Sukha Bhagat Pariyar's signboard.

Down by the river at Bhimsensthan, Kathmandu, there is a small tailoring shop, almost hidden in plain view at the corner of two large buildings, blocked by the constant traffic at the busy bridge intersection. It’s early morning and the shop is just opening; where before we could find no trace of any musical group, now above the sewing machine a signboard proclaims that this is the place to contact Panchai Baja Master Purna Bahadur Pariyar.

Purna Bahadur, 57, along with his older brother Top Bahadur, 61, are the sahanai players and leaders of this group. Originally from Takokot village in Gorkha district, both brothers have lived long and full lives before reuniting to open their Panchai Baja group in central Kathmandu. When they were children, they both learned from their father to play all the instruments of the traditional ensemble. Both brothers reminisce with mixed feelings about their childhood in Gorkha. On the one hand, Top Bahadur relates, “When we were little it was hard, we were poor, we didn’t have enough land, and we had to sew and give crops to the landowners.” On the other hand, both brothers look back with pride on the traditions of which their music was an essential part. During Dasain, they played the nagara at Gorkha Darbar on the 8th day of the festival. The Damai musicians at Gorkha Darbar were supported by a plot of guthi land, from which they were required to send a portion of the crop to present to the king on the 7th day of Dasain. The men who carried this portion to Kathmandu set out from Gorkha with great fanfare—played, of course, by the Gorkha Panchai Bajas. Both men remember playing on this day, watching and admiring those who got to journey all the way to Kathmandu.

Top Bahadur was the first to learn the instruments of the Panchai Baja, and he performed with his father’s group until he left home to join the army. Purna Bahadur then learned, in order to take his place. As an ordinary rifleman in the army, Top Bahadur nevertheless had the chance to travel the world, much further away than the Kathmandu he dreamed of as a child. As a member of a UN peacekeeping force, he was posted in Israel and Lebanon. He raised his family in his village, returning whenever he was on leave. He has four married daughters, now with children of their own, and a son who has remained on their family’s land to farm; this son, he says, “is more expert than me at playing the sahanai.” For the last two years of Top Bahadur’s army career, he was sent to London to train horses at a special school set up by the British army. He explains, “the horses were trained but they only knew English! We had to retrain them in Nepali.” After that he retired and came back to Kathmandu, where he decided to work as a musician again, at first with a Band Baja. However, he soon decided he liked playing the Panchai Baja instruments better:

“After I left the army I came here and there’s Lakshmi brass band, you know, I went there and worked there. But just for work. I bought a trumpet and a clarinet. I learned for 4-5 years, but I didn’t like it—I wanted to do the same thing that my father, my grandfather did. So we decided we’d do that from now on and I left that work. My friends call me to do it still, but I say no.”

Purna Bahadur, for 18 years, had a textile factory in the western Tarai city of Nepalganj, and raised his family there. His sons play damaha and dolakhi, but not sahanai—in the city environment, they followed other pursuits, and did not feel like learning, says Purna Bahadur. However, he is happy that they have not strayed from their musical roots, as evidenced by his satisfaction that neither of them plays the guitar.

When Top Bahadur got tired of the Band Baja, Purna Bahadur was also tired of the textile business. So he moved to join his brother in Kathmandu, and they set up their tailoring shop and Panchai Baja signboard in Bhimsensthan. Their signboard advertises that a Band Baja is also available, and the brothers acknowledge that they can play the instruments, but prefer to play Panchai Baja. Both speak of wanting “to do things according to our old culture, the way our fathers and grandfathers did,” and they see this ensemble as a way to continue the Panchai Baja tradition throughout Nepal. They figured that they would get sufficient business because of Top Bahadur’s army connections and because of the amount of family members who were already in Kathmandu, and so far it has been successful. Recently, they played at Hanuman Dhoka on the occasion of the king’s birthday; for that, they received a phone call and a letter of invitation from the palace. They expect several engagements per month, eight or nine in the low season and twelve to thirteen in the season with the most weddings.

In general, this family feels that they are doing well financially, though their income is the result of continued hard work despite official retirement. Top Bahadur receives a pension from the army, works as a security guard, and receives part of the income from Panchai Baja performances. He is of the opinion that the Damai caste as a whole is increasing in status as more and more Damai find ways to earn money, purchase land, and move their families up in class terms, and as caste proscriptions are slowly decreasing in importance. He asserts, “[Oppression] is gone now from the villages. Now those of us in the villages have our own land. Earning money we’ve come up from the bottom. Now we all have a little inheritance and we’re doing better. If we don’t have that we can only go down. But we’re going up.”

These days it is the low season for weddings and other occasions, as most people are busy in their fields. But Top Bahadur and Purna Bahadur look forward to the busier months. An occasion that they are particularly proud of is the 7th day of Dasain—now, in their elder years, they still participate in the tradition of presenting Gorkha’s guthi portion to the king. But this time, instead of sending the procession off from the village, their Panchai Baja—really, a Naumati Baja ensemble with two damaha and narsingha—meets the representatives from Gorkha upon their arrival in Kathmandu, and accompanies them on their march to the central Tundhikhel, where the crops are received by the king himself.

At the other end of the chain linking the central government to the peripheral district centers, this ritual, in addition to all of its implications for the significance and interrelationship of the Nepali monarchy, the Hindu religion, and the supposedly untouchable people charged with providing an auspicious musical atmosphere for these institutions’ continuation, provides a point for Top Bahadur and Purna Bahadur to reflect back on their own lives and their own journeys from Gorkha, through various other adventures, to Kathmandu.

It's 9:00 in the morning, and Sukha Bhagat Pariyar is just opening his men's tailoring shop in Patan Mangal Bazaar. He brings out neatly folded pants and shirts and places them under the countertop, ready for customers coming to pick up their orders. The shop is small and tidy, with a Singer treadle sewing machine as its central fixture. Along the back walls are racks that one would expect to hold hangers full of newly sewn pants and shirts, as in most tailoring shops. However, the crisply ironed red jackets with brass buttons lining the walls of Pariyar's shop speak of this tailor's other main profession: he is a master of a Band Baja.

Looking more closely, one can see that the walls of the shop are lined with pictures: a group of 16 men, all in red jackets and black trousers. A clarinetist-Sukha Bhagat himself. Four trumpet players, four euphoniums, 4 snare drums, a cymbal player, and one man with maracas (jhunjhuna, in Nepali), all gathered around the centerpieces of the band: the two big bass drums. From outside the shop, the priority that Sukha Bhagat gives to his occupations is clear from the signboards: a small sign above the door announces the name of the tailoring shop, while a much larger one above it, blue and white with pictures of a clarinet and a happy couple, proclaims that this is the main office of his Band Baja group.

Sukha Bhagat has been playing band and Panchai Baja instruments since he was a small child. He had "a little ordinary education," or some formal schooling, but it was always understood that he would follow in his father and grandfather's footsteps as a professional tailor and musician. Now, at age 48 and very proud of his profession, he speaks of his role as Band Baja master as both the path he was expected to take, and as his childhood dream. The youngest of four brothers, he learned from his elder brothers, father and grandfather to play all the band and Panchai Baja instruments to some degree of competency. When he was younger, his home was filled with the sound of Panchai Baja drums but slowly, as he got older, his father and brothers began to shift toward playing Band Baja instruments, though all of them will still play Panchai Baja instruments if they are called for a special program. He himself is most comfortable playing the clarinet, as the leader of his group.

Sukha Bhagat's Band Baja group plays at the same occasions that traditionally call for a Panchai Baja: weddings, vratabandas, and rice-feeding ceremonies. He adds that since the clientele in Patan is mostly Newar, they are also sometimes called to play at a Newari ceremony called the jankhu, celebrated when a person reaches the age of 77 years and 7 months. Like the Panchai Baja, Band ensembles are considered auspicious and Sukha Bhagat believes that this is why they are needed for such life cycle rituals. Their repertoire includes mostly Hindi film songs, or whatever else is currently popular on the radio. They also tailor their performances to their audience: for their Newar clients, Newari folk songs made famous by the media, such as Rajamati and O Chhu Galli, Wo Chhu Galli, are standard fare. Sukha Bhagat states that he knows some of the rags played by the Panchai Bajas, and that he is able to play them on the clarinet but chooses not to. According to the thinking of his group, he says, "the rags for the sahanai are special for the sahanai and the Panchai Baja. If we play them on band instruments, it doesn't sound as good. So we play our own music. But of the folk songs and modern songs on the radio, we can play whatever the Panchai Bajas play."

Though the instruments that comprise the Band Baja originated outside Nepal, Sukha Bhagat views this ensemble as a specifically Damai occupation. According to his version of the history of the Band Baja, the instruments were introduced from the West but the ensemble first gained popularity in Indian courts, and then in the Rana courts of Nepal. When these ensembles were first developed, they were restricted to Damai instrumentalists because of caste purity laws, and thus they have continued to be Damai traditions. Sukha Bhagat considers the profession of music to be a special pride of his Damai caste, but is willing to share his knowledge with members of other groups and hopes that those who want to learn will continue to cross caste lines to follow their desires to learn about music. He recalls an all-Brahmin Band Baja in a village in Kavre district, and says that in the western districts other castes are also beginning to play in Panchai Baja ensembles.

When asked about the future prospects for Damai musical traditions, Sukha Bhagat is practical but optimistic. He sees change as inevitable, citing what he sees as the slow replacement of the Panchai Baja by the Band Baja. However, he acknowledges that the Panchai Baja is making a comeback because of people's "renewed interest in old things that were being lost," and sees this, too, as an aspect of natural change. He is less worried about the possible demise of the tradition of playing at life-cycle rituals; in his view, people know that music is what makes the gods happy, and thus though money may be tight and situations may be difficult, there will always be families who make it a priority to have live music at their festive occasions. As for future generations, he is even more optimistic that people will continue to play in these ensembles, though the repertoire may change as it has through his own lifetime. His 8-year-old son is learning to play the bass drum, and joins the group whenever they are practicing any new songs. He hopes also to teach his 12-year-old daughter to play instruments, but at the moment she is more interested in her school's dance lessons.

One tradition that Sukha Bhagat will be happy to see disappear is the practice of caste discrimination. He describes his view of the Damai's status today: "It's different according to place. Here in Patan, we're living with Newar castes like brothers. But there are so many other people who still think according to the old rules. We don't meet as many of them here but if you go outside of Koteshwor, to Lokanthali or Thimi, people still think that way. There are a lot of old-style people. Perhaps among the young generation they don't think that way, but the older ones do. If we touch them they have to purify themselves, they don't let us in the house, and when they're speaking they put us down. But they still invite us to play at their weddings."

He stops to attend to a customer, telling his assistant to pack two neatly folded, newly tailored dress shirts for a customer from the neighborhood. The customer greets Sukha Bhagat as a friend, stepping into the shop for a hearty handshake and embrace. In this moment, caste differences seem like a theoretical detail, secondary to the importance of friendship and camaraderie in the quotidian practices of running a shop and going about one's daily business. But Sukha Bhagat's final words about caste remind us that the quotidian is cut through with times that are ritually set apart, echoing the compensation promised in the Damai myths of origin and thus reinstating caste divisions while proclaiming the Damai's uniqueness: "When they need us for the wedding, the ones who walk in the front, the ones who speak in the front, the ones who do all of the most visible work are these people from the low Damai caste. Putting everyone else behind, we are the ones who walk in front at these auspicious occasions."