Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone, and the Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu

Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio,Telephone, and the Nepali Diaspora in

Kathmandu

Laura KunreutherBard College

On October 21, 2005, Nepali government officials attacked Kantipur FM, one of theoldest and largest commercial FM radio stations in Kathmandu.1 Their mission wasto seize satellite equipment that enabled the station to broadcast programs outsidethe Kathmandu Valley.2 This seizure was necessary, the Ministry of Informationand Communication declared, because Kantipur FM refused to comply with a newgovernment ordinance that forbade the broadcast of news about opposition to theroyal regime. Put into place on October 9, 2005, the ordinance eerily evokes similarlaws during the Panchayat government (1960–90), a regime that was overturnedby a nationwide movement to establish a multiparty democracy. Such state actionagainst a private media house was not entirely surprising. Eight months earlier,on February 1, 2005, King Gyanendra dismissed the parliament and assumed solecontrol of the government. All political leaders of opposition parties were put underhouse arrest, several hundred journalists and other activists were put in jail, andmany activists quickly left the country to avoid arrest. Perhaps the most strikingaspect of this coup was that the king cut all technological communication outsidethe valley and overseas for a period of several days. ZNet Asia issued a reportabout the situation on February 3:

The following report was brought out by courier from Kathmandu, where all com-munication with the outside world is cut off, except for select satellite telephones andinternet connections mostly controlled by embassies. The general public had no accessto communication with the outside world from 10:00 AM on 1 February 2005 untilat least 7:00 PM on 2 February 2005. All domestic telephones are also shut off, bothmobile and land lines. People are traveling from one place to another to communicate.[ZNet Asia 2005]3

The report goes on to list the work of the “king’s army” in posting soldiersin private media houses throughout Kathmandu. The army took control of Nepal

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 21, Issue 3, pp. 323–353, ISSN 0886-7356, electronic ISSN 1548-1360.C© 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permis-sion to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissionswebsite, www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

323

324 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Telecom and UTL (United Telecommunications Limited), two companies thatprovide telephone service throughout the country, as well as all Internet serviceproviders. The FM stations outside the valley were shut down, and inside Kath-mandu the stations were monitored by soldiers who were ordered to approve allprogramming prior to broadcast. Although phone service was returned intermit-tently over the period of a week, most of these severe restrictions on media com-munication lasted more than eight days. The October 21 attack on Kantipur FMwas clearly an extension of the February 1 royal coup. To protest the government’saction, journalists and media personnel gathered together in Kathmandu, wearingblack cloths around their mouths to signify their stifled voices (see photo on cover).

Claims about the interconnection between voice and political agency havebecome increasingly prominent in the mass democratic movement of April 2006that succeeded in overthrowing King Gyanendra. Seven political parties and theMaoists joined together in the most massive prodemocracy demonstrations todate. Dubbed Jana Andolan II (People’s Movement II), in reference to the 1990prodemocracy movement, the current movement is even more radically republican,rejecting any constitutional role for the monarchy that has been at the center ofthe Nepali state since its foundation in 1769. Hundreds of thousands of protesterseffectively shut down the nation’s capital, shouting epithets such as “Burn theCrown” and “Hang Thief Gyanay [Gyanendra],” defiantly challenging the king’sshoot-on-sight curfew order. The seven-party alliance’s primary demand has beenthe election of a constituent assembly, capable of drafting a new constitution thateliminates the power of the palace from lawfully seizing absolute control overthe country. On the eve of April 24, 2006, the King capitulated, and a constituentassembly is being elected as this article goes to press. While in prison for partici-pating in the People’s Movement II, Kanak Mani Dixit, a prominent Kathmanduintellectual and editor of Himal South Asia, wrote: “A voiceless people discoveredthe power of speech; they developed a confidence unprecedented in their history”(Dixit 2006).

Indeed, over the past 15 years, the figure of voice has been especially invokedin discussions about the promises of democracy and transparent government. Atthe same time, in much of the talk radio programming produced on FM stations,voice is viewed as a sign of emotional directness, authenticity, and immediacy.These two formations of voice, I argue, are mutually constitutive. Sentimentaldiscourse about the voice reiterates modern neoliberal discourse about democracyand is central to the formation of a Nepali diaspora.

The mediated and voiced production of an urban Nepali subject is shaped bythe figure of the diaspora. This diaspora is made “present” in Kathmandu throughtwo technologies of the voice—FM radio and the telephone. Here, I discuss thehearing and voicing of telephone calls made between Nepalis in Kathmandu andthose abroad that are broadcast on a popular Kantipur FM program, RumpumConnection (sponsored by Rumpum Noodles).4 Unlike many studies of diaspora,this analysis does not focus directly on a particular community of Nepalis living

TECHNOLOGIES OF THE VOICE 325

abroad but instead on the mediation of a diaspora within Kathmandu.5 Nor doI discuss place as the primary category through which diasporic communitiesemerge. Temporality and affect rather than shared territory shape the way in whichthis diaspora is constituted (Axel 2002).

As Maoists wage a civil war against the state and many Nepalis are deeplydismayed by the government, particularly after the February 1 coup, and afterthe economy has plummeted over the past decade, technologies of the voice bothaggravate and alleviate Nepali dreams of contact across great distances. Fantasiesof escaping the current war and of earning enough money to support a middle-class life in Nepal are constantly belied by stories about the difficult and sometimeshorrific conditions of work abroad. This contradiction produces anxieties that loomlarge, making the material and symbolic presence of Nepali diasporas increasinglyimportant to urban sociality in Kathmandu.6

Programs on FM radio such as Rumpum Connection interpellate a Nepali dias-pora among urban subjects, creating discursive forms through which they becomerecognized by others as well as by themselves. “Interpellation is an address thatregularly misses its mark,” writes Judith Butler, expanding on Louis Althusser’snotion of interpellation. “The mark interpellation makes is not descriptive, butinaugurative. It seeks to introduce a reality rather than report an existing one; itaccomplishes this introduction through citation of existing convention” (Butler1997:33; emphasis mine). Interpellation occurs not only through the discursivestructures of “excitable speech” (Butler 1997) but also through the mediums oftechnology. As William Mazzarella has suggested, media such as television orradio create the social entities “society,” “nation,” or “culture” that they claim torepresent on air (Mazzarella 2004:357). FM radio is not simply a medium forbroadcasting conversations with Nepalis abroad, but it produces, as one of its per-suasive effects, the idea that “urban Nepalis” and a “Nepali diaspora” are entitiesthat exist prior to their mediation through the telephone or radio.

This effect must be situated within the broader history of FM radio and thepolitical and economic conditions that create the presence of a Nepali diasporain Kathmandu. Over the past two decades, money sent from abroad has becomevitally important in supporting middle-class life in Kathmandu. Life abroad isincreasingly associated with material and symbolic possibility, and it is thought ofas a source of social redemption and financial success.7

There are three main points about technological mediation that I discuss. First,FM radio programming generates particular temporalities. Live broadcasts heardsimultaneously in Kathmandu and abroad are key to the making of a broad and in-timate urban Nepali public and to the presence of a Nepali diaspora in Kathmandu.Second, the figure of voice and neoliberal discourses of democracy arise togetherthrough a semantic connection made between transparency and directness in de-scriptions of voice. This occurs in descriptions of both democratic governance andemotional immediacy. Third, and most importantly, I demonstrate the possibili-ties in what Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli call an “ethnography of forms,”


moving between the particular “things” animated on FM radio—the figure of voice,urban Nepali subjects, and a Nepali diaspora—and the discursive and technologicalforms that generate these “things” (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003:391).

This approach focuses on how other media such as the telephone, letters,and email become incorporated within FM programs.8 Conversations on RumpumConnection are replete with references to potential telephone calls as well as tophotos, emails, or letters. The excess of discourse about technology I refer to as“technological phatic” speech. As with other forms of phatic speech, such refer-ences to past or future communications do not convey any information but simplyreiterate the strange fact that people seem to “connect” through technology. Atten-tion to the material and discursive forms of FM programming, I argue, suggestslinks between the figure of voice and the figure of diaspora in contemporary urbanNepali subjectivity.

The Voice

The voice is a key aspect of technological mediation that shapes fantasiesof presence projected by the radio and phone. There are several distinct under-standings of the voice often simultaneously at work in the ethnographic examplespresented here that are helpful to identify for analytic purposes. Each modality ofvoice raises specific questions about the kind of presence being produced. How, forexample, does the mediated voice of the telephone and radio become the mediumfor producing affective relations, subjects, and diverse temporalities? How do thesetechnologies of the voice configure a contemporary urban sociality in Kathmanduthat centers on Nepalis living abroad?

As a cultural and historical construct, the voice is often used as a metaphor todescribe consciousness and empowerment, particularly among a group of peoplewho have not been adequately represented in politics or history. This construct ofvoice can be found in a host of feminist writings such as Carol Gilligan’s well-known In a Different Voice (1982). It also appears in the quest of subaltern studieshistorians (often through oral history) for a story that remains outside the purviewof the state and has therefore not yet been recorded in official history (Guha 1996).9

Anthropology’s own historical preference for face-to-face interactions as the siteof authentic and credible cultural information is similarly rooted in this logocentricunderstanding of the voice.

Jacques Derrida (1974) rejects this construct of voice, which he claims in-forms classical models of language. The voice and speech are not sites of presence,the original condition of language, or markers of the intentionality of the speaker.10

Instead, Derrida argues that both speech and writing depend on the ability of signsto be recognized and iterated outside the context of their production, always inways that do not exactly reproduce any original meaning (Derrida 1988). Revers-ing common distinctions made between speech and writing, Derrida argues thatwriting, rather than speech, more aptly structures language.11


The ideology of the voice that Derrida critiques connotes ideas about em-powerment, speech, and authenticity that project a historically specific notion ofpersonhood. Such a construct of voice appears in the way FM radio is perceived incontemporary Kathmandu as a medium of transparent, direct connection. Listeners,journalists, and intellectuals alike describe FM radio as enabling unencumberedand “direct” social relations that reveal essential truths of politics and personhood.In contrast to the state-run Radio Nepal on AM airwaves, which served as the cen-tral mouthpiece of state and royal ideology during the monarchical Panchayat era,FM radio began broadcasting only six years after the reestablishment of democ-racy in 1990. It quickly became a symbol of a new democratic moment and itspromises of “free speech.” FM programs are so different from those on RadioNepal that many in Kathmandu describe them as completely different media. “Idon’t listen to radio,” many said. “I listen to FM.” The immediacy, directness, andtransparency attributed to FM radio presumes the voice to be the natural indicatorof presence, consciousness, and agency. This notion of voice and personhood is akey aspect of modern neoliberal discourse that has characterized Nepal since thereestablishment of democracy in 1990.

The voice can also be described through its materiality or what might be calledthe “sonic voice.” The sonic voice conveys messages through intonation, rhythm,or musical song. Ethnomusicologists describe this voiced sound as “soundscapes”or the interlacing of expressive sounds that articulate links between social con-cepts and emotional feeling.12 The sonic voice creates sensations of presence andimmediacy that are frequently referred to by listeners of radio as well as scholarsof the voice and language. Kathmandu listeners, for example, make frequent refer-ence to the melodramatic or melodic tones of the radio hosts’ voices, which makethem feel “as if they are really there with them” or “really feeling the sadness orsuffering” expressed in listeners’ letters.

These two models of voice assume that the voice and meaning, sound andintention, are coterminous with one another. Friedrich Kittler (1999) offers an-other, more persuasive model of the voice that combines Marshall McLuhan’s(1965) emphasis on the materiality of technology with a Foucauldian analysis ofdiscourse. Kittler’s analysis proposes a contingent relation of sound and mean-ing. Technology accounts for both the cultural and historical construct of voiceas well as the sonic voice. Only when human sounds are transposed onto techno-logical forms, such as the gramophone, the radio, or the telephone, Kittler argues,does speech become “the voice” as a medium of directness, authenticity, andtruth. Such technologies do not require a hearing subject to record sound andtherefore record not only the symbolic, meaningful sound of language but alsointrusions of meaningless noise, such as the hissing of the machine. Technologythus produces both the voice and the originary quality of the voice that appearsto precede its technological recording. Ironically then, the discourse about trans-parency or the immediacy of the voice emerges as an aftereffect of technologicalrecording.


Kittler’s analysis suggests several effects of technologies of the voice.Recorded sound no longer has contact with the body and thereby appears to createa “perfect” record of the voice that seems to lie outside human consciousness andthe body.13 Unlike face-to-face conversations that rely on visual, aural, and gestu-ral cues, the radio and the telephone rely on a single sensory mode, distilling allmessages into the voice alone. The disembodied quality of recorded sound makesits messages appear to be transparent, unmediated, and direct. When discussingthe potential of FM radio, listeners frequently invoke concepts such as “true self,”“direct emotion,” or “transparent politics”—concepts that are integrally tied tothe indexicality of the voice and the radio’s reliance on a single sensory mode.Recorded voices thus appear to be “more real” and “more pure” than languagespoken face to face, with its multiple sensory registers and gestures. A secondaryeffect is that recorded voices draw attention to the conventions of everyday lan-guage and the fact that all language is mediated through human consciousness andcultural categories. Recording technologies, then, make it possible for people toimagine ineffable or transparent messages that seem to defy the symbolic qualityof words.14

Nepali Diaspora on Air

Starting in 1996, FM radio stations were the first semiprivate electronic me-dia in Nepal, and they radically changed the format of broadcasting. The programRumpum Connection, broadcast on Kantipur FM, is part of what some have calledthe “FM revolution” (Kunreuther 2004; Onta 2002). FM radio interpellates Nepalisubjects into a broad public defined through constant interaction and the every-day expression of common problems and familial and intimate affairs.15 Initiallythe different FM stations broadcast on a single band (FM 100), together calledKathmandu FM, which targeted the “urban, educated elite” within the KathmanduValley.16 Now, a decade later, there are at least 56 FM stations with governmentlicenses, only nine of which are located in the Kathmandu Valley. Yet as the FMband expands to include a wider range of stations, many programs actually helpreinforce the centrality of Kathmandu Valley in national imaginings. The Commu-nication Corner, for example, is a program aired on several FM stations outsideKathmandu that aims “to bring listeners from outside the Valley emotionally closeto the center by providing them updates on happenings in Kathmandu” (Onta2001: 4).

Rumpum Connection engages a similar dynamic, but rather than seeking toaffectively draw villagers into urban life, the program aims to invoke the presenceof Nepalis abroad, figuratively drawing them into the public space of the nation’scapital. The program began in 2001 and is based on the broadcast of telephone callsbetween Kathmandu Nepalis and their friends or relatives abroad. A day beforethe program is aired, Rumpum’s host, a young, energetic woman named AnamikaPradhan, who is known professionally by her first name only, arranges several


phone calls for Kathmandu residents who have written letters or emails requestinga specified call abroad. At noon on Saturdays, a day when most Nepalis are athome, Anamika makes a series of conference calls from the Kantipur FM studio.These calls ostensibly “connect” Kathmandu residents with their friends or familiesabroad. Yet Rumpum Connection does not in fact make a connection betweendisparate parties, as its name suggests. Instead, the very notion of “connection”constructs the subjects of “urban Nepali” and “Nepali diaspora” that come intobeing through the show. They become social categories through which callers andlisteners recognize others as well as themselves.

The conversations on Rumpum Connection are public only to listeners inKathmandu.17 Although the speakers from abroad may be expecting a call fromtheir family or friend, they do not hear their phone calls broadcast throughoutthe city. The program’s popularity is a broader sign of the desire among urbanNepalis to communicate in public with their friends and family abroad. Listenersof Rumpum Connection commend the program because, they say, it enables themto speak for free. The callers consist largely of a growing consumer class that isincreasingly dependent on the remittance economy and the forms of consumptionthis new wealth enables.18 If the calls appear to be a gift from Kantipur FM, theymask the ways in which the program constitutes, circulates, and publicizes the sub-jects and social relations that enable a transnational consumer economy to flourish.The program goes further to actually cultivate desires for further consumption andpublic conversation at the same time as it seems to ease personal and familial losseson which this consumer economy depends.

Rarely do the conversations on Rumpum Connection discuss political subjects.Instead, they center on personal and family affairs that do not immediately appearpolitical. This may be owing to the government censorship on FM programs orpublic discussions that deal explicitly with religion or politics, as well as morerecently, a government ordinance that made it illegal for any media program tospeak against the monarchy. In spite of the personal nature of the calls, the programis clearly a politically charged arena that produces “Nepaliness,” first by creatingthe categories of urban Nepalis or Nepalis at home and the Nepali diaspora, andthen by seeming to unite these Nepali subjects within the broadcast of the programitself. The political and economic context in which this Nepali diaspora emerges,however, reveals the political implications of radio conversations that often appearto be without any direct political content.

Most studies of diaspora focus especially on people’s relation to a “place oforigin.” Despite the number of Nepalis who moved to British India during colonialtimes in search of work or education (in contrast to Indian indentured laborers, whowere sent out of India), it would be a misnomer to group them together as a “Nepalidiaspora.”19 Diaspora—a word that stems from a root meaning “dispersal”—mustinclude a minimum of two destinations from where different multigenerationalgroups relate to one another through their connection to a national homeland (Butler2001:192). Be they the famed Gurkha soldiers, migrant laborers, or elite Nepalis


who traveled to Indian cities for school, these different Nepalis did not maintainmuch contact amongst themselves as Nepalis who shared a mutual connection toNepal.20 As Brian Axel points out, the emphasis on place unwittingly contributesto “an essentialization of origins and fetishization of what is supposedly to befound at the origin (e.g., tradition, religion, language, race)” (Axel 2002:411).Implicitly or explicitly, this attention to place of origin aims to reveal a particulardiasporic identity. Although studies of diaspora seek to problematize narrativesof nationalism by including nationalists who reside outside the homeland, theconflation of place with identity paradoxically has the effect of reinscribing thesignificance of territory to national imaginings.

A specifically diasporic identity is now emerging among Nepalis aroundthe world, and much of this identity is informed, at least partially, by a mutualconnection to place. My emphasis is not on describing this identity or discussing theexplicitly political program of Nepalis abroad. Drawing on Axel’s work, I suggestinstead that the cultural category of diaspora emerges through the production oftemporality and relations of affect on media such as FM radio. The telephoneconversations on Rumpum Connection, for example, generate a temporality of thesimultaneous, as well as affective, connections through which urban Nepalis andthe Nepali diaspora converse and appear present to one another. Technologies ofvoice also obscure this process and project a fantasy of presence and immediacy thatenables newly constituted subjects to imagine themselves “connecting” throughthe radio and the telephone.

The emergence of a Nepali diaspora has been heavily influenced by stateagendas. Over the past decade, the Nepali state has actively encouraged Nepalicitizens to pursue work outside the country, in part because the national economydepends enormously on remittances sent from abroad. Since the mid-1980s, theNepali state has entered into contracts with other states through foreign employ-ment agencies—colloquially known as “manpower agencies”—to send Nepalilaborers to foreign countries.21 For a fee incurred by the Nepali citizen (which canbe as high as NPR80,000, or $1,150, and much more when taking into accountadditional moving expenses), the manpower agencies interview, select, and ulti-mately arrange to send a specified number of workers with official work visas to aparticular job abroad. Often the agencies find ways to circumvent the Ministry ofLabor and collect additional fees, thereby shortening the process but also makingthese laborers “unofficial” (Seddon et al. 2001:69).22

The state’s endorsement of the movement of its citizens abroad points tosome of the unique features of the diaspora that emerge on Rumpum Connection.Callers on Rumpum Connection range from migrant villagers living in Kathmanduto middle-class Kathmandu families. Given that the vast majority of requests arefor calls to Malaysia or the Persian Gulf—where currently the least-educatedNepali laborers are employed through manpower agencies—it is clear that mostcallers are not part of the political or cultural elite (Gurung 2000). Unlike NRNs(nonresident Nepalis) who have “made it” in another country, the diasporas that


arise from manpower employment consist of neither the poorest villagers northe wealthy professionals. Rather, they are people who have managed to get justenough cash together to leave the country in pursuit of middle-class respectabilityand a comfortable retirement in Nepal. Such diasporic fantasies are implicit inmany Rumpum conversations, which, in many ways, can be seen as extensions ofstate interests.

The idea for Rumpum Connection emerged from transnational flows of peopleand language. It was conceived of by the only British manager of Kantipur FMafter he heard a similar program broadcast in London. Anamika explained that,initially, she and a young man were chosen to cohost the program because theycould understand and speak good English.23 After a year, she became the solehost. “You don’t know if the person who answers the phone will speak Nepali,”Anamika told me in a mix of Nepali and English, typical of most young, educatedNepalis. “I need to be able to speak English so I can reach the Nepalis abroad.”

According to Anamika, the program is explicitly conceived of as a “Nepalispace” that transcends the political borders of the nation-state. But the fact thatonly subjects within Nepal hear Rumpum conversations suggests that the pro-gram actually reinforces the territorial claims of the nation-state. The phone callsvirtually span the globe and are made primarily to family members but also togirlfriends, boyfriends, or simply good friends. As many Nepalis abroad live withother Nepalis, if the requested person is not at home, oftentimes the caller willsimply converse with a person he or she has never met. As Anamika explained tome, she never entertains phone calls between Nepalis and non-Nepali foreignersliving abroad. The main premise of the show, she said, is to cultivate ties betweenNepalis around the world:

There are a lot of Nepalese people around the world, but even so, we are not able toreach them. Therefore, why should one converse with foreigners? Very many numbersof foreigners come [to this program]. But I cut those out. I don’t honor those. Thoseare not allowed. It’s not really that foreigners are not allowed, but there are a lot ofpeople, Nepalese people, around the world who want to talk. . . . Instead, speak withanother Nepali, I tell people.

The program brings forth the category of Nepaliness and a Nepali voice,at the same time as it implies the need for radio and telephone to materializethese social relations. The national premise of the program suggests that it mightbe considered a quintessential example of long-distance nationalism (Anderson1998; Schiller and Fouron 2001).24 Yet despite its attempt to create a virtual“Nepali space,” Rumpum Connection does not engage a diasporic subject reach-ing back toward the homeland like other forms of long-distance nationalism; in-stead, it publicizes Nepali subjects in Kathmandu reaching out toward the diasporaand ostensibly bringing those voices of diasporic Nepalis back.25 The diaspora,the Nepali voice, and the sense of Nepaliness that the program generates makeNepalis who are dispersed around the world appear like ghostly presences withinKathmandu.


Transparent Voices: Conversations on Rumpum Connection

A vast majority of Rumpum conversations are spent discussing and envision-ing who is listening in Kathmandu and who may be sitting beside the speaker that isabroad. Speakers refer to invisible but known listeners and, by implication, to otherpotential listeners who may be anonymous. At the same time, direct reference torelatives and personal friends seems to subvert the public nature of the conversa-tion. In most conversations broadcast on Rumpum Connection, there is an explicittension between the host’s wish to emphasize the public format of the programand the personal, domestic, and familial forms of the speakers’ conversations.26

Consider the following conversation between Anup and his didi Meena, wholives in Canada.27 After Meena initially tries to establish exactly where Anup iscalling from, the host, Anamika, interrupts and explains, “Meenaji, this is beingbroadcast over the radio. Everyone can now hear your conversation. If you haveanything to say from your side, you may say it.”

Anup: Didi (older sister), Maijuharu (uncle’s wives) are listening upstairs.Meena: Oh really? Dai (older brother) and bhauju (brother’s wife) are listening?A: Mama (maternal uncle), my oldest mama, went out to the fields, and “mommy”

is not here. She went to Balaju. But maiju and Ananda are listening upstairs.

A few minutes later, the conversation falls into a lull, and Anamika urgesAnup to “continue talking.” Anup returns again to describing who is listening, andMeena continues to envision the scene of listening. “And Sambhu?” Meena asks,referring to another relative.

A: Sambhu is over there listening to the radio. He doesn’t want to talk. He’s listening atArav’s place.

M: Why not?A: He’s over there listening.

Anamika interrupts and again tries to explain the public nature of their ex-change: “He’s too shy to speak on the radio.”

A: My younger brother is shy, but not me.M: Arav is also there?A: Yes, Arav is also listening over there. La, say something to Arav.M: Arav, we also remember you. We remember your mommy and daddy. Send [us] an

email sometime.28

Anup then attempts to conjure up the scene from which Meena is speaking:“Is Uncle [referring to Meena’s husband] there?”

M: Yes, he is here.A: Let me talk to Uncle.

This conversation is not unique in its preoccupation with identifying theinvisible listeners by name. The constant references to who is listening becomesa way for those Nepalis abroad to become part of the urban space of Kathmandu,marking their presence and subjectivity in a field where they are otherwise invisible.


Naming is a form of “hailing,” Judith Butler (1997) has argued, which interpellatesspeakers into a given social space—in this case, into the world of the family, thediaspora, and urban Nepal. Through interpellation, Meena emerges as a subjectwho is Nepali and a member of a particular family, yet also, as part of the diaspora,a subject who is simultaneously excluded from these social worlds. In naming andlocating these silent listeners, callers bring forth and constitute an invisible publicas really there. This process establishes a relationship between the diaspora andurban Nepalis that then becomes a vital part of the urban publics created throughFM radio.

Anamika told me that she thought the possibility of reaching many familymembers at once—and especially the possibility of hearing loved ones’ voicestogether—was one of the program’s great appeals. There is something particularlyevocative about hearing a loved one’s voice, not just over the telephone but circu-lated widely over the radio. “Everyone wants to hear the voice of everyone else,”Anamika suggested. She continued:

How are they? What is going on? Because from the voice, one can figure out manythings—whether that person is happy or not. How is it there? What is there? All of thefamily has the opportunity to listen at the same time. If I’m the one person speaking,and if the radio is on, then everyone else can hear that person’s voice. Whateverconversation is going on, it’s very transparent. Everyone can listen to it.

The figure of the voice creates a sense of immediacy and direct connection,which Anamika refers to as “transparent”—a quality made possible by electronictechnology such as the radio and telephone (Kittler 1999; Morris 2002). The ma-teriality of the voice that Anamika speaks of here, and its significance as a vehicleof directness, is part of broader ideological discussions about the voice and radioas transparent mediums.

Transparency was frequently invoked in discussions about the potential ofFM radio, particularly by journalists and Nepali intellectuals in their conversationsabout political agency, freedom of expression, and increased participation enabledby democracy. Dev Raj Dahal argues that all media face the task of promotingand enabling a level of transparency that might counter otherwise destructiverumors and governmental lies. He suggests that FM radio stations, because oftheir limited range, have the potential to enable a “free flow of information at thelocal level” (Dahal 2002:45). “In the legislative sphere,” writes Dahal, “givingpeople a voice means a higher level of political participation in the very centre ofpolicy making. . . . Nepal’s government and its development partners have providedvoice and participation to the media in legislative debates” (Dahal 2002:34–35). Insuch discussions, the “voice” and “transparency” are both used to describe bettergovernance and a form of political agency that enables civilians to participate inpolitics and speak against the state.29

This discourse of transparency is echoed in Anamika’s reference to the trans-parent voice on Rumpum Connection as well as in listeners’ letters and commentsto many other FM programs, suggesting a more general understanding of the voice


among a wide audience of FM listeners. As in discussions about political trans-parency, the voice becomes the locus and medium associated with direct, unmedi-ated expression. But the sense of what constitutes “transparency” and “freedomof expression” on commercial FM stations centers on personal topics and intimateaffairs. Furthermore, instead of invoking ideas of consciousness or agency—whohas the right to the floor—the transparency on FM entertainment programs invokesa spatial and emotional presence that is frequently attributed to the sound and sonicnature of the voice. Because of the obvious connections to the body, Steven Feldargues, hearing and voicing link the felt sensations of sound to those of emotionaland physical presence (1996:97).30 A letter sent to Kalyan Gautum, the popularhost of the FM program Mero Katha, Mero Gıt (My Story, My Song), in November1997, begins by referring to the power of Kalyan’s voice: “Your melancholy voicetells someone’s real life story, in which there is a little bit of pleasure and a littlebit of happiness. When I hear those words in your voice, it seems as if you arereally crying, or as if you are feeling pleasure.”

The very notion of reality and authentic emotion that this woman describesstrikingly depends on appropriate representation and the prosodic features of avoice that will adequately convey “a real life story.” In this and many other letters,listeners describe the material and sensuous quality of the voice as the raisond’etre of their listening, the siren call that convinces them to participate in suchprograms. “The voice” here comes to stand not for direct political participationand good governance but rather for a quality of social connection and emotionaldirectness associated with FM radio.

Many listeners describe their enchantment with a radio voice as having thepower to channel emotions that the listeners themselves cannot express in words.Radio hosts encourage their listeners to “speak your minds and hearts,” and fanletters repeat such messages nearly verbatim. A July 1996 letter to the FM programHeart to Heart stated: “I really like your program because it helps you reveal all ourtrue emotions” (emphasis mine). Hosts become master empathizers who are ableto express adequately and accurately what the listeners feel.31 Frequent referencesto the listeners’ inability to articulate what they feel are also described in termsof authentic emotions. If the lilt and tone of the radio voice become a route tostardom for the radio host, for the listeners these prosodic features of the voicearticulate messages that seem to transcend the symbolic quality of words.32 AsKittler suggests, media such as radio “do not have to make do with the grid of thesymbolic. That is to say, they reconstruct bodies not only in a system of words orcolors or sound intervals. . . . It refers to the bodily real, which of necessity escapesall symbolic grids” (Kittler 1999:11–12). Ironically, recording technologies thattransmit people’s voices make it possible for people to imagine “real” messageswithout words and for the voice itself to be perceived as the medium best suitedfor the ideals of transparency and direct connection.

The emotional directness that listeners ascribe to the radio voice arises along-side political aspirations of transparency and participation after 1990. Both dreams


of transparency imagine FM radio as providing unmediated access to the world ofpolitics, on the one hand, and the world of individual feelings, on the other hand.FM radio will, therefore, reveal truths about both. These two seemingly differentformations of voice are mutually constitutive. Neoliberal discourses of democracyfeature the voice as an element of transparent government and reiterate the sen-timental fantasies of emotional directness and immediacy that characterize FMentertainment programs. One must wonder, What material qualities of the radio orthe telephone make their own mediating powers seem to disappear?

Materiality of the Voice: Telephone and Radio Calls

The telephone, in many ways, laid the social groundwork for many FM pro-grams. Telephone and telegraph technology were initially introduced by the BritishResidency in 1872 and were used in specific Rana family homes by 1935.33 Thefirst private lines became available only after the Ranas were removed from powerin 1951, although only 100 lines were put in place at that time (Nepal DursancharSansthan [Nepal Telecommunication Corporation] v.s. 2056). When I first trav-eled to Nepal in 1989–90, telephones were still a rarity in most urban middle-classhomes. The most common way of reaching a person within the Kathmandu Valleywas simply to go to his or her house or to call from a corner shop. As a materialobject, telephones entered most homes after they had acquired televisions and atthe same time as refrigerators; they signified a level of middle-class domesticityand disposable income initially associated with those who traveled or had contactsoverseas. Telephones became a common household technology in Kathmandu inthe mid-1990s, although many families shared a single line. By the summer of 2004,nearly every middle-class family I visited had a telephone, and many young profes-sional Nepalis carried cell phones either in addition to, or instead of, their landline.

The telephone is a medium of locality in Nepal, frequently thought of asconnecting distant places as much as distant people. Common greetings on thetelephone suggest the way in which the voice is conceived of as a material, em-bodied part of oneself that can travel to another place. When telephones firstentered Nepalis’ homes, often a person answered the phone by asking, “Kah˜a batafon garnubhaeko?” (Where are [you] calling from)? Similarly, the caller usuallyasked, “Kah˜a paryo?” (Where have I [this call] landed, or Where have I [this call]entered)? The greeting quickly became the subject of many Kathmandu jokes,such as the common reply, “Mero kanma paryo” ([You’ve] landed in my ear).This telephone greeting is now a sign of class position. It is no longer used bymore cosmopolitan Nepalis and is mocked by them as gaule (“of the village”).The very sense of the materiality of the voice may be closely tied to a lower classposition, which suggests, in part, who is speaking in Rumpum conversations. Onewoman, for example, began and ended her conversation on Rumpum Connectionby profusely thanking “the FM family” for allowing “my phone and my voice toreach Nepal” (mero fon ra swar Nepalma pugyo).


During the mid-1990s, youths began using the phone to connect with oth-erwise inaccessible acquaintances through what is colloquially known as a blafkal (bluff call). The friendships that develop through these bluff calls are oftenbetween two people who have been introduced by a mutual friend, or they are theresult of a misdialed or randomly dialed number.34 A 23-year-old daughter of afamily I frequently visited often invited a young man to the house and to familyevents. He lived close to the apartment where I was staying, and one evening whilewe were traveling home together, I asked him how he and Sarjana had met. Hereplied matter of factly, “On the phone.” He had apparently misdialed his friend’snumber and reached Sarjana instead. They began to talk and quickly became reg-ular “phone friends.” Only after a year or so of this phone relationship did theybegin to meet each other in person.

The purpose of these bluff calls is to engage a stranger (usually a member ofthe opposite sex) in conversation and hopefully reestablish this connection againand again.35 In a letter sent to the program Friends and Trends on Hits FM stationin October 1996, a listener described his participation in a bluff-call relationshipthis way: “She . . . started [a] bluff call about 4 years ago. Gradually we becamephone friend[s]. . . . We used to talk about several topics, such as music, cinema,education, love, etc. . . . I couldn’t forget those golden moments when we sharedour views about everything.”

Relationships that develop over the phone in these bluff calls are powerfulbecause they appear to be unentangled and circumvent the usual pressures offamily and social control.36 One popular radio presenter told me about a phonerelationship he had over the course of two years with a young woman whom hehad never met. He fondly remembered this as his only “real” relationship. Theability to connect over the phone becomes a context that many young people inKathmandu describe in subjective terms as a “freer” and “more real” emotionalattachment. The subjects of urban youth who appear to be represented through thephone in fact emerge through their conversations on the telephone.

The form of sociality on FM radio echoes the form of such bluff-call con-versations. Bluff calls begin as a meeting between strangers who become intimatein part because of the sound of their voice and their conversations about a sharedpublic world. The phenomenon of bluff calls, like the programs on FM radio, relieson an audience-oriented subjectivity in which a person constitutes him- or herselfby addressing a stranger in intimate terms. Stranger intimacy is an attribute of mostmodern publics, which Michael Warner defines as “a space of discourse organizedby nothing other than discourse itself” (Warner 2002:50). Although the telephoneconversations between two individuals may not constitute a public, the form ofdiscourse that bluff calls rely on bears strong resemblance to the self-organizeddiscourse of publics like those formed by FM radio.

FM radio appropriates the intimate form of communication on the telephone,but it is fundamentally transformed by the presence of an invisible imagined au-dience. Like all FM programs, the conversations on Rumpum Connection are


performances that produce not only a connection to another distant person butalso, crucially, a self-conscious, othering relation to oneself. This seemingly dis-tant relation to oneself is a fundamental part of the Kathmandu callers’ experienceon Rumpum Connection: as they sit in a room with other family members orfriends, they simultaneously speak and hear their own voices broadcast over theradio. Indeed, part of the appeal of speaking on FM radio in its early days wasthe ability to connect with others while simultaneously hearing oneself projectedback through the radio, thereby seeming to be in two places at once. As one FMstation manager told me, “It doesn’t matter what you say. People just want to talkand hear their voices broadcast next to them.”

This double relation between self-distancing and self-recognition is char-acteristic of all forms of mediation, William Mazzarella argues, including ritualas well as mass-mediated forms, where the relationship is particularly obvious(Mazzarella 2004:357). There is something specific about the relationship be-tween self-recognition and the othering of oneself on Kathmandu FM programs.The self-distancing aspect of Rumpum Connection conversations is doubled. Onthe one hand, there is the spatial distance that defines a diaspora, and, on the otherhand, there are the effects of the media (radio and telephone) that create and si-multaneously seek to subvert this spatial distance through temporal simultaneityand a fantasy of presence. On many FM programs, as in many bluff calls, novelrelationships and discourse occur as if these ways of thinking about self and socialrelationships were always there—they just needed a form and place for expression.The FM band presents itself as just that place, even as it creates the discourse andterms on which this expression takes place.

Rumpum Connection creates what Axel calls a “diasporic imaginary” withinKathmandu. The diasporic imaginary is a social process that constitutes a specificdiasporic community, not primarily through a relationship to place but throughformations of temporality and affect (Axel 2002:412).37 The circulation of publicconversations on Rumpum Connection effectively makes the diaspora and urbanNepali subjects appear to be already established social entities, linked togetherin this performance of intimate attachment between Nepalis in Kathmandu andabroad. The diasporic imaginary produced on Rumpum Connection is differentfrom Axel’s example of the Sikh diaspora, not only in terms of its content butprimarily because it engages those not living in the diaspora.

Anamika believed the reason so many people liked to hear these intimatefamily conversations is because it gave them an idea of what it is like to live andwork abroad and it reminded them of their own connections with Nepalis overseas.Listeners, however, thought the program was primarily about communicating withrelatives or friends, and the conversations I heard always centered on family affairsand events in Nepal and only discussed what it is like to live abroad in the mostgeneral terms. Although the program’s content does not discuss life in the diasporaexplicitly, its form does work to establish the existence of a Nepali diaspora,presenting it as fundamental to Kathmandu life. Disparate voices produced through


FM programs are considered “Nepali” voices that are separated around the world.Their conversations condensed into a single hour, these “voices of the diaspora” arepresented as connected yet distinct from those listeners in Kathmandu. In this sense,as Anamika surmised, the program reminds people of their own connections withNepalis overseas, and in the process, constitutes the Nepali diaspora as spatiallyseparate yet, during this hour, an integral part of Kathmandu public life.

Radio Time: Live and Recorded Broadcasts

When asked about the main difference between the state’s Radio Nepal pro-grams and those of commercial FM stations, listeners reply that FM programs are“live.” In contrast to the scripted monotone of Radio Nepal, “live” FM broadcastsforeground the seeming directness of their transmission through, among otherthings, a poetics of spontaneity, accident, or technical mishaps. The “liveness” ofFM broadcasts encodes a temporality that is immediate and instant, in which indi-vidualized subjects are brought into simultaneous and intimate “connection” viathe apparent miracle of broadcast technology. The scene projected by live broad-casts is one in which the radio host and the listeners appear physically distant fromone another but nevertheless talking to each other at the same time. The constitu-tive links between the technology, its temporal features, and the subjects it invokesare obscured by this fantasy of co-presence.

Live broadcasting, according to some radio hosts, adds to the authenticity ofFM programs. One radio host from Radio City FM 98.8 clearly distinguished herprogram, Jindagika Ayamharu (Perspectives on Life), from similar programs byclaiming that she always broadcasts her program live. Compared to the longer-standing program Mero Katha, Mero Gıt, which similarly broadcasts listeners’letters about their life tragedies, Uma declared that her program was more “real”and more direct.

“Kalyan [the host of Mero Katha, Mero Gıt] sometimes records his reading[of listeners’ letters]—I know he does,” Uma told me, as if she were revealingsomething she thought Kalyan would rather not have known. “Do you know howI know? I sometimes hear the whir from the tape recording machine over the air.”

“Why does that make a difference?” I asked Uma, curious about this particularcontrast, which had little to do with the content of their programs.

“If you read it live,” Uma explained, “you give all the feelings as if you werethere with the person. People tell me this: ‘I feel that you are with us.’ ”

A live program produces temporal simultaneity between the radio host andhis or her listeners, making them feel as if “you [the host] are with us.” Thistemporality is subverted in a recorded program when one hears the hissing of amachine. Recording a live program as it is broadcast does not present a problemfor Uma. She recorded every program and kept these cassettes at home “in caseanyone wishes to hear them again.”38

The use of phone calls or listeners’ letters enhance the self-recognition andself-distancing effects of radio. By hearing their letters read by the radio hosts’


voices or their own voices mediated through the radio device, listeners come torecognize themselves and their words reflexively, as if from a distance. A publicreproduces itself through this reflexive circulation of its own discourse (Warner2002:66). These forms of self-reflexive circulation resemble the popular forms ofself-reflexive circulation in other media—for example, letters from viewers, thepresence of studio audiences, or on-the-street interviews. “These genres,” Warnersuggests, “create feedback loops to characterize their own space of consumption”(2002:71).

The reflexive circulation of a public’s discourse creates new ways of organiz-ing time—a temporality marked by punctuality rather than by a continuous streamof time (Warner 2002:66). Through their regular daily and weekly programming,FM radio stations train listeners to divide the day into segments of listening hours.With electronic media, the punctuated time of a radio program combines withwhat Raymond Williams (1974) calls the “flow”—the ephemeral nature of whichconveys the here and now. People experience this “thinning of time” as a loosen-ing of social controls, argues Arvind Rajagopal, while it also evokes “feelings ofcloseness and reciprocity to unknown participants who may exist only in imagi-nation” (Rajagopal 2001:5). Thus, electronic media such as television or radio inparticular seem to have the capacity to subvert or reach beneath political or culturalconstraints and reveal underlying essential truths of politics, society, personhood,or emotion. The temporality that the radio medium encodes provides the conditionsfor people to experience radio conversations as unmediated transactions.

On programs such as Rumpum Connection, temporal simultaneity is funda-mental to their creation of a shared space of Nepaliness. During our interview atthe FM station’s office, Anamika drew attention to the fact that Rumpum Connec-tion was live, emphasizing its ephemeral qualities: “You have to be very quick.Because with a live show, this is the difficult part. You cannot edit. Once it goeson it’s gone.” Anamika felt her most important role in this program was to becomean on-the-spot editor and censor, who listened carefully for provocative questionsabout the government and especially about the King. She also claimed that theprogram’s “liveness” was crucial to its success. In these brief conversations broad-cast live on air, Nepalis separated across the world seem to exist, momentarily,together at the same time.

But simultaneity is never fully achieved. “Noise” from the phone call abroadfrequently interferes with the fantasy of presence and simultaneity generated bythe radio and phone. Because the program is broadcast at noon in Kathmandu,Nepalis who live abroad receive their calls in the middle of the night. One canoften hear the differences in time through their groggy voices and yawns. “Howis your son? Is he asleep?” one caller asked his cousin, who resided in NorthAmerica. “Yes, of course,” she replied, “it’s 3 a.m.!” Because Nepal uses a non-Roman calendar, quite often the failure of temporal simultaneity centers on thedifferences in dates. “I will go with my daughter to Jhapa [a town in Eastern Nepal]on Marg 15,” a husband tells his wife. His wife responds with some confusion,


“Marg is very far away. But what is today’s date anyway? Today is November 1 overhere. What day is it over there?” These intrusions subvert the intended portrayal ofsimultaneity on the “live” broadcasts, accentuating the temporal and spatial dividesthat separate the speakers, a separation that technology creates and then aims tobridge.

Technological Phatic

Perhaps the failure of complete simultaneity is one reason why so manyconversations on Rumpum Connection center almost exclusively on the variousmedia—letters, emails, telephone calls—through which the speakers imagine theywill connect or have connected.39 Roman Jakobson’s analysis of the six functions ofspeech helps us understand the social importance of immediacy and why listeners’enchantment with the medium itself appears so often in their conversations onFM radio. To relay a message over the radio or in any conversation, a speakermust convey a referent and a context that the listener can grasp; together, theymust share a lexical code, and they must be able to make contact through “aphysical and psychological connection [that] . . . enables both of them to enter andstay in communication” (Jakobson 1987:66). Speech that centers on this ability tomake contact is what Jakobson, following Bronislaw Malinowski, refers to as the“phatic” function of language. Phrases such as “How are you?” or “You know?” areoften used simply to prolong communication without exchanging any information(Jakobson 1987; Malinowski 1953). This is a standard exchange on an FM call-inshow:

Host: Hello, do you hear me?Caller: Yes, I hear you. Hello.H: Where are you calling from?C: I’m calling from Baneswar.H: And your name?C: I’m Raju from Baneswar.H: Okay, Rajuji, have you eaten rice?C: Yes, I’ve eaten. And you?H: Yes, I’ve eaten. And what would you like to say, Raju dai?C: I like your program very much. And I would like to say hello to my sisters and

friends. Okay, I’m putting [the phone] down.H: Goodbye, a big thanks for calling.

This typical conversation functions primarily in the phatic mode. The actualinformation these two speakers share is minimal. Their exchange centers insteadon checking whether the channel of communication is clear. Both host and callerrepeat a common colloquial greeting, “Have you eaten rice?” (Bhat khanubhyo?),which seems to ask for specific information but in fact is used to begin a conversa-tion or simply establish contact between acquaintances passing on the street. It isinflected with a sense of familiarity and habitual meeting. Such conversations re-semble the conversations frequently heard in the United States when people reachfor their cell phones “just to say hello.” By referring to the various channels of


communication, phatic speech draws attention to the voice as a mediating tool ofsocial relations. Such discourse becomes the link between technology and voiceby highlighting, in a single phrase, the concurrent mediation of the two mediums(voice and radio).

In between the phatic phrases quoted above, the radio host attempts to identifythe caller through two key indicators—place (“Where are you calling from?”) andname (“What is your name?”). Both of these questions transform an anonymousvoice into a particular person with a social identity (“I’m Raju from Baneswar”).At the same time, the question “Where are you calling from?” may also workto veil the fact that true temporal simultaneity is impossible. It draws listeners’attention to the stated spatial distance between host and caller, and in so doing, itallows callers to engage in a fantasy of presence by repeating the simple fact thatthey can connect through the telephone and the radio.

On Rumpum Connection, the various mediums that course through any givenconversation invoke the speakers’ relation to Nepal and to the diaspora, for them-selves as well as for the listening public. Conversations that usually begin with“Did you receive that email?” or “Have you spoken on the phone to so-and-so?”reiterate the fact that Nepalis in Kathmandu and abroad can and do seem to connectthrough technology, without directly referring to the content of those messages.Such frequent references to various mediums of communication might be thoughtof as a form of “technological phatic” speech. The excess of phatic speech onRumpum Connection reveals the mediating qualities of the voice and also becomesa poignant expression of intimacy. Using technological phatic speech, Rumpumcallers draw attention to the media through which they communicate betweenKathmandu and the diaspora as they construct a dialogue that is largely aboutcontact itself.

Here is an excerpt from a conversation broadcast on Rumpum Connectionbetween Indira, a Nepali woman working in Israel, and a male relative, Purusottam,presumably her husband, in Kathmandu, that illustrates the use of technologicalphatic speech.40 Particularly striking in this exchange is the overlap between thevisual and the voiced, as speakers try to picture their loved ones on the other endof the line. After the requisite statement of their names, the conversation beginswith Indira asking about her young daughter, whom she eventually talks to on thephone:

Purusottam: Is everything okay there?Indira: Everything is fine. How is everything there? How is my daughter?P: She is listening right now. I told her that her mother’s phone call would

come here today. She’s sitting right here.I: Oh ho! How happy am I! A big thank you to Kantipur FM, from my side.P: I want to thank them too. Did you get the email? Ritu called me from

America on the 11th and said, “I will call my sasu (mother-in-law) inIsrael.”Did she call or not?

I: She hasn’t called. When are you going to call again?P: After three weeks.


Presumably, Purusottam said something about money, referring to the missedphone call or switching the subject completely, as Indira responds:

Indira: Send money? How should I send money? Sending money involves many, manyproblems. What to do?

Purusottam quickly tries to steer the conversation away from money, perhapsto avoid discussing such a personal subject through this public medium:

Purusottam: First I will talk to my family, and then we will talk on the phone [aboutsending money].

Indira: Promise to call me on Saturday. I will wait all day at the phone . . . . Tellmy close ones that I miss them a lot and think of them. Nobody sends anyletters to me. I check the mailbox every day, and nothing comes. Every daythe mailbox is empty. I have looked every day.

P: Listen, listen, did the letter from Dangol reach you yet or not?I: I received one letter only, the one of October 26, to which I replied. Did

you receive that yet?P: That letter hasn’t reached here yet.

A few minutes later, Indira asks to speak to her daughter, who has been sittingby the radio listening in. A little girl, probably between six and eight years old,gets on the phone:

Daughter: What will you bring me from there, Ama?Indira: Oh, pants, dolls, cloth—everything for my princess. . . . Did you receive any-

thing from your father for Deshain?D: Yes, shoes, clothes. That’s all.I: Take a photo of yourself and your father in your new Deshain clothes and

send it to me.41

This conversation, like many on Rumpum Connection, begins almost imme-diately with a discussion of money—the main reason Indira traveled to Israel and akey medium through which Nepalis abroad relate to their families in Kathmandu.The veiled and sometimes explicit discussions of money reveal the complex issuesof class in this diaspora. Most callers on Rumpum Connection have managed toget enough money to travel abroad, but once there, they have become part of thevast laboring class, struggling first to pay back their debts at home and then toearn enough to contribute to their family’s income. As in many Rumpum conver-sations, the discussion of money indicates the failure of this medium to adequatelyconnect—Indira notes only how difficult it is to send money.

The subject of money in Rumpum Connection conversations simultaneouslyevokes the affection implied in sending money and its use as a medium of intimacybetween distant families. As Danilyn Rutherford (2001) has argued, the exchangeof money not only homogenizes values and erodes intimacies, it often serves as avehicle of social identity and intimacy even among strangers in a market. Of course,when considered in the context of family members, this point seems obvious. Inthe context of an FM radio program, which itself is a form of consumer exchange,direct reference to the intimate connotations of money works in two ways: on theone hand, it refers to the broader consumer culture of FM radio and the intimate


public it creates; on the other hand, money and other commodities are sent astokens of affection between Nepalis in Kathmandu and abroad. When speakingto her daughter, Indira asks for a photograph that depicts the father’s affectionategiving on the national holiday of Deshain. As with hearing their voices over thephone, seeing a photo indicates to Indira that her daughter is really there. Theindexical properties of the voice and a photograph create dreams of direct accessto the person on the other line or the person pictured in the photograph.

However, too much talk about money is somewhat taboo, particularly in sucha public setting as an FM radio program. Purusottam quickly turns the conversationaway from the exchange of money to the exchanges they engage in through othermediums—telephone calls and letters. Here again, the focus is on the possibilityof connecting and failure to connect: “Did [Ritu] call you or not?” “She hasn’tcalled.” Or “Did the letter from Dangol reach you yet?” “I received one letteronly . . . to which I replied. Did you receive that yet?” “That letter hasn’t reachedhere yet.” Even more poignantly, Indira remarks on her constant checking anddisappointment at seeing an empty mailbox day after day.

For making contact, each medium has its advantages and disadvantages: radiogenerates temporal simultaneity; letters delay contact and are often discussed interms of a potential future. In another Rumpum Connection conversation, a youngman discusses the benefits and problems with chatting over the Internet. “Nowa-days we cannot even do ‘voice chat,’ ” the young man says to his cousin in NorthAmerica. “Whenever I go on line, you are not there, and whenever you go online, I’m not there.” Little information is actually exchanged in these references toother technologies. Such technological phatic discourse evokes the pathos of theprogram and thereby draws in an audience of listeners.

Like many FM radio hosts, Anamika herself has become a fetish of connectionwith a special power to facilitate connection between people living far away.42

Anamika told me that she frequently receives gifts—chocolate, perfume, jeans,bags, cards, knickknacks—from her listeners in Kathmandu and around the world.Sometimes listeners come to meet Anamika at the studio, as they do with manyFM radio program hosts. More often, however, as she explained, “It’s only overthe phone and over the mail. That person hasn’t seen me, and I haven’t seen thatperson.” The form of attachment that people express toward Anamika is somewhatdifferent from the aura of a celebrity. It is assumed that listeners can and will enterinto gift transactions with her in ways that strikingly resemble the acts and desiresdiscussed on her program. As the callers discuss the emails and letters they write,the photos they hope to receive, or the telephone calls they are waiting for, theyincorporate Anamika into these same exchanges.

Conclusion

As in many places, contests over political power in Nepal often involve gain-ing control over the media to communicate with subjects or citizens. Given thesignificance of voice and media in this context, the royal seizure of control over


all means of communication on February 1, 2005, and the raid on Kantipur FM’sstudio in October 2005 are not at all surprising. This article is concerned only withthe constitutive processes enacted by technology rather than with the alignment ofsides in the current political conflict. None of the conversations explored hereinrefer explicitly to the politics of the nation, but their forms of mediation and themeanings they generate register some of the national anxieties being produced inKathmandu today. For example, the simple and persistent desire for contact acrossborders, which may be taken away at any moment, is perhaps one key symptomof the current political and economic distress.

In this article I have traced the connections between the materiality and me-diating qualities of radio and telephone voices and the discourses of transparencyand emotional directness that the voices invoke. Sentimental discourse about un-mediated, “real” or “true” emotions and notions of transparent governance are twoformations of voice that are mutually constitutive, arising together in the contextof neoliberal democratic reform and the dislocations associated with it. Throughthe technologies of voice explored here, urban Nepali subjects and a Nepali dias-pora emerge together as distinct already present social entities that subsequentlyencounter the miraculous workings of technology. More poignantly, these tech-nologies of the voice reveal, to listeners and anthropologists alike, the mediationof everyday social life within and outside the radio and telephone context.

As Nepal increasingly becomes a site of military and economic crisis, even af-ter April 2006, life abroad appears to offer the only promise of escape. Yet Nepalisin Kathmandu also are confronted with the extremes of material wealth associatedwith this promise and by stories about the difficulty of working abroad and frequentencounters with brute oppression. I have shown that the emergence of this diasporaoccurs not primarily through attachment to place but rather through specific tempo-ralities and relations of affect, each of which are effects of technological mediation.

Dreams of contact and the excess of phatic speech on FM radio programsboth allay and express the contradiction between a desire to flee and the failedpromises of the diaspora. More than this, it is in such moments of political andeconomic crisis that something normally concealed—the power of technologyto create illusions of realness—is revealed through technological phatic speech.Unlike discourses that attempt to make a technological apparatus vanish so thatthe voice appears all the more real, this phatic discourse emphasizes the agency oftechnology involved in satisfying the seemingly antecedent desire for connection.In technological phatic speech, subjects appear as individuals who exist prior to thebroadcast or telephone call and whose needs and desires are met by the miraculousinterventions of technology.

By looking closely at the materiality of communication by radio and tele-phone, along with the discourses they produce, the voice can be seen more clearlyas an effect of technology and a medium rather than as a metaphor and seat ofconsciousness, agency, and intentionality. This formulation requires us to con-sider the materiality of the sonic voice—the lilts and tones that people refer to as


particularly evocative—as well as the cultural and historical construct of the voiceas a sign of transparency and emotional directness, and as a key element in demo-cratic discourse. It requires us to consider the overlaps of different mediums withinany given technology of voice and ask how these overlaps are productive of thevoice as well as of the subjects the radio and telephone seek to represent. Andfinally, it requires us to consider the significance of diasporic voices that emerge asa ghostly presence in Kathmandu. This ghostly presence of the diaspora, createdthrough technologies of voice, evokes a pervasive sense of what it means to beNepali within urban Nepal today.

Notes

Acknowledgments. My thanks goes first and foremost to Nepalis who have helpedand engaged me at different levels of my research: Sanjeev Pokharel for his help on researchon manpower agencies and for conversations and support in Nepal and elsewhere, SarojDhakal for help with transcription and translation, and members of Kantipur FM, particularlyAnamika Pradhan, for giving me their time and insights about FM radio. I would also like tothank several individuals whose comments on earlier drafts of this article helped refine theargument: Virginia Dominguez, Aaron Fox, Daniel Karpowitz, Mandana Limbert, KennethMcGill, Penelope Papailias, Jesse Shipley, Michael Silverstein, Karen Strassler. I am gratefulfor the editorial suggestions and assistance provided by Ann Anagnost and the editorial staffat Cultural Anthropology as well as three anonymous reviewers. Support for this researchwas generously provided by Fulbright-Hays, SSRC-NMERTA Dissertation Fellowship,Bard Faculty Research Funds, and The Freeman Foundation.

1. Kantipur FM is part of the media conglomerate Kantipur Publications, which hasconsistently been critical of the current government and king. Because this station drawsits audience across all segments of the Nepalese population, it poses a threat to the currentgovernment.

2. Isolating the valley from the rest of Nepal has been a common strategy of manyNepali governments to preserve political power. During the Rana oligarchy (1846–1950),people needed passports to enter and exit the valley. The Rana family, who maintainedclose political ties with British India, might be described as the internal colonizers of Nepal.They seized political power in 1846 and became the Prime Ministers and de facto rulersof Nepal who aimed to “isolate” Nepalis from any intercourse with foreigners via travel,access to technology, media, or the structures of colonial rule. The current government hasworked hard to keep the urban population separated from the ongoing Maoist civil war,fought primarily in villages, as well as to isolate villagers from the antiroyal sentimentnow endemic in the valley. The three-week-long nationwide strike in April 2006, whichdemanded that the King renounce his political power, suggests that this strategy was notcompletely effective.

3. ZNet Asia is an Internet site that publicizes recent political incidents, reports, andcritical thinking about social issues around Asia.

4. Rumpum Noodles is a product sold by Asian Thai Foods Ltd. that is primarilydistributed in Nepal, India, and Bhutan. Their main factory is near the southern Nepal cityof Biratnagar and their corporate offices are in Kathmandu. Rumpum Connection is nolonger being broadcast on Kantipur FM and was most likely canceled after the governmentraid on Kantipur FM when many programs broadcast outside the Kathmandu valley wereshut down.


5. See Mazzarella 2004 for a thorough discussion of mediation in anthropology. Here,mediation is not used to distinguish between the “medium” of social interaction and “mate-rial social practices” that constitute social life; rather, the concept reveals interconnectionsbetween the two (cf. Williams 1977:158–164).

6. Throughout this article, I aim to show the processes of interpellation as constitutingurban Nepali subjects and the Nepali diaspora through technologies of the voice. WheneverI refer to the categories of “Nepali,” “the diaspora,” and “the voice,” I am referring to socialentities and concepts that are not originary but rather arise as an effect of the technologiesof voice I discuss here.

7. Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang (2002) makes a similar point in discussing the transnationalidentity of Shanghai Chinese who identify with overseas Chinese through films, TV shows,and popular songs. Yang suggests that this “subjective mobility” presents challenges to statemodernity and the regulations of state that determine how to be Chinese. This situationdiffers from the Nepali context, particularly because the Nepali state encourages Nepalisto work overseas and has increasingly become dependent on them. At the same time,however, the royal coup of February 1, 2004, suggests a contradictory movement of closingoff the boundaries of Nepal and attempting to circumvent media that cross over nationaland regional borders.

8. This emphasis on the various technological forms follows Marshall McLuhan’s(1965) focus on the formal quality of particular media. In contrast to McLuhan, I showthe overlaps of different technologies within a single media and suggest that the form andcontent of these diverse media are shaped by cultural and historical forces.

9. See also Amin 1995 and Stoler and Strassler 2000 for critiques of this model of“voiced memory” that appears to evade all state intrusions.

10. Following Jacques Derrida, Morris (2002) similarly describes the simulation ofpresence evoked by the voice in her discussion of Thai spirit mediums. Derrida’s translator,Gayatri Spivak (1988), also draws on this sense of voice in her critique of subaltern histories.

11. Interestingly, in Kathmandu, FM programs are examples par excellence ofDerrida’s reversal of the speech versus writing dichotomy. In their reliance on writtentexts (such as listeners’ letters and stories), many FM programs produce a form of voicedwriting in which the written word does in fact structure speech (Kunreuther 2004).

12. See Feld 1990, 1996; Tacchi 2002; Fox 2004; Weidman 2003a.13. As Amanda Weidman (2003b) discusses, music reproduced through the gramo-

phone in south India during the early 20th century made it possible to imagine one’s earsas separate from oneself; one’s ears could “hear” the music more perfectly than one’s guruor musical instructor.

14. A third, slightly different understanding of voice is rooted in the writings ofMikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin (1981) views any utterance as a composition of voices, that is,a composition of differing social perspectives and worldviews that are consistently drawnon in discourse, reworked, and never completely “one’s own.” This fundamentally socialperspective emphasizes that the voice always carries ideological messages and is alwaysdirected toward a listener and an answer (even when one speaks alone). The voice forBakhtin is situated in voiced practice and genre composition, in the dialogues of novels, inthe everyday conversations and narratives that populate our world. I do not explicitly engagewith Bakhtin’s notion of voice here, although his writings do influence my understandingof language throughout.

15. Request programs were part of Radio Nepal’s programming intermittently sinceits inception in 1951 and call-in programs became a staple in Radio Nepal’s programsafter 1983 (Humagain 2003). However, broadcasting and informal interaction on FM wasdistinctly different, cultivating distinct vocal “personalities” of the radio hosts.


16. Initially, the government rented time slots to different FM stations on this singleFM band. After several years, the government began issuing private licenses for companiesto broadcast on their own FM band. It is still common to hear people refer to the media as“FM”, distinguished from the AM state Radio Nepal, commonly referred to as “radio”.

17. Rumpum Connection is not one of the several Nepali radio programs that arebroadcast over the Internet and can be heard abroad.

18. See Liechty 2003 for an extensive analysis of consumption practices in Kath-mandu, ranging from media to education.

19. As many scholars of the South Asian diaspora have argued, colonialism—specifically, institutions of indentured labor—set the context for the vast number of mi-grations from the subcontinent, thereby creating social categories like “the migrant,”“overseas south Asian communities,” “people of south Asian descent living outside southAsia,” and more recently, “nonresident Indians” or “the south Asian diaspora” (Axel 1996;Chatterjee 2000; Shukla 2003; Van de Veer 1995). Although Nepal was not a colony, BritishIndia was nevertheless the context in which people from Nepal crossed borders. Onta 1996discusses the emerging Nepali national identity among educated Nepalis in British Indiathrough the rediscovery of the now renowned national poet Bhanubhakta in the 1920s.This elite group, located primarily in Darjeerling, might be considered the first Nepalidiaspora.

20. Sandhya Shukla (2003) points out that movement to and from the diaspora mustbe distinguished from both immigration—a one-way, permanent move to another nation—and migration. Migration tends to focus primarily on patterns of work and movement thatconstitute subjects through state laws and particular nations, whereas diaspora forces us tocontend with the relations of affect and global belonging that stretch across national bordersand simultaneously constitute Nepali subjects (Shukla 2003:13).

21. Manpower agencies work particularly for countries in the Persian Gulf, forMalaysia, Thailand, Japan, China, and Australia, and for some countries in Western Europe.According to a recent study, 13 to 25 percent of the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ofNepal comes through the remittance economy (Seddon et al. 2001:43). See Gurung 2000 forofficial and unofficial statistics on the number of Nepalis working abroad, many of whomare employed through manpower agencies.

22. Stories abound about the large-scale corruption, bribery, and deception carried outby the manpower agencies in Kathmandu. One of the most traumatic incidents occurred inAugust 2004 when 12 Nepali laborers who had initially been sent to Jordan by MoonlightManpower Agency were redirected to Iraq, where they were captured and killed by themilitant group Ansar Al-Sunna (Adhikari 2004; Khadka 2004). In contrast to the radioconversations of Rumpum Connection, from which political criticism is explicitly censored,the mediation of this event, through videos of the killing circulated over the Internet andgraphic newspaper accounts, became the grounds for critiquing political and economichardships inside Nepal. The incident provoked heated protests from Nepalis in Nepal andaround the world, who interpreted the workers’ deaths as a sign of the Nepali government’sfailure and the corruption of the manpower agencies (see, e.g., Singh et al. 2004). A tragedythat had occurred abroad became a critical example of the ills occurring at home. In ratherdrastic terms, this incident shows the way in which the Nepali diaspora is emerging as a socialcategory through its mediation of events and is becoming an integral part of public life inKathmandu—one that is called on to further clarify and discuss local and national tensions.Such a use of the diaspora has been the case historically in many other places. “OverseasIndians” was a crucial category for Indian nationalists in the 1920s, providing examplesof plantation life abroad to critique colonial rule and forward a program of nationalism inIndia (Axel 1996:427).


23. As in many countries of the South, English enables people to travel in transna-tional circuits, particularly for education and professional work abroad. Numerous Englishlanguage institutes can be found throughout Kathmandu, and I often had the experience ofyoung Nepalis asking me to teach them English, because, as people say, “ English is theinternational language.”

24. Nina Glick Schiller and Georges Fouron (2001:20–23) identify three key featuresof long-distance nationalism that distinguish it from other forms of transborder belongings,all of which center around developing a new state that is not limited by territorial borders.

25. This process is evident elsewhere in the world, in other popular media suchas the Shanghai television programs that feature overseas Chinese (Yang 2002) or theGreek films that frequently show images of Greek Americans (Penelope Papailias, personalcommunication).

26. See Kunreuther 2004 for an elaborated discussion of public intimacy on FM radio.Here I discuss the transformation of furtive intimacies in letters or telephone calls into apublic performance before an invisible, imagined audience that draws on, but also differsfrom, Lauren Berlant’s (1997) notion of the intimate public sphere.

27. Meena could also very well be Anup’s older cousin, whom he would also addressas Didi (older sister).

28. Nepalis refer to close friends and cousins using the kinship terminology for sib-lings. Sambhu (as well as Arav) may be Anup’s cousin, or he may be Anup’s actual youngerbrother.

29. The discourse of transparency to describe a less corrupt, more participatory formof government, with its association with liberalizing political regimes, has parallels in manyparts of the world. Quite often, it is used not only to signify good governance but also, morespecifically, to mark a shift in political power. Interestingly, these political ideals are oftenassociated with a particular technological innovation or mediated expression that makes theideals of transparency material and sometimes even visible. Karen Strassler writes aboutthe Indonesian “dream of transparency” during the Reformasi Movement of 1998, whichopposed the Suharto’s regime’s “reliance on the dimly-lit operations of organized terror”(Strassler 2004:692). Photographs, she suggests, became a fetish in the service of trans-parency, having the power to authenticate historical truth and provide unmediated accessto the ideals of transparency and the Reformasi movement (Strassler 2004:696). Using adifferent technology, the renovation of the Bundestag (state capitol) after the unificationof Germany included a large glass dome and glass siding to signify the transparent natureof the new government. In Nepal, the dreams of transparency are often expressed throughreference to the technology of radio, particularly FM radio, and the seemingly unmediatedquality of the voice it conveys.

30. Dean Leder (1990:103) argues that the body and the process of embodiment is asmuch about difference and absence as it is about presence. Because of its connection to thebody, the voice works as a medium that expresses absence and presence simultaneously.

31. I thank Hajime Nakatane for the concept of “master empathizer.”32. Joshua Barker discusses the power of the modulated voice in some Indonesians’

use of a local telephone-cum-radio technology called Interkom. In this voice-based medium,as in radio, discursive styles and the way the voice sounds on air are used “to generate alocal version of stardom” (Barker 2002a).

33. According to tradition, the place where the British Residency was located, Lain-chor (pronounced “line-chor;” [chor meaning crossroads]), got its name from the fact thatit had the first telegraph line out of Nepal (Nepal Dursanchaar Sansthaan v.s. 2056).

34. With the introduction of caller ID and the increased use of mobile phones inthe past few years, there has been a significant drop in the number of bluff calls. One


journalist comments on this shift, “There are times when you are scolded just becausesome brat from the school continuously gives you bluff calls. And aren’t those calls areal pain in the neck? . . . The introduction of [caller ID] has really minimized all thoseabove problems. . . . Thanks to the rules and regulations as well, you no longer have to geta scolding for the unwanted bluff calls and blank calls” (Pandey 2004: 6).

35. Bluff calls are quite different than the crank calls that are common among youth inthe United States. The purpose of the latter is simply to tell a joke and hang up. The socialityof bluff calls more closely resembles Internet sociality, which encourages continued intimateconversation among strangers. In Kathmandu, FM radio and the Internet emerged as popularmedia within a few years of each other, producing similar forms of sociality.

36. A similar situation to the phenomenon of bluff calls in Nepal occurred with theintroduction of telephone technology into Indonesia, when, as Joshua Barker writes, “thedisciplines normally brought to bear on public and domestic spheres (by way of over-hearing and seeing, for example) became far less effective in controlling communication”(2002b:166). As I describe below, there are other forms of discipline that structure theparticular content and form of bluff-call conversations. See Rafael for a discussion of howphone technology also has the capacity to “reveal what was once hidden, to repeat what wasmeant to be secret, and to pass on messages intended for a particular circle” (2003:400).Wires can always be tapped or someone might be listening in on a party line, young Nepalissuggested, even while they asserted that in their phone conversations they could expressthemselves most “truly” and “freely.”

37. Axel also includes corporeality as central to his understanding of the diasporicimaginary, an issue I do not address here.

38. I did not find any listeners of Uma’s program who also recorded the programs,but undoubtedly they exist. In my extensive research on Kalyan Gautum’s program MeroKatha, Mero Gıt, many of the listeners recorded the program when their story was read andreplayed it for their friends and family.

39. In a context where electronic recording technologies have become hegemonic,Rosalind Morris suggests that a common wish is to achieve “a transmission so pure thatit requires no medium” (Morris 2002:383). Morris writes of the Thai fantasy of spiritmediums who are thought to be so powerful that their voice can be heard without incarnatingin a human body. Ironically, in everyday conversations on FM radio, the emphasis ontechnological mediums actually reinforces the seemingly pure transmission and contactenabled by technology. As with Thai spirit mediums, many FM radio conversations centerexclusively on the sheer fact that this elusive connection can occur at all.

40. Many more young men than women travel abroad to work, but sometimes a motherwill apply to go because she is thought more likely to be granted a visa by officers who expecther to return to her children. Israel is one common destination for women. According to arecent government survey, there were 156 Nepali women registered through the governmentas workers in Israel, which is more than double the number working in any other country.

41. Deshain is one of the biggest national and Hindu holidays in Nepal, celebrated inlate September or October.

42. In this sense, Anamika is like Morris’s spirit mediums, referred to above (see N.39). The difference is that Anamika is not a “voice without a body” but rather, a voice thatembodies the powers and possibilities afforded by technology.

References Cited

Adhikari, Chandra Shekhar2004 All 12 Nepalese Hostages Killed in Iraq. The Rising Nepal. September 1.


Electronic Document, http://www.gorkhapatra.org.np/pageloader.php?file=2004/09/01/topstories/main1, accessed September 3.

Amin, Shahid1995 Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chari Chaura, 1922–1992. Berkeley: University of

California Press.Anderson, Benedict

1998 The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalisms, South East Asia, and the World. NewYork: Verso.

Axel, Brian1996 Time and Threat: Questioning the Production of the Diaspora as an Object of

Study. History and Anthropology 9(4):415–443.2002 The Diasporic Imaginary. Public Culture 14(2):422–428.

Bakhtin, Mikhail1981 The Dialogic Imagination. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Austin:

University of Texas Press.Barker, Joshua

2002a The Interkom Rhizome in Indonesia. Paper presented at the 101st Annual Meet-ing of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, November 20–24.

2002b Telephony at the Limits of State Control: “Discourse Networks” in Indonesia. InLocal Cultures and the “New Asia.” C. J. Wan-Ling Wee, ed. Pp. 158–183. Singapore:Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

Berlant, Lauren1997 The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Durham, NC: Duke University

Press.Butler, Judith

1997 Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.Butler, Kim

2001 Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse. Diaspora 10(2):189–219.Chatterjee, Piya

2000 A Time for Tea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Dahal, Dev Raj

2002 Mass Media, Trust, and Governance. In Media and Society. P. Kharel, Dev Raj Da-hal, Sushil Raj Pandey, Krishna B. Bhattachan, eds. Pp. 19–48. Kathmandu: SupravahaPublication.

Derrida, Jacques1974[1967] Of Grammatology. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press.1988 Signature, Event, Context. In Limited, Inc. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman,

trans. Gerald Graff, ed. Pp. 1–23. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Dixit, Kanak Mani

2006 Nepal’s People Phenomenon. Himal Southasian 19(3). Electronic document,http://www.himalmag.com/2006/may/commentary 1.html, accessed June 15, 2006.

Feld, Steven1990 Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.1996 Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papau

New Guinea. In Senses of Place. Steven Feld and Keith Basso, eds. Pp. 91–136. SantaFe: School of American Research Press.

Fox, Aaron2004 Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.


Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, and Elizabeth A. Povinelli2003 Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition. Public

Culture 15(3):385–397.Gilligan, Carol

1982 In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Guha, Ranajit

1996 The Small Voice of History. In Subaltern Studies, 10: Writings on South AsianHistory and Society. Gautum Bhadra, Gyan Prakash, and Susie Tharu, eds. Pp. 1–12.Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Gurung, Ganesh2000 Patterns in Foreign Employment and Vulnerability of Migrant Workers. Paper pre-

sented at the Workshop on Migrant Workers, Nepal Institute for Development Studies,November 15. Kathmandu: Nepal Institute of Developmental Studies. Electronic doc-ument, aidsouthasia.undp.org.in/ publicatn/6TH%20ICCAP/pdfs/Nepal.pdf, accessedJune 20, 2006.

Humagain, Devraj2003 Radio Nepalka Karyakram: Ardhashatabdiko Samiksa. [Radio Nepal’s program-

ming: Critique of half a century.] Studies in Nepali History and Society 8(1):37–66.Jakobson, Roman

1987 Linguistics and Poetics. In Language in Literature. Krystyna Pomorska andStephen Rudy, eds. Pp. 62–94. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UniversityPress.

Khadka, Navin Singh2004 Open Secret: Everyone, Even the Government, Knew Nepali Workers Were Go-

ing Illegally to Iraq. Nepali Times, Aug. 27–Sept. 2. Electronic document, http://www.nepalitimes.com/issue/211/Nation/1762, accessed September 3.

Kittler, Friedrich1999 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz,

trans. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Kunreuther, Laura

2004 Voiced Writing and Public Intimacy on Kathmandu’s FM Radio. Studies in NepaliHistory and Society 9(1):57–95.

Leder, Drew1990 The Absent Body. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Liechty, Mark2003 Suitably Modern: Making Middle-Class Culture in a New Consumer Society.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.McLuhan, Marshall

1965 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill.Malinowski, Bronislaw

1953 The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages. In The Meaning of Meaning.C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, eds. Pp. 296–336. New York: Harcourt and Brace.

Mazzarella, William2004 Culture, Globalization, Mediation. Annual Review of Anthropology 33:345–367.

Morris, Rosalind2002 A Room with a Voice: Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand’s Information Age.

In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod,and Brian Larkin, eds. Pp. 383–397. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nepal Dursanchar Sansthanv.s. 2056[1999] Nepal Dursanchar Sansthan: Atit Ra Wartaman. [Nepal telecommuni-

cations corporation: Past and present] Kathmandu: Nepal Dursanchar Sansthan.


Onta, Pratyoush1996 Creating a Brave Nepali Nation in British India: The Rhetoric of Jati Improvement,

Rediscovery of Bhanubhakta and the Writing of Bir History. Studies in Nepali Societyand History 1(1):37–76.

2001 FM Radio and New Urban Communities. Kathmandu Post, January 12: 4.2002 Critiquing the Media Boom. In State of Nepal. Kanak Mani Dixit and Shastri

Ramachandaran, eds. Pp. 253–269. Kathmandu: Himal Books.Pandey, Swagat Raj

2004 Caller’s Id Tracker. Himalayan Times, July 6: 6.Rafael, Vicente

2003 The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philip-pines. Public Culture 15(3):399–425.

Rajagopal, Arvind2001 Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in

India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Rutherford, Danilyn

2001 Intimacy and Alienation: Money and the Foreign in Biak. Public Culture13(2):299–324.

Schiller, Nina Glick, and Georges Fouron2001 Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for

Home. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Seddon, David, Jagannath Adhikari, and Ganesh Gurung, eds.

2001 The New Lahures: Foreign Employment and Remittance Economy of Nepal.Kathmandu: Nepal Institute of Development Studies.

Shukla, Sandhya2003 India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.Singh, S. N., Charu Bist, S. K. Aryal, Neeta Pradhan, and Naresh Rai

2004 Letters to Nepali Times (3 September–9 September). Electronic document, http://www.nepalitimes.com/issue/212/Letters/1862, accessed September 10.

Spivak, Gayatri1988 Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary

Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Pp. 271–313. Urbana: University of IllinoisPress.

Stoler, Ann, and Karen Strassler2000 Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in “New Order” Java. Comparative

Studies in Society and History 42(1):4–48.Strassler, Karen

2004 Gendered Visibilities and the Dream of Transparency: The Chinese-IndonesianRape Debate in Post-Suharto Indonesia. Gender and History 16(3):689–725.

Tacchi, Jo2002 Radio Texture: Between Self and Others. In The Anthropology of Media, a Reader.

Kelly Askew and Richard Wilk, eds. Pp. 241–257. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Van de Veer, Peter, ed.

1995 Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora. Philadel-phia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Warner, Michael2002 Publics and Counterpublics. Public Culture 14(1):49–90.

Weidman, Amanda2003a Gender and the Politics of Voice: Colonial Modernity and Classical Music in

South India. Cultural Anthropology 18(2):194–232.


2003b Guru and Gramophone: Fantasies of Fidelity and Modern Technologies of theReal. Public Culture 15(3):453–476.

Williams, Raymond1974 Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken.1977 Marxism and Literature. Oxford: University Press.

Yang, Mayfair Mei-Hui2002 Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on

(Re)Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis. In Media Worlds. Faye Ginsburg, LilaAbu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, eds. Pp. 189– 210. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

ZNet Asia2005 Notes from Nepal: On the Royal Takeover. Electronic document, http://www.

zmag.org/southasia/southasia1.cfm#Nepal, accessed February 5.

ABSTRACT Through the public broadcast of intimate telephone conversationsbetween Nepalis abroad and those in Kathmandu, the diaspora is made “present”in Kathmandu. On these commercial FM programs, the voice is viewed as a keysign of emotional directness, authenticity, and intimacy. Simultaneously, the figureof the voice has been central in discussions about the promises (and failures) ofdemocracy and transparent governance. These two seemingly distinct formationsof voice are mutually constitutive. Sentimental discourse about the voice reiteratesmodern neoliberal discourse about democracy and vice versa. Both are crucial tothe formation of an urban Nepali subject in this political moment, which is deeplyshaped by the figure of the diaspora. [voice, diaspora, Nepal, media technology,publics, intimacy]

Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone, and the Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu

Documents

Transcript of Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone, and the Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu