For over a decade, dohori songs have dominated the Nepali music scene. These playful, improvised duets – dohori means 'back and forth' – form the backbone of the commercial recording industry. You hear dohori everywhere: blaring on buses traversing the country, requested on countless call-in shows, and broadcast by FM channels to settlements large and small dotting the Nepali hills and plains. Dohori has even spawned a new kind of nightlife in Nepal's urban centres, where audiences comprising mostly male patrons eat, drink and dance to stage performances in restaurants advertising themselves as dohori sanjh (dohori evening) or rodhi ghar (club house). The distance between these spaces and the original rodhi ghars of rural Nepal is at once significant and understandable.
The now ubiquitous rodhi ghar refers to a tradition of the ethnic Gurung community, which is said to have migrated to the central mid-hills of present-day Nepal from the Tibetan plateau around the sixth century AD. In Gurung villages, the rodhi ghar was essentially a place to relax, a house in the village where the community gathered after a full day's work to sing, dance and be festive. At the rodhi ghar, the otherwise rigid norms defining gender relations were set aside. Young, unmarried men and women gathered at the rodhi ghar sat on two opposing sides, and engaged in a playful battle of wit deep into the night.
With talk of love and marriage forming the basis of the singing, the proceedings inevitably tilted to the erotic. The strong sexual undertones were expected, and acceptable, so long as they did not cross the line from innuendo to more explicit expression. These gatherings were also an opportunity for the young to arrange marriages on their own terms – though it was not necessarily the case, as popular belief has it, that the winner of the singing competition could automatically marry the loser. Rather, the rodhi ghars were a sort of pre-dating spot, where familiarity between two people increased, often resulting in marriage.
The rodhi ghar has today become synonymous with dohori, likely because those in the power centre of Kathmandu had relatively greater access to the culture of the Gurung people. Also known as Tamu, the Gurung are also among the more comfortable of Nepal's ethnic communities, having acquired economic wellbeing, particularly through Gorkha recruitment in the Indian and British armies. The Gurung community is, however, not the only one of Nepal's many ethnic groups with a tradition of improvised back-and-forth singings. Duets cross barriers of geography and ethnicity, whether as Deuda in the mid-west, Hakpare in the eastern hills or the Tamang selo of the central region. Though similar forms also exist in the southern Tarai plains, such as the jat-jatin of Mithila, with the exception of the significant population of pahadi settlers from the hills, this region has remained relatively untouched by the dohori craze. Nevertheless, the beginnings of the contemporary dohori genre and its subsequent widespread popularity are both directly linked to the fact that the practice had deep roots in large parts of the country.