ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN NOVEMBER, a small crowd milled around a mini boxing ring set up in a restaurant garden in Jhamsikhel, in upmarket Kathmandu. They smoked cigarettes and spoke in undertones, heads nodding and feet tapping to the breakbeat thumping through a stack of speakers. At a signal from the smart, clean-cut compère, someone killed the music, and two nervous young men were introduced to the people in the audience, most of them in their twenties. The compère tossed a coin to decide who would attack first, and a hush descended over the garden. Onlookers from the street stopped to stare, unsure if what they were seeing was completely legal.
This was the finale of the second season of Raw Barz, a rap battling phenomenon which has gone viral in the Nepali-speaking parts of South Asia, injecting the Nepali hip-hop scene with a confrontational new finesse and energy. The battlers looked like the East Coast rap pioneers of thirty-odd years ago, wearing low-slung jeans and strutting about with an in-your-face, crotch-grabbing swagger. But there was a South Asian element to their style too; when things got heated and the protagonists were toe to toe, gestures more resonant of a tea stall adda emerged; forefingers extended, nostrils flared, the battlers resembled head teachers scolding errant pupils.
The weapons in this battle were insults, disses and jibes, which had to rhyme and keep to a loose metre. Their targets were the contestants’ opponents—their family and ancestry, dress sense, and, most importantly, claim to be battling poets. Combatants were expected to be bilingual, and the organisers had established vague laws governing what kinds of insults and curses were permissible. Still, the language used would have made the battlers’ parents swoon. Clumsy rhymes and lame insults were rewarded with silence, and rappers lacking charisma and bravado soon lost the attention of the crowd—the ultimate judge in these contests.
That afternoon, the first few rounds were unremarkable. The participants were relative newcomers and so nervous; they resorted too easily to American-accented questioning of each other’s gender and sexual orientation. At times they were drowned out by the chatter of the unconvinced crowd. It was only as the daylight began to fade that the hostility became lyrical enough to justify standing out in the cold to hear it. Smoking marijuana on the premises (even when the weed was mixed inside innocuous-looking cigarettes) had been banned by the management a few weeks ago, but people had been going out to the motorbike parking area for a toke. Even they stopped and crowded the ring for the main event.
What followed was a tag team affair—SickJam v. Underdogs—an all-star showdown of battlers who had established themselves in previous contests. Professor opened the battle for SickJam with tight, sneering Nepali, which was quickly complemented by his teammate Dayjen’s earnest, layered English insults. Some exchanges were so slick as to give away that parts had clearly been prepared beforehand. No-one cared, though; the crowd was warmed up, and strained to catch every word for a full thirty minutes. SickJam finished with a Nepali–English, back-and-forth countdown from ten, using each number to release a new diss—a Kathmandu take on the pioneering hip-hop group Boogie Down Productions’ 1988 ‘Ya Slippin.’ Dayjen’s mocking comparison of his opponents and the pop band One Direction to end the countdown drew much laughter. Underdogs responded with their own tag-team insults, and ended the battle to a roar of approval. The combatants embraced and shook hands, the audience waded in to offer congratulations and hugs, and the speakers were turned on again to blast out songs from the American rapper KRS-One. Out on the street, the celebration turned into a tight huddle under the spotlights, cigarette smoke billowing into the night sky and jubilant shouts floating up above the music.
KATHMANDU MAY SEEM AN UNLIKELY SETTING for a bustling hip-hop scene. For many, the city’s name conjures up images of an out-of-the-way, electricity-starved place trapped in eternal gridlock, where ubiquitous diesel generators pollute the air and drown out all music. During the civil war, which lasted from 1996 until 2006, Kathmandu’s traditionally conservative leanings were bolstered by the moral policing of the city’s streets by various law enforcement agencies deployed in force against the Maoist threat. Until the peace agreement that ended the war, venues playing loud music or hosting gigs were often forced to close early, or shut down completely. The city is still recovering from this civic hangover, and even today only a few venues and clubs stay open past midnight, to the continued distress of proprietors and patrons.
In spite of this, since the middle of 2012, Nepal’s capital has become the centre of a growing hip-hop scene, which is inspiring more and more young Nepalis to meet up on Saturdays to abuse one another in free verse, and occasionally to record their rhymes in studios. Early gatherings were often disrupted by the police, for whom young males getting together usually meant radically politicised students planning trouble. But those perceptions are slowly changing, and Raw Barz recently featured on the News 24 programme Issue of the Day, where the event’s co-founder and promoter Kolin Rana was invited, along with rappers Dayjen, Easi 12 and Cring, to explain how battling worked, and to reassure parents that they discouraged the use of Nepali swear words and curses. Although, Rana admitted, “in English they can say something.”
If hip-hop emerged as an expression of discontent among the United States’ disenfranchised and marginalised African-American communities, Kathmandu’s appropriation of it, Nephop, is the serious and fulltime passion of a group of relatively privileged, yet still disenchanted, school and college students. With the civil war still in recent memory and a lack of opportunities at home forcing large-scale migration abroad, Nepal’s urban youth are negotiating a host of uncertainties. Those in the cities are spending longer in school, leaving with better qualifications, and are more likely to remain single for longer, as well as to experiment with drugs and alcohol. Unemployment and underemployment figures are at anywhere between twenty and forty percent.
For its practitioners, Nephop is both a means of articulating grievances with politics and society, and an expression of youthful outlandishness and creativity before they settle into marriage and middle-class respectability. On a track titled ‘Grab Ya Khukuri,’ the rapper Yama Buddha sings:
It’s time to go to war/ leave every crooked motherfucker in the government squad/ we all fell apart like we forgot to converse/ we didn’t self destruct yet, but we on verge/ so I’m on a search for an/ unswerving government/ fleas get shot coz/ I got no love for them/ the glee of my people is/ what you ain’t fucking with/ nothing left still they want to take more out of us/ I can’t change things alone, it needs a lot of us.
A lot of Nephop is good, by any standard, and getting better. Those who produce this music want to take the genre to a global audience, and to challenge the dominance in the Nepali musical imagination of folk music, Hindi and Nepali film soundtracks, and the rowdy, power-chord-saturated rock scene. The hip-hop community in Kathmandu is austere, tightly knit and self-contained. There is little of the movie-star glamour and bling associated with Indian rap acts like Yo Yo Honey Singh or Desi Beam. Respect and fame are measured not by money, cars and high-profile record signings, but earned in the heat of toe-to-toe lyrical battles in front of unforgiving crowds. Those deemed failures achieve perverse fame on YouTube, featuring in “worst rapper” videos. The comments are acerbic enough to end a career before it has begun. “Dissing each other is the best,” the young rapper Bishisht Chand told me. “Songs are what we feel about the country, about us. Battles are about your opponent only.”
THE FUSION OF EASTERN AND WESTERN influences has defined a sizeable part of Kathmandu’s popular music scene since the 1960s. The hippies brought Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix to Kathmandu, and their haunts—in Freak Street and, later, in the tourist quarter of Thamel—were soon echoing with local versions of flower-power anthems as Nepalis picked up the instruments of rock and roll. Cover bands dominated a large part of the live music scene until the early 1990s, when mixing caught on and electronic music pulled some adherents away to Kathmandu’s handful of nightclubs and secretive raves out in the hills. But it was not until the end of that decade that hip-hop caught on, and rap emerged as a commercially viable genre.
Girish Khatiwada is one of Kathmandu’s most prominent hip-hop pioneers, having achieved fame in 2005 with the album X, which he released together with Sudin Pokhrel and Amit Sinha as part of the group Girish and The Unity. Following success in Nepal and tours in Hong Kong and Australia, Khatiwada went to study in the US, where he picked up DJ-ing and producing. As a follower of hip-hop since the early 1990s, he said, he had wanted to hear rap in his own language. “I wanted to listen to Nepali rap on the radio, so I did it. I thought, ‘I want to be that guy,’” he told me, smoking a cigarette and looking out over Kathmandu’s nascent skyline from his office in the old neighbourhood of Naxal.
Nephop records of the early 2000s often mixed the sounds of Nepali folk music with Western beats and effects; girls, parties and politics formed much of the subject matter. Male and female back-and-forth vocals on tracks like Nepsydaz’s ‘Maya oh Maya’ were vaguely reminiscent of traditional dohori folk songs, and Girish and the Unity’s ‘Money’ sampled the most famous lines from the revered Nepali poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s 1935 epic Muna Madan:
Hatka maila sunka thaila, ke garnu dhanle?
Sag ra sisnu khaeko besa anandi manle!
(Bags of gold are like the dirt on your hands, what can be done with wealth?
Better to eat nettles and greens with happiness in your heart!)
This passage, in which the poem’s heroine Muna tries to convince her beloved Madan not to risk his life in search of fortune in Tibet, was woven into a satirical lament on how pervasive greed has become among today’s generation: “Jati bhaye pani yesle malai pugdaina” (No matter how much, it’s never enough for me).
The production values still had a long way to go, and connoisseurs cringed at the naivety of some of the lyrics, but the new sound showcased a rising young urban consciousness—anxious, often angry about conditions in Nepal, and turning to rap to express itself.
Khatiwada said he has been taken by surprise at how popular and successful hip-hop has become in Nepal, and added that while there are many things left to learn for Nepal’s rappers, “most of the rap coming out now is honest.” Khatiwada himself walks the line between underground and mainstream, hosting a weekly hip-hop show on Radio Kantipur, the city’s most popular FM station, and running a production company. While continuing to rap, he has also produced and performed for several Nepali films, and sung with the popular dohori singer Komal Oli during a celebration of the festival of Teej.
Among those following in Khatiwada’s footsteps is Anil Adhikari, a young man from a village in eastern Nepal who goes by the stage name Yama Buddha, and is one of Nephop’s newest stars. Adhikari co-founded Raw Barz in 2013, and as both an artist and a producer is seen as a major force behind the recent success of the rap scene.
Adhikari learnt his trade on the streets and basketball courts of east London in the latter years of the last decade, rapping and freestyling with Jamaican and Lithuanian friends and performing at open-mike nights around the city. Working three jobs at times, and sharing a double bed with two other migrants, the experience of living hand-to-mouth allowed him to tap into the currents of social discontent which characterised much of early American hip-hop, and from which his contemporaries in Nepal, many still living with their parents, were far removed. “London was hard for me,” he told me when we met in November. One night, tired after work and last on the bill at an open mike in Aldgate, he choked after four lines, he remembers wryly, and had to leave the stage. Unexpectedly, a young actress came up to him and told him the four lines had made such an impression on her that he shouldn’t give up. “So yeah,” Adhikari said to me, “there was no way I was going to stop.”
A couple of years before his UK visa ran out, Adhikari decided to take what he had learned in London back to Nepal. “There was nothing here,” he said of the hip-hop scene of that time. His parents did not take his early return well, but, unfazed, he soon began holding workshops to get people interested and confident enough to rhyme and battle. He also began recording, and in 2012 achieved huge success, by Nephop standards, with Ekadesh, a bilingual record which featured some of the sharpest and most insightful Nepali-language rap to date. The album’s release was highly anticipated thanks to the hype Adhikari was able to generate for it online. His Youtube channel alone received 2.5 million hits in the month around Ekadesh’s July launch.
In recent years, artists like Adhikari have responded to falls in CD sales, a rise in internet piracy and the continuing lack of copyright laws in Nepal by sharing more of their music online and turning to live shows to make money. Rahan Joshi, an internet marketing consultant based in Kathmandu, told me that “with the increase in more accessible internet and thanks to platforms such as YouTube and SoundCloud, many artists are emerging with loyal fan followings.” From only fifty thousand internet users in 2000, by 2012 more than 2.5 million Nepalis were regularly going online. This figure is admittedly low for a country of thirty million people, but internet users are disproportionately concentrated in the Kathmandu Valley, where the majority of Nepal’s music continues to be produced. This has allowed Nephop to get a firm foothold in the capital, especially among the young people who are by far the most active users of social media and sharing sites; those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four constitute almost half of Facebook users in Nepal. Nephop’s online popularity has also been bolstered by other media: Radio Kantipur and Times FM, another popular FM station, both now broadcast programmes dedicated to hip-hop.
Nepali became a Google language in December 2013 (along with Punjabi, Hausa and Maori) and figures released soon afterwards named the prominent rapper Laure, whose real name is Aasis Rana, as one of Nepal’s two “Google celebrities,” along with the US-based fashion designer Prabal Gurung. Last February, Rana performed in Seoul and Hong Kong, and this June he will perform in London. He is the first of the Raw Barz battlers to break out into other areas of show business, and will appear alongside Namrata Shrestha, a prominent Nepali actress, in the British director Murray Kerr’s upcoming film Tandav. Nephop is also making inroads into India: Yama Buddha recently performed at the Masque Lounge in Kolkata with local rapper Feyago, and last year the Gangtok-based Nephop group Urban Inc played to three thousand people at Jamia Millia University in Delhi.
As a crucial medium for the spread of Nephop, the internet is also increasingly defining the contours and importance of rap battles. Live contests happen in front of a maximum of 150 people; their online video versions, however, often receive up to a million hits. The ability to re-watch contests and analyse popular exchanges online means that discussion and debate around battles and battlers takes place as much in internet forums as on the streets. Using YouTube to research an opponent’s weaknesses before a battle is now standard practice.
ON A BEAUTIFULLY WARM SATURDAY afternoon in November, a week before the Raw Barz season finale, around fifty people gathered at the restaurant garden in Jhamsikhel to watch first-time battlers try to prove themselves. No one bought drinks or food, but the waiters and managers didn’t seem to mind. The novices were clearly tense, and were made more so by a long wait; the compères arrived late, then sat smoking and drinking in the sun, purposefully oblivious to all the nervous glances they were getting. The first two battlers were called up. Bhusal Pyakurel—a tall, good-looking young man with an enviable head of hair, who goes by the stage name of Adiyos—strutted up to the dais. Suraj Karki—smaller and scruffier—was introduced as Nepalko Chhoro (Son of Nepal). The contempt in his opponent’s eyes as they sized each other up was unmistakable.
Adiyos’s first round was mediocre, though acceptable for a first timer. When Nepalko Chhoro took his turn, the gulf between the competitors became starkly apparent. He picked up the pace and volume, mouthing barbs in Nepali, and the crowd quickly took his side. Adiyos’ response—“I can give three reasons why I’m better than you. One, you suck. Two, you suck. Three, you suck”—drew only silence. The crowd was vindicated. The compère nodded politely. Nepalko Chhoro started his second round by addressing the crowd:
Jati ghote ni yesko jyanma lagena thal/ tyespachhi yo banna pugyo pocketmar/ aja yelle malai shabdama giraune prayas garyo.
(No matter how much this guy tried he couldn’t make ends meet/ so became a pick-pocket/ and tried to diss me with profane language.)
He then turned to Adiyos:
Belaima buddhi purya/ atma-samarpan gar ra afno har lai swikar/ tan, rapper! yeta her na/ Patan aspatal ma gayera gare hunchha upachar.
(Hey, you, think about it/ surrender and admit your loss/ You, Rapper! Look at me/ And get to the Patan mental hospital to get treated for your insanity.)
Nepalko Chhoro’s impersonation of a concerned doctor received huge applause, and from there the battle became even more one-sided as his rhymes turned louder and more confident, and his gestures more aggressive and overblown. Several Maori haka-style chest-thumps and leaps into the air punctuated his tirade, and even his opponent clapped at some of the disses.
At the end of the battle, the crowd’s verdict was wholeheartedly in Nepalko Chhoro’s favour—two months later, fans were still complaining in online forums that the cameraman hadn’t captured his last round. At the Raw Barz finale a few weeks later, Nepalko Chhoro swaggered more boldly into the ring, and received a huge cheer of recognition from the crowd.
Another recent arrival on the scene is Bishisht Chand, a veteran of the first season of Raw Barz and one of Nephop’s youngest popular rappers, who wrote his first song, titled ‘Naya Nepal’ (New Nepal), in 2010, when he was aged just thirteen. “I want to take Nephop everywhere,” he told me across a table at a café. His enthusiasm is typical of the younger generation of rappers. Chand grew up listening to classic rap artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., 2Pac, Logic and Eminem (and a little bit of The Beatles), and is a fan of foreign hip-hop. But, he told me, he is also wary of excessive emulation. By age fifteen, Chand was performing around Thamel, and by seventeen he had appeared on Raw Barz and performed at Purple Haze, the closest thing Kathmandu has to a warehouse venue, after its owner was impressed by his freestyling.
He recounted how he and his schoolmates used to clandestinely write rap lyrics in class under the stern gaze of their teachers. This was easier to do during the cold months, when an mp3 player could be concealed among layers of thick clothing and a beat heard discretely through an earphone hidden and muted by a gloved hand. He recalled being caught several times, and being told that he “wasn’t suited to education.” He now works for The Explicit Content, a leading Kathmandu-based hip-hop label. He told me he had shown his father the tracks and battles he has performed in, but had not dared share them with his mother. “Aren’t all Nepali mothers like this?” he mused.
THE THEMES AND VOCABULARY of Nephop battles are telling of how members of Nepal’s hip-hop generation relate to one another. Lyrics often centre on self-aggrandisement, and attacking the persona of the opponent. Caste and ethnicity are hot issues in the country, and it is not surprising that they have entered the lexicon and discourse of battling, where they are regularly satirised, mocked or extolled. What is surprising, though, is that they have become fair game for dissing; no one’s origins are sacred, and each protagonist knows this. “It’s just a game,” Chand pointed out. “If we show anger our fans won’t like it … and it’s a rap battle. So why get angry?” As in Europe and the United States, the rules demand silence and attention while an opponent is rapping, no matter how personal or low the insults get. When they are used, jibes about caste and ethnicity are generally articulated with reference to common historical narratives, juxtaposed with the unashamedly modern counter-culture in which rap battling takes place.
One memorable example came during a battle between the rappers Balen and Litl Grizl at a Jhamsikhel café in July 2013. Litl Grizl is the stage name of Nihesh Maharjan, an ethnic Newar, while Balen belongs to a branch of the Shah family. The Kathmandu Valley was ruled by Newar kings until it was captured by Prithvi Narayan Shah and the Gorkhalis in 1769. Shah went on to found a dynasty that officially ruled the country until 2008, two years after a popular revolt sparked by resentment of the monarchy. Litl’ Grizl wove that history into an insult:
Kathmanduharu Newarle raj garthe/ bichma aayo Shaha/ das-bahra pustako churtiphurti/ antyama Nagarjunama swaha.
(The Newars used to rule Kathmandu/ then along came the Shah/ after ten or eleven generations of their pomp/ they met their end in Nagarjun. [The assigned residence of the last king, Gyanendra, after he was evicted from his palaces])
On his turn, Balen asked the compères “if we’re talking history now,” and, mocking Litl Grizl’s manner of speech (Newars are often derided for finding it difficult to pronounce the aspirated “tha” when speaking Nepali), told him not to waste his time talking about establishing democracy and a republic, as the day’s battle would show that the rule of the Shahs was far from over.
This rejoinder, Shah later explained to me, was “just history.” “Because he used it, I had to in my rebuttal—there was no intention for it to be racial,” he said. Balen is one of the few bridges between Kathmandu’s rap battling and slam poetry scenes, and is also a prominent singer. He is slated to battle Laure sometime this year, although a date hasn’t been fixed yet. The bout is hugely anticipated: there is much speculation in online forums as to when it will take place, other artists have spoken about it in interviews and preview videos, and parodies have already appeared online. What makes the prospect of a battle even more enticing is the fact that Laure and Balen are also good friends—“best buddies in the Nephop scene,” according to Balen.
Insults built around stereotypes can sometimes be much cruder than those in the Balen–Litl Grizl battle. The casual, throwaway snobbery with which Nepalis from the country’s hilly regions often treat those from the plains appears at times, and some battlers still resort to homophobic insults in English. Adhikari—Yama Buddha—told me that “these are now clichés,” and Nepali rappers needed “to move on.”
However, the expectation that everything be laid out on the table (efforts at censorship have been decidedly lacklustre even after the promises on Issue of the Day) and the diktat that battling is verbal only (which has been followed to the letter) has created an arena in which cultural and political labels are tempting ammunition, and sensitive identities are ready targets. For Chand, the vocabulary of rap battling is an indicator that some sections of Nepali youth are becoming comfortable enough with caste and ethnicity to allow the traditions, languages and lineages that come with them to be openly mocked and attacked. “We are a family, so there is no hate,” he said.
As the language that inspired many on the Nephop scene to rap in the first place, English enjoys special status among those who battle. Only a handful rap as well in English as they do in Nepali, but the inability to rhyme and diss proficiently in English is commonly mocked, and taken as an indicator of low socio-economic status. Utsaha Joshi, who is known on the scene as Uniq Poet, brought the matter up early on during a July 2013 battle with Laure, which has since received over a million hits on Youtube, and started both rappers on a rise to the top of the Nephop ladder (other rappers I interviewed knew parts of the battle by heart). Laure battles and records exclusively in Nepali, and Uniq Poet attacked him for this:
I rap good and study better so there’s no problem with me/ Biha garne umer tero (you’re old enough to be married), at least try to speak like you got a college degree/ hamilai thaha chhaina bhanthaneko laurema/ bharti huna angrejima pass hunuparchha (don’t think we don’t know that you need to pass English to enrol in the Gurkhas).
“Laure” is the local term for those who enlist in Gurkha regiments in the UK and former British colonies. Uniq Poet suggested that Laure’s choice of stage name demonstrated that rapping was his second career choice, which he only turned to after failing to make the cut for not just the British or Indian Gurkhas, but even for the decidedly less prestigious Nepal Army.
More taunts about Laure’s inability to battle in English followed in the next two rounds, and by the time of Laure’s final reply the tension was electric. After starting his last salvo in Nepali and working the crowd up with aggressive insults, Laure turned to Uniq Poet and finished:
And fuck you if you think Laure cannot rap in English/ I’m a graduate student, nominated to the dean’s list/ next time you try to create all the hate and debate/ bitch / I’m’a slap you in the face with my bachelor’s certificate.
The crowd went wild, and both battlers walked away with their heads held high.
The practice of sparring over levels of education, and the relatively respectful nature in which battles are conducted, shows that hip-hop is still firmly a middle-class phenomenon in Nepal, unlike in many other settings in the world. Even in the heat of one-sided battles, when the crowd is riled up and eager to see more bloodletting, protagonists are given time to compose their replies, and are never jeered at for faltering. Witty, intelligent and well-crafted insults prevail every time over brute vulgarity and aggression. The truth of the disses is irrelevant—no one seriously believes them anyway. What counts is the wordplay itself: the more outlandish, the better.
IN SPITE OF NEPHOP’S SPECTACULAR ASCENT, most artists on the scene cannot yet earn a living from their music alone. Live performances, rather than recordings, continue to define the genre, which means commercial gain is dependent on success in the few clubs that play hip-hop in Kathmandu, and on occasional shows in India. “In Nepal it’s too difficult; you don’t make money at all,” Chand told me. “You have to be Yama Buddha to make money.” He said that while he would always rap, family obligations were likely to mean that in ten years he would be working a regular day job. “We need to make money. We need to feed ourselves and our family.”
Many feel Nephop has significant promise as a marketing tool, but that potential has not been significantly exploited so far. “There is still a gap between those who listen to hip-hop—those people who listen to it on Youtube, watch it on their phones and have popular tracks as their ringtones—and those who control the media, the corporations who can afford to put money into music,” Khatiwada, the early Nephop star, told me. The music industry is certainly growing in Nepal, but so far hip-hop has remained underground, and bands playing folk songs or covers of popular rock bands such as Dire Straits and Bon Jovi (the music today’s “suits” grew up with, according to another Nephop insider), continue to dominate the market.
Nephop rolls on nevertheless. By April, the third season of Raw Barz had just got underway. Yama Buddha was set to return to Kathmandu to play a series of gigs to end his Sprite-sponsored country-wide tour, and Amit Sinha of Girish and The Unity had just returned to the studio, and also announced an Australian tour. There were plans to send the winner of Raw Barz Season III to Australia to face the rap battling champion there. The real wait, however, was for the young battlers trained by Raw Barz, who were juggling college classes and exams with battling and recording, to really join the scene.
To say that Raw Barz has come a long way in its three seasons would be an understatement. From its first meet, attended by just four prospective battlers, it now boasts a core of eighty rappers. Their association with Raw Barz means these performers receive millions of views on Youtube, as well as free exposure through parodies and tributes that keep popping up on the internet.
The rise of rap has coincided with the emergence of other elements of hip-hop culture in Kathmandu. The Everest Crew, Astro Boys and Cartoonz Crew are but three of a number of break-dancing collectives that have won fans in Nepal and abroad during the last year (again, thanks largely to Youtube). Recently, Kolor Kathmandu, a joint enterprise between Nepali and international graffiti artists, brightened up some of the city’s dreary concrete walls with seventy-five murals. DJ-ing remains the missing link between these different art forms, with professionals mostly sticking to playing club and house music as they wait for hip-hop to become more lucrative. To make do, rappers with the software and the know-how produce beats and backing tracks and share them online for others to use. Chand’s record label now produces samples of popular tracks for free download, while beat boxers have started laying down rhythms for acoustic freestyling sessions, which are partly a response to Kathmandu’s fickle power supply.
At the moment, a Nephop concert could not fill Kathmandu’s Dasrath stadium as the rock star Bryan Adams did in February 2011. But, with its incessant lyrical battles, the rap scene is becoming stronger, and building big plans to expand in South Asia and around the world. The emergence of quality hip-hop in Nepal is, hopefully, a sign that the dominance of Bollywood music can be defied. “I’m optimistic,” Khatiwada said when I spoke to him last year. “It’s been a slow ride but we were ahead of time … I think this year rap came a long way, and it’s looking forward.”
Much has been written about how globalisation and new mediums of communication have acted as agents in perpetuating and reinforcing traditions. For Kathmandu’s battling community, though, the opposite seems to be true. Caste and custom are now firmly on the table for examination in a critical light, something that, arguably, would not have been possible a generation ago. While hip-hop has successfully challenged stereotypes and social divisions elsewhere, in Nepal that process has just begun. It is unlikely that those who produce hip-hop will spark any social revolution in the country, but if it comes from any other quarter, Nephop is more than ready to provide a soundtrack.