As someone who moved to the United States at the age of 9, a big aspect of Nepali culture that I personally feel that I missed out on has been the Nepali folk culture. In many cases, especially the smaller towns and villages, folk displays of art such as music, dance, and literature has been prominent for years. As someone who lived in a city until I moved, I missed out on many of the different forms of expression that folk culture usually provides an insight to. I did get to experience two forms of folk culture though, a dance called the Lakhe dance (where someone in a lakhe costume and mask dances to music) and dohori, which is what I like to think of as an informal singoff between two groups of people, usually men and women in their respective teams going back and forth between versus. Saying that, I missed out on many other forms such as the Selo, Chutki, Maruni Dance, Chandi dance, and the various Nepali folk instruments and how to play them.
For the songs themselves, the lyrics range from slow paced to fast paced but they're mostly spoken in Nepali. From the samples of ones I've heard, I've been able to understand most of the song orally but of course there are mixtures of words that I am clearly not aware of or not completely sure about what they mean. I want to incorporate this into my learning plan by doing a short analysis of the song type and the lyrics. I think it would be good to compare the types of folk music to ones in English and compare the two. For the dances and videos, I plan to go through the various different types of folk dance. I've already done an initial sweep while doing some research for this but I plan to go more in depth for maybe my next culture post.
In terms of instruments, I don't exactly know how to fit into my learning plan but I definitely want to learn how to play some of the classic instruments outside of class. I've played the Sarangi (similar to a violin) and Madal (double sided hand drum) but I want to try out more of the instruments.
Lakhe (Lakhe Dance)
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