Identity of the Jyapu People 

Dhime, dhime, dhim.  Dhime, dhime, dhim.  Dhime, dhime, dhim. This is the sound of Dhime, a large drum, worn around the neck and played with a curved stick at the right end and by the palm of the hand on the left. So the sound can be very loud.

One cold morning in January the street of Naya Bazar in Kathmandu was reverberated by the sound of Dhime drum when the streets were still enveloped by heavy fog.  The faint sound of drum beating comes from afar. It gets louder as it gets closer.  The sound falls directly into my ears.  Lying in my bed, my face covered with a thick blanket called “sirak,”  I slightly get agitated by the piercing sound of the drum and the periodic clanking of the brass cymbals called jhurma.  Although half sleep, I could still count the drum beat in three—dhime, dhime, dhim. 

Beating the dhime drums were the Jyapus of the Kathmandu Valley, who were on their way to a temple for a religious ceremony, according to their Guthi tradition.  Not far from my apartment in Naya Bazar where I was living at the time, there was a temple of Mhaipi Devi, patronized by the Jyapus.  The temple was run by a Guthi, an organization strictly founded by the Jyapu community for their cultural, social and religious activities.

Although the incident took place more than sixty years ago, 1958 to be precise, my memories are still fresh because I heard this music pretty much every day while I was growing up as a young boy in Kathmandu.  The childhood memories can be indelible if they are repeatedly hammered in the brain by pleasant or unpleasant manner.  In my case, however, it was a pleasant imprint, not a trauma.  In this memory section, I write of nostalgia with which I lived for many years.  As I grow older and I have no way to return to the time and place, I ruminate my old days in fond memory.

Even today when I hear the sound of Dhime drum—recorded or live—I am transported back to a time when the Dhime Baja was played by the older Jyapu men during special occasions. Today, however, the time has changed.  Dhime in a different form has emerged.  The act of handling or playing Dhime was strictly the prerogative of the elder Jyapu men.  However, today both young men and women play it during various public gatherings without any particular religious association.  More about this later when I write about the social and cultural changes that have emerged out of a political movement that swept Nepal after the Loktantra Andolan (Democratic Movement) of 2006.  This has affected all ethnic groups in Nepal, especially the Newar communities of the Kathmandu Valley, of which Jyapus are a part. 

In this section, I will examine how recent social, cultural and political forces have shaped the Jyapu culture that once practiced Dhime music in its original form.  They still do, but in a modified manner with a new outlook.  How the music has transformed under what circumstances, under what conditions and for what reasons will be the focus of my writing here. 

Although I am a Nepali and grew up in Kathmandu, I don’t claim to know everything about Jyapu culture, because I am not a Jyapu. However, being exposed to the environment in which I lived hearing the music and speaking the language, I feel that the Newari culture, especially Jyapu, to a degree has been rubbed off to me in a significant way that I can’t dislodge the memory ingrained more than sixty years ago.

Most cultures have their own sound, giving them a unique identity.  The sound is not just any sound; here I am referring to sound created by one or more musical instruments called Dhime, unique to the Jyapu culture of Nepal.

The Newars of the Kathmandu Valley are no exception.  Among the Newars, the Jyapus, the people who make up the farming community of the Valley, are vital to the community.  As farmers, they live a healthy and busy life as they toil in the field all day long throughout the year inhaling the fresh air and toiling hard with the soil of the land.  With good health comes celebration of life which includes eating and drinking.  They are known for finding any excuse to eat and drink. Music readily becomes part of that celebration of life.

Newars of Nepal are divided into many castes and sub-caste groups.  Jyapu, according to the division imposed by King Jayasthiti Malla in the 14th century, belongs to the sudra category, the lowest of the four castes in the system.  However, they form the backbone of the Newar society of the Kathmandu Valley.  Jyapu literally means “competent worker” and they indeed are not only competent but also progressive farmers who, in olden days, fed most of the population of the Valley with their produce.  They were so proficient that they could plant one crop after another, hardly giving chance for the field to rest.  They are known for getting more than four crops in a year.  They did this very efficiently. 

They claim to be the original inhabitants of the Valley and hence represent the entire Newar race with their culture and tradition as reflected in their music and religious rituals.

In my section here, I take up their one unique identifying marker which is called Dhime.  Dhime is a uniquely shaped large drum, one that, according to the Sachs-Hornbostel classification, belongs to the category of double-headed cylindrical membranophone, played during special occasions.  When it is referred to as “Dhime Music,” it consists of two drums, two jhurma (cymbals), two tang-tang (gongs), flutes and two ponga (long horns).  Together they create the sound and soul of the Jyapu community and together they represent the entire Newar people of Nepal no matter wherever they are.  Is this the imagined community as argued by Benedict Anderson in his seminal book The Imagined Communities?

Today, the tradition has been passed on to the younger generation with the intent of keeping the tradition alive. But in the name of keeping the tradition alive, they are allowed to glamorize it by bringing it to a secular space with much choreography and grandiose presentation like a public parade or a display of some sort.  There is definitely a deep desire to show to the public as well as to be seen by the people.  The exchanges of gaze between the performers and audience might be cited here as discussed by François Cusset in his book Inverted Gaze.  Although the theory of gaze might not transfer to the Jyapu community of Nepal in the exact terms while dealing with the Dhime performance in the public, the desire to relish attention is nonetheless there. 

I will now discuss in my section here how Dhime music has become politicized.  With the rise of the ethnic divide in Nepal, Dhime Music has been used as a tool to push Newar identity and agenda into the political arena by bringing it from the strictly religious sphere to the public space.  The music primarily associated with religious festivals and cycles of life such as birth, marriage, harvest and other cultural rituals including death, has now been enlisted to exploit ethnic identity both at home and abroad.  This is a significant shift that has taken place where an old traditional music is employed as an agency of identity.

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