The Gandharva (Gaine) Tradition & the Nepali Sarangi

The Gandharva, commonly called Gaine, are a hereditary caste of professional musicians and itinerant bards from the central hill region of Nepal. Traditionally Indo-Aryan and Nepali-speaking, they earned their living by singing Gaine Geet (also written Gandharva Geet) door to door and were, for generations, the only people permitted to play the Nepali sarangi. The community name echoes the Gandharvas of Hindu mythology, the celestial musicians of Indra's court, though the earthly Gaine lived a far humbler life dependent on the charity of the villages they served.

The largest and most famous Gandharva settlement is Batulechaur, now Ward 16 of Pokhara Metropolitan City in Kaski district, on the road to the Mahendra and Bat caves. Local tradition holds that the ancestors of the Pokhara Gaine were granted land at Batulechaur by early kings of the Kaski state, and the settlement grew around the medieval Kaski court. Beyond Kaski, sizeable Gandharva populations live in Baglung, Tanahun, Gorkha, Lamjung, Palpa, Gulmi, Syangja and across Gandaki, Lumbini and Karnali provinces.

In Nepal's official classification the Gaine/Gandharba are counted among the Hill Dalit groups. They are one of the smallest such communities: the National Population and Housing Census 2021 (2078 BS) recorded just 6,971 Gandharba people nationwide, only a modest change from the 6,791 counted in the 2011 census. This tiny population, combined with the decline of their traditional occupation, is a central reason the tradition is now considered endangered.

Before radio, print and roads reached Nepal's hills, the Gaine were effectively the country's mobile press. Travelling from village to village, they sang news of distant battles, royal events, disasters and the doings of ordinary people alongside older epics and love songs. A Gaine arriving at a courtyard was welcomed as entertainer, messenger and gossip-bearer at once, and in return received food, grain, cloth or small coins, a system of communal patronage rather than fixed wages.

Their songs were never merely decorative. Working in satire, humour and metaphor, the Gaine acted as rural journalists and social critics, commenting on injustice, corruption and the hardships of migration and war. Because so much of hill Nepal's history was oral, these wandering singers became a living archive, carrying genealogies, heroic tales and communal memory that were written down nowhere else.

This role gives the tradition unusual historical importance. Songs about soldiers dying on foreign battlefields, for example, preserved the experience of Nepal's Gurkha recruits at a time when few such families could read or write. The Gaine, in effect, turned news into memory and memory into song, sustaining a form of public information that predated any newspaper in the region.

The Gandharva repertoire is broad, but two forms stand out. Gaine Geet (Gandharva Sangeet) is the general body of narrative folk song through which the singers delivered news, romance, devotion and satire. Karkha is an older, more formal genre of ballad singing used to recount genealogies, heroic deeds and historical events, functioning as a sung chronicle of a lineage or a war.

Karkha in particular tied the Gaine to Nepal's martial history. Singers composed praise-ballads celebrating warriors and, later, soldiers of the World Wars, keeping their names alive in oral form. The tradition was at times politically sensitive, and certain heroic songs were discouraged or suppressed before being revived by later performers, showing how tightly the art was bound to the state and its wars.

The most celebrated modern exponent was Jhalak Man Gandarbha (1935 to 2003), widely regarded as the first Gaine to commercially record Gaine songs. His ballad Aamale Sodhlin Ni ("Mother may ask"), about a young Nepali soldier killed abroad, became a national classic, and he performed across Europe and India, lifting sarangi-based folk music onto national and international stages.

The Nepali sarangi is a short-necked, bowed string instrument carved from a single block of wood, with a neck and a hollowed, double-chambered body whose lower opening is covered with stretched sheep or goat skin. It is distinct from the larger, many-stringed classical sarangi of North India; the Nepali folk instrument is compact enough to be carried on foot from village to village. The most prized material is khirro (Sapium insigne, also classified as Falconeria insignis), a very light, soft wood that is easy to carve, though saaj, sisau and other local timbers are also used.

The instrument has four melody strings, traditionally made from twisted sheep gut, and is sounded with a bow. In the old method, the Gandharva obtained intestines from sheep sacrificed at festivals such as Dashain, fermented them, and wove the cleaned fibres into strings; the bow was strung with horse-tail hair. Today most players use nylon, steel or even badminton strings and nylon bow hair, but the four-string, single-block, skin-faced design remains the hallmark of the Nepali sarangi.

The sarangi is prized because it closely imitates the human voice, mirroring the singer's vocal ornaments as they perform. Its usual companion in performance is the madal, a two-headed cylindrical hand-drum struck with both palms that supplies rhythm and drives the emotional intensity of a song.

The sarangi was not always the Gandharva's main instrument. Their older signature instrument was the aarbajo (arbajo), a large four-string plucked lute also carved from a single piece of khirro wood and long associated with the Gandharba of western Nepal for folk and devotional music. The aarbajo is often described as the "male" instrument, paired conceptually with the sarangi.

Over time the aarbajo, being larger and more cumbersome to carry on long walking circuits, was gradually displaced by the smaller, bowed sarangi, which became the iconic instrument identified with the Gaine. This shift reflects the practical realities of a travelling profession: an instrument that could be slung over a shoulder and played at any doorstep suited the itinerant life better than a bulky lute.

Today the aarbajo is rare and itself the subject of revival efforts, while the sarangi has moved far beyond the community. Since the caste restriction weakened, musicians of many backgrounds and Nepali fusion and pop bands have adopted the sarangi, making it one of Nepal's most recognisable national instruments even as the community that created it dwindles.

For most of their recorded history the Gaine were treated as an impure, untouchable caste. Under the Muluki Ain, the civil code first promulgated in 1854 (1910 BS), Nepal's population was ranked into a rigid caste hierarchy, and the Gandharva were placed near the bottom, denied land, formal education and equal social standing, and made dependent on the patronage of higher castes. Their music was valued while the musicians themselves were shunned.

Legal change came only in 1963 (2020 BS), when a new Muluki Ain abolished the formal caste system and criminalised caste-based discrimination and untouchability. Nepal's later constitutions reinforced this, and the Caste-Based Discrimination and Untouchability (Offence and Punishment) Act, 2011 provides criminal penalties. In practice, however, the Gaine, listed among Hill Dalits, continue to face social and economic marginalisation.

This history explains why the community's greatest artists have sometimes struggled for recognition and why so many young Gandharva have left music altogether. The discrimination that once fenced the sarangi off as a low-caste occupation is directly linked to the tradition's present fragility.

The Gaine profession has collapsed under modernisation. Radio, television, YouTube and social media now deliver the news and entertainment that the wandering singer once provided, and patronage has dried up. A 2021 study of the Gandharva of Baglung, published in the Dhaulagiri Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, found that many families have abandoned singing for agriculture, carpentry, masonry, driving and daily-wage labour simply because the old work no longer pays.

Against this decline, several initiatives are working to record and teach the tradition before it disappears. The Nepal Music Center and the associated Project Sarangi in Kathmandu document sarangi music, train new players and promote the instrument, while Gandharva cultural organisations and researchers in Pokhara and Baglung archive songs and oral histories. Batulechaur itself is promoted to visitors as a living centre of sarangi craft and performance.

For students, ethnomusicology learners and travellers to Pokhara, the Gandharva story is a rare case where an entire information system, Nepal's pre-radio journalism, survived encoded in the strings of a single hand-carved instrument. Supporting the artisans of Batulechaur and the archives of Project Sarangi is, in a real sense, keeping that history audible.