it as Nepali women’s expression of alternative femininity and counterhegemonic

middle-class, urban, heterosexual women cannot be denied. The journey of Tı̄j as a

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