Tech Voice Katmandu

Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone, and the Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu
Laura Kunreuther
Bard College
On October 21, 2005, Nepali government ofcials attacked Kantipur FM, one of the oldest and largest commercial FM radio stations in Kathmandu.1 Their mission was to seize satellite equipment that enabled the station to broadcast programs outside the Kathmandu Valley.2 This seizure was necessary, the Ministry of Information and Communication declared, because Kantipur FM refused to comply with a new government ordinance that forbade the broadcast of news about opposition to the royal regime. Put into place on October 9, 2005, the ordinance eerily evokes similar laws during the Panchayat government (196090), a regime that was overturned by a nationwide movement to establish a multiparty democracy. Such state action against a private media house was not entirely surprising. Eight months earlier, on February 1, 2005, King Gyanendra dismissed the parliament and assumed sole control of the government. All political leaders of opposition parties were put under house arrest, several hundred journalists and other activists were put in jail, and many activists quickly left the country to avoid arrest. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this coup was that the king cut all technological communication outside the valley and overseas for a period of several days. ZNet Asia issued a report about the situation on February 3:
The following report was brought out by courier from Kathmandu, where all communication with the outside world is cut off, except for select satellite telephones and internet connections mostly controlled by embassies. The general public had no access to communication with the outside world from 10:00 AM on 1 February 2005 until at least 7:00 PM on 2 February 2005. All domestic telephones are also shut off, both mobile 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 kings army in posting soldiers in private media houses throughout Kathmandu. The army took control of Nepal
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 21, Issue 3, pp. 323353, ISSN 0886-7356, electronic ISSN 1548-1360. C 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
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Telecom and UTL (United Telecommunications Limited), two companies that provide telephone service throughout the country, as well as all Internet service providers. The FM stations outside the valley were shut down, and inside Kathmandu the stations were monitored by soldiers who were ordered to approve all programming prior to broadcast. Although phone service was returned intermittently over the period of a week, most of these severe restrictions on media communication lasted more than eight days. The October 21 attack on Kantipur FM was clearly an extension of the February 1 royal coup. To protest the governments action, journalists and media personnel gathered together in Kathmandu, wearing black cloths around their mouths to signify their stied voices (see photo on cover). Claims about the interconnection between voice and political agency have become increasingly prominent in the mass democratic movement of April 2006 that succeeded in overthrowing King Gyanendra. Seven political parties and the Maoists joined together in the most massive prodemocracy demonstrations to date. Dubbed Jana Andolan II (Peoples Movement II), in reference to the 1990 prodemocracy movement, the current movement is even more radically republican, rejecting any constitutional role for the monarchy that has been at the center of the Nepali state since its foundation in 1769. Hundreds of thousands of protesters effectively shut down the nations capital, shouting epithets such as Burn the Crown and Hang Thief Gyanay [Gyanendra], deantly challenging the kings shoot-on-sight curfew order. The seven-party alliances primary demand has been the election of a constituent assembly, capable of drafting a new constitution that eliminates the power of the palace from lawfully seizing absolute control over the country. On the eve of April 24, 2006, the King capitulated, and a constituent assembly is being elected as this article goes to press. While in prison for participating in the Peoples Movement II, Kanak Mani Dixit, a prominent Kathmandu intellectual and editor of Himal South Asia, wrote: A voiceless people discovered the power of speech; they developed a condence unprecedented in their history (Dixit 2006). Indeed, over the past 15 years, the gure of voice has been especially invoked in discussions about the promises of democracy and transparent government. At the 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. Sentimental discourse about the voice reiterates modern neoliberal discourse about democracy and is central to the formation of a Nepali diaspora. The mediated and voiced production of an urban Nepali subject is shaped by the gure of the diaspora. This diaspora is made present in Kathmandu through two technologies of the voiceFM radio and the telephone. Here, I discuss the hearing and voicing of telephone calls made between Nepalis in Kathmandu and those abroad that are broadcast on a popular Kantipur FM program, Rumpum Connection (sponsored by Rumpum Noodles).4 Unlike many studies of diaspora, this analysis does not focus directly on a particular community of Nepalis living
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abroad but instead on the mediation of a diaspora within Kathmandu.5 Nor do I discuss place as the primary category through which diasporic communities emerge. Temporality and affect rather than shared territory shape the way in which this diaspora is constituted (Axel 2002). As Maoists wage a civil war against the state and many Nepalis are deeply dismayed by the government, particularly after the February 1 coup, and after the economy has plummeted over the past decade, technologies of the voice both aggravate and alleviate Nepali dreams of contact across great distances. Fantasies of escaping the current war and of earning enough money to support a middleclass life in Nepal are constantly belied by stories about the difcult and sometimes horric conditions of work abroad. This contradiction produces anxieties that loom large, making the material and symbolic presence of Nepali diasporas increasingly important to urban sociality in Kathmandu.6 Programs on FM radio such as Rumpum Connection interpellate a Nepali diaspora among urban subjects, creating discursive forms through which they become recognized by others as well as by themselves. Interpellation is an address that regularly misses its mark, writes Judith Butler, expanding on Louis Althussers notion of interpellation. The mark interpellation makes is not descriptive, but inaugurative. It seeks to introduce a reality rather than report an existing one; it accomplishes this introduction through citation of existing convention (Butler 1997:33; emphasis mine). Interpellation occurs not only through the discursive structures of excitable speech (Butler 1997) but also through the mediums of technology. As William Mazzarella has suggested, media such as television or radio create the social entities society, nation, or culture that they claim to represent on air (Mazzarella 2004:357). FM radio is not simply a medium for broadcasting conversations with Nepalis abroad, but it produces, as one of its persuasive effects, the idea that urban Nepalis and a Nepali diaspora are entities that exist prior to their mediation through the telephone or radio. This effect must be situated within the broader history of FM radio and the political and economic conditions that create the presence of a Nepali diaspora in Kathmandu. Over the past two decades, money sent from abroad has become vitally important in supporting middle-class life in Kathmandu. Life abroad is increasingly associated with material and symbolic possibility, and it is thought of as a source of social redemption and nancial success.7 There are three main points about technological mediation that I discuss. First, FM radio programming generates particular temporalities. Live broadcasts heard simultaneously in Kathmandu and abroad are key to the making of a broad and intimate urban Nepali public and to the presence of a Nepali diaspora in Kathmandu. Second, the gure of voice and neoliberal discourses of democracy arise together through a semantic connection made between transparency and directness in descriptions of voice. This occurs in descriptions of both democratic governance and emotional immediacy. Third, and most importantly, I demonstrate the possibilities in what Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli call an ethnography of forms,
moving between the particular things animated on FM radiothe gure of voice, urban Nepali subjects, and a Nepali diasporaand the discursive and technological forms 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 Rumpum Connection are replete with references to potential telephone calls as well as to photos, emails, or letters. The excess of discourse about technology I refer to as technological phatic speech. As with other forms of phatic speech, such references to past or future communications do not convey any information but simply reiterate the strange fact that people seem to connect through technology. Attention to the material and discursive forms of FM programming, I argue, suggests links between the gure of voice and the gure of diaspora in contemporary urban Nepali subjectivity. The Voice The voice is a key aspect of technological mediation that shapes fantasies of presence projected by the radio and phone. There are several distinct understandings of the voice often simultaneously at work in the ethnographic examples presented here that are helpful to identify for analytic purposes. Each modality of voice raises specic questions about the kind of presence being produced. How, for example, does the mediated voice of the telephone and radio become the medium for producing affective relations, subjects, and diverse temporalities? How do these technologies of the voice congure a contemporary urban sociality in Kathmandu that centers on Nepalis living abroad? As a cultural and historical construct, the voice is often used as a metaphor to describe consciousness and empowerment, particularly among a group of people who have not been adequately represented in politics or history. This construct of voice can be found in a host of feminist writings such as Carol Gilligans wellknown In a Different Voice (1982). It also appears in the quest of subaltern studies historians (often through oral history) for a story that remains outside the purview of the state and has therefore not yet been recorded in ofcial history (Guha 1996).9 Anthropologys own historical preference for face-to-face interactions as the site of authentic and credible cultural information is similarly rooted in this logocentric understanding of the voice. Jacques Derrida (1974) rejects this construct of voice, which he claims informs 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 signs to be recognized and iterated outside the context of their production, always in ways that do not exactly reproduce any original meaning (Derrida 1988). Reversing common distinctions made between speech and writing, Derrida argues that writing, rather than speech, more aptly structures language.11
The ideology of the voice that Derrida critiques connotes ideas about empowerment, speech, and authenticity that project a historically specic notion of personhood. Such a construct of voice appears in the way FM radio is perceived in contemporary Kathmandu as a medium of transparent, direct connection. Listeners, journalists, and intellectuals alike describe FM radio as enabling unencumbered and 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 central mouthpiece of state and royal ideology during the monarchical Panchayat era, FM radio began broadcasting only six years after the reestablishment of democracy in 1990. It quickly became a symbol of a new democratic moment and its promises of free speech. FM programs are so different from those on Radio Nepal that many in Kathmandu describe them as completely different media. I dont listen to radio, many said. I listen to FM. The immediacy, directness, and transparency attributed to FM radio presumes the voice to be the natural indicator of presence, consciousness, and agency. This notion of voice and personhood is a key aspect of modern neoliberal discourse that has characterized Nepal since the reestablishment of democracy in 1990. The voice can also be described through its materiality or what might be called the 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 concepts and emotional feeling.12 The sonic voice creates sensations of presence and immediacy that are frequently referred to by listeners of radio as well as scholars of the voice and language. Kathmandu listeners, for example, make frequent reference to the melodramatic or melodic tones of the radio hosts voices, which make them feel as if they are really there with them or really feeling the sadness or suffering expressed in listeners letters. These two models of voice assume that the voice and meaning, sound and intention, are coterminous with one another. Friedrich Kittler (1999) offers another, more persuasive model of the voice that combines Marshall McLuhans (1965) emphasis on the materiality of technology with a Foucauldian analysis of discourse. Kittlers analysis proposes a contingent relation of sound and meaning. Technology accounts for both the cultural and historical construct of voice as well as the sonic voice. Only when human sounds are transposed onto technological forms, such as the gramophone, the radio, or the telephone, Kittler argues, does speech become the voice as a medium of directness, authenticity, and truth. Such technologies do not require a hearing subject to record sound and therefore record not only the symbolic, meaningful sound of language but also intrusions of meaningless noise, such as the hissing of the machine. Technology thus produces both the voice and the originary quality of the voice that appears to precede its technological recording. Ironically then, the discourse about transparency or the immediacy of the voice emerges as an aftereffect of technological recording.
Kittlers analysis suggests several effects of technologies of the voice. Recorded sound no longer has contact with the body and thereby appears to create a perfect record of the voice that seems to lie outside human consciousness and the body.13 Unlike face-to-face conversations that rely on visual, aural, and gestural cues, the radio and the telephone rely on a single sensory mode, distilling all messages into the voice alone. The disembodied quality of recorded sound makes its messages appear to be transparent, unmediated, and direct. When discussing the potential of FM radio, listeners frequently invoke concepts such as true self, direct emotion, or transparent politicsconcepts that are integrally tied to the indexicality of the voice and the radios reliance on a single sensory mode. Recorded voices thus appear to be more real and more pure than language spoken face to face, with its multiple sensory registers and gestures. A secondary effect is that recorded voices draw attention to the conventions of everyday language and the fact that all language is mediated through human consciousness and cultural categories. Recording technologies, then, make it possible for people to imagine ineffable or transparent messages that seem to defy the symbolic quality of words.14 Nepali Diaspora on Air Starting in 1996, FM radio stations were the rst semiprivate electronic media in Nepal, and they radically changed the format of broadcasting. The program Rumpum Connection, broadcast on Kantipur FM, is part of what some have called the FM revolution (Kunreuther 2004; Onta 2002). FM radio interpellates Nepali subjects into a broad public dened through constant interaction and the everyday expression of common problems and familial and intimate affairs.15 Initially the different FM stations broadcast on a single band (FM 100), together called Kathmandu FM, which targeted the urban, educated elite within the Kathmandu Valley.16 Now, a decade later, there are at least 56 FM stations with government licenses, only nine of which are located in the Kathmandu Valley. Yet as the FM band expands to include a wider range of stations, many programs actually help reinforce the centrality of Kathmandu Valley in national imaginings. The Communication Corner, for example, is a program aired on several FM stations outside Kathmandu that aims to bring listeners from outside the Valley emotionally close to the center by providing them updates on happenings in Kathmandu (Onta 2001: 4). Rumpum Connection engages a similar dynamic, but rather than seeking to affectively draw villagers into urban life, the program aims to invoke the presence of Nepalis abroad, guratively drawing them into the public space of the nations capital. The program began in 2001 and is based on the broadcast of telephone calls between Kathmandu Nepalis and their friends or relatives abroad. A day before the program is aired, Rumpums host, a young, energetic woman named Anamika Pradhan, who is known professionally by her rst name only, arranges several
phone calls for Kathmandu residents who have written letters or emails requesting a specied call abroad. At noon on Saturdays, a day when most Nepalis are at home, Anamika makes a series of conference calls from the Kantipur FM studio. These calls ostensibly connect Kathmandu residents with their friends or families abroad. Yet Rumpum Connection does not in fact make a connection between disparate parties, as its name suggests. Instead, the very notion of connection constructs the subjects of urban Nepali and Nepali diaspora that come into being through the show. They become social categories through which callers and listeners recognize others as well as themselves. The conversations on Rumpum Connection are public only to listeners in Kathmandu.17 Although the speakers from abroad may be expecting a call from their family or friend, they do not hear their phone calls broadcast throughout the city. The programs popularity is a broader sign of the desire among urban Nepalis to communicate in public with their friends and family abroad. Listeners of Rumpum Connection commend the program because, they say, it enables them to speak for free. The callers consist largely of a growing consumer class that is increasingly dependent on the remittance economy and the forms of consumption this new wealth enables.18 If the calls appear to be a gift from Kantipur FM, they mask the ways in which the program constitutes, circulates, and publicizes the subjects and social relations that enable a transnational consumer economy to ourish. The program goes further to actually cultivate desires for further consumption and public conversation at the same time as it seems to ease personal and familial losses on 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 appear political. This may be owing to the government censorship on FM programs or public discussions that deal explicitly with religion or politics, as well as more recently, a government ordinance that made it illegal for any media program to speak against the monarchy. In spite of the personal nature of the calls, the program is clearly a politically charged arena that produces Nepaliness, rst by creating the categories of urban Nepalis or Nepalis at home and the Nepali diaspora, and then by seeming to unite these Nepali subjects within the broadcast of the program itself. The political and economic context in which this Nepali diaspora emerges, however, reveals the political implications of radio conversations that often appear to be without any direct political content. Most studies of diaspora focus especially on peoples relation to a place of origin. Despite the number of Nepalis who moved to British India during colonial times in search of work or education (in contrast to Indian indentured laborers, who were sent out of India), it would be a misnomer to group them together as a Nepali diaspora.19 Diasporaa word that stems from a root meaning dispersalmust include a minimum of two destinations from where different multigenerational groups relate to one another through their connection to a national homeland (Butler 2001:192). Be they the famed Gurkha soldiers, migrant laborers, or elite Nepalis
who traveled to Indian cities for school, these different Nepalis did not maintain much contact amongst themselves as Nepalis who shared a mutual connection to Nepal.20 As Brian Axel points out, the emphasis on place unwittingly contributes to an essentialization of origins and fetishization of what is supposedly to be found 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 particular diasporic identity. Although studies of diaspora seek to problematize narratives of nationalism by including nationalists who reside outside the homeland, the conation of place with identity paradoxically has the effect of reinscribing the signicance of territory to national imaginings. A specically diasporic identity is now emerging among Nepalis around the world, and much of this identity is informed, at least partially, by a mutual connection to place. My emphasis is not on describing this identity or discussing the explicitly political program of Nepalis abroad. Drawing on Axels work, I suggest instead that the cultural category of diaspora emerges through the production of temporality and relations of affect on media such as FM radio. The telephone conversations on Rumpum Connection, for example, generate a temporality of the simultaneous, as well as affective, connections through which urban Nepalis and the Nepali diaspora converse and appear present to one another. Technologies of voice also obscure this process and project a fantasy of presence and immediacy that enables newly constituted subjects to imagine themselves connecting through the radio and the telephone. The emergence of a Nepali diaspora has been heavily inuenced by state agendas. Over the past decade, the Nepali state has actively encouraged Nepali citizens to pursue work outside the country, in part because the national economy depends enormously on remittances sent from abroad. Since the mid-1980s, the Nepali state has entered into contracts with other states through foreign employment agenciescolloquially known as manpower agenciesto send Nepali laborers to foreign countries.21 For a fee incurred by the Nepali citizen (which can be as high as NPR80,000, or $1,150, and much more when taking into account additional moving expenses), the manpower agencies interview, select, and ultimately arrange to send a specied number of workers with ofcial work visas to a particular job abroad. Often the agencies nd ways to circumvent the Ministry of Labor and collect additional fees, thereby shortening the process but also making these laborers unofcial (Seddon et al. 2001:69).22 The states endorsement of the movement of its citizens abroad points to some of the unique features of the diaspora that emerge on Rumpum Connection. Callers on Rumpum Connection range from migrant villagers living in Kathmandu to middle-class Kathmandu families. Given that the vast majority of requests are for calls to Malaysia or the Persian Gulfwhere currently the least-educated Nepali laborers are employed through manpower agenciesit is clear that most callers 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 nor the wealthy professionals. Rather, they are people who have managed to get just enough cash together to leave the country in pursuit of middle-class respectability and a comfortable retirement in Nepal. Such diasporic fantasies are implicit in many Rumpum conversations, which, in many ways, can be seen as extensions of state interests. The idea for Rumpum Connection emerged from transnational ows of people and language. It was conceived of by the only British manager of Kantipur FM after he heard a similar program broadcast in London. Anamika explained that, initially, she and a young man were chosen to cohost the program because they could understand and speak good English.23 After a year, she became the sole host. You dont 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, educated Nepalis. 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 Nepali space that transcends the political borders of the nation-state. But the fact that only subjects within Nepal hear Rumpum conversations suggests that the program actually reinforces the territorial claims of the nation-state. The phone calls virtually span the globe and are made primarily to family members but also to girlfriends, boyfriends, or simply good friends. As many Nepalis abroad live with other Nepalis, if the requested person is not at home, oftentimes the caller will simply converse with a person he or she has never met. As Anamika explained to me, she never entertains phone calls between Nepalis and non-Nepali foreigners living abroad. The main premise of the show, she said, is to cultivate ties between Nepalis around the world:
There are a lot of Nepalese people around the world, but even so, we are not able to reach them. Therefore, why should one converse with foreigners? Very many numbers of foreigners come [to this program]. But I cut those out. I dont honor those. Those are not allowed. Its not really that foreigners are not allowed, but there are a lot of people, Nepalese people, around the world who want to talk. . . . Instead, speak with another 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 materialize these social relations. The national premise of the program suggests that it might be considered a quintessential example of long-distance nationalism (Anderson 1998; Schiller and Fouron 2001).24 Yet despite its attempt to create a virtual Nepali space, Rumpum Connection does not engage a diasporic subject reaching back toward the homeland like other forms of long-distance nationalism; instead, it publicizes Nepali subjects in Kathmandu reaching out toward the diaspora and ostensibly bringing those voices of diasporic Nepalis back.25 The diaspora, the Nepali voice, and the sense of Nepaliness that the program generates make Nepalis who are dispersed around the world appear like ghostly presences within Kathmandu.
Transparent Voices: Conversations on Rumpum Connection A vast majority of Rumpum conversations are spent discussing and envisioning who is listening in Kathmandu and who may be sitting beside the speaker that is abroad. Speakers refer to invisible but known listeners and, by implication, to other potential listeners who may be anonymous. At the same time, direct reference to relatives and personal friends seems to subvert the public nature of the conversation. In most conversations broadcast on Rumpum Connection, there is an explicit tension between the hosts wish to emphasize the public format of the program and the personal, domestic, and familial forms of the speakers conversations.26 Consider the following conversation between Anup and his didi Meena, who lives in Canada.27 After Meena initially tries to establish exactly where Anup is calling from, the host, Anamika, interrupts and explains, Meenaji, this is being broadcast over the radio. Everyone can now hear your conversation. If you have anything to say from your side, you may say it.
Anup: Meena: A: Didi (older sister), Maijuharu (uncles wives) are listening upstairs. Oh really? Dai (older brother) and bhauju (brothers wife) are listening? Mama (maternal uncle), my oldest mama, went out to the elds, 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 urges Anup to continue talking. Anup returns again to describing who is listening, and Meena continues to envision the scene of listening. And Sambhu? Meena asks, referring to another relative.
A: M: A: Sambhu is over there listening to the radio. He doesnt want to talk. Hes listening at Aravs place. Why not? Hes over there listening.
Anamika interrupts and again tries to explain the public nature of their exchange: Hes too shy to speak on the radio.
A: M: A: M: My younger brother is shy, but not me. Arav is also there? Yes, Arav is also listening over there. La, say something to Arav. 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 Meenas husband] there?
M: A: Yes, he is here. Let me talk to Uncle.
This conversation is not unique in its preoccupation with identifying the invisible listeners by name. The constant references to who is listening becomes a way for those Nepalis abroad to become part of the urban space of Kathmandu, marking their presence and subjectivity in a eld where they are otherwise invisible.
Naming is a form of hailing, Judith Butler (1997) has argued, which interpellates speakers into a given social spacein this case, into the world of the family, the diaspora, and urban Nepal. Through interpellation, Meena emerges as a subject who 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 and locating these silent listeners, callers bring forth and constitute an invisible public as really there. This process establishes a relationship between the diaspora and urban Nepalis that then becomes a vital part of the urban publics created through FM radio. Anamika told me that she thought the possibility of reaching many family members at onceand especially the possibility of hearing loved ones voices togetherwas one of the programs great appeals. There is something particularly evocative about hearing a loved ones voice, not just over the telephone but circulated 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 gure out many thingswhether that person is happy or not. How is it there? What is there? All of the family has the opportunity to listen at the same time. If Im the one person speaking, and if the radio is on, then everyone else can hear that persons voice. Whatever conversation is going on, its very transparent. Everyone can listen to it.
The gure of the voice creates a sense of immediacy and direct connection, which Anamika refers to as transparenta quality made possible by electronic technology such as the radio and telephone (Kittler 1999; Morris 2002). The materiality of the voice that Anamika speaks of here, and its signicance as a vehicle of directness, is part of broader ideological discussions about the voice and radio as transparent mediums. Transparency was frequently invoked in discussions about the potential of FM radio, particularly by journalists and Nepali intellectuals in their conversations about political agency, freedom of expression, and increased participation enabled by democracy. Dev Raj Dahal argues that all media face the task of promoting and enabling a level of transparency that might counter otherwise destructive rumors and governmental lies. He suggests that FM radio stations, because of their limited range, have the potential to enable a free ow of information at the local level (Dahal 2002:45). In the legislative sphere, writes Dahal, giving people a voice means a higher level of political participation in the very centre of policy making. . . . Nepals government and its development partners have provided voice and participation to the media in legislative debates (Dahal 2002:3435). In such discussions, the voice and transparency are both used to describe better governance and a form of political agency that enables civilians to participate in politics and speak against the state.29 This discourse of transparency is echoed in Anamikas reference to the transparent voice on Rumpum Connection as well as in listeners letters and comments to many other FM programs, suggesting a more general understanding of the voice
among a wide audience of FM listeners. As in discussions about political transparency, the voice becomes the locus and medium associated with direct, unmediated expression. But the sense of what constitutes transparency and freedom of expression on commercial FM stations centers on personal topics and intimate affairs. Furthermore, instead of invoking ideas of consciousness or agencywho has the right to the oorthe transparency on FM entertainment programs invokes a spatial and emotional presence that is frequently attributed to the sound and sonic nature of the voice. Because of the obvious connections to the body, Steven Feld argues, hearing and voicing link the felt sensations of sound to those of emotional and physical presence (1996:97).30 A letter sent to Kalyan Gautum, the popular host of the FM program Mero Katha, Mero Gt (My Story, My Song), in November 1997, begins by referring to the power of Kalyans voice: Your melancholy voice tells someones real life story, in which there is a little bit of pleasure and a little bit of happiness. When I hear those words in your voice, it seems as if you are really crying, or as if you are feeling pleasure. The very notion of reality and authentic emotion that this woman describes strikingly depends on appropriate representation and the prosodic features of a voice 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 raison d tre of their listening, the siren call that convinces them to participate in such e programs. The voice here comes to stand not for direct political participation and good governance but rather for a quality of social connection and emotional directness associated with FM radio. Many listeners describe their enchantment with a radio voice as having the power to channel emotions that the listeners themselves cannot express in words. Radio hosts encourage their listeners to speak your minds and hearts, and fan letters repeat such messages nearly verbatim. A July 1996 letter to the FM program Heart to Heart stated: I really like your program because it helps you reveal all our true emotions (emphasis mine). Hosts become master empathizers who are able to express adequately and accurately what the listeners feel.31 Frequent references to the listeners inability to articulate what they feel are also described in terms of authentic emotions. If the lilt and tone of the radio voice become a route to stardom for the radio host, for the listeners these prosodic features of the voice articulate messages that seem to transcend the symbolic quality of words.32 As Kittler suggests, media such as radio do not have to make do with the grid of the symbolic. That is to say, they reconstruct bodies not only in a system of words or colors or sound intervals. . . . It refers to the bodily real, which of necessity escapes all symbolic grids (Kittler 1999:1112). Ironically, recording technologies that transmit peoples voices make it possible for people to imagine real messages without words and for the voice itself to be perceived as the medium best suited for the ideals of transparency and direct connection. The emotional directness that listeners ascribe to the radio voice arises alongside political aspirations of transparency and participation after 1990. Both dreams
of transparency imagine FM radio as providing unmediated access to the world of politics, 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 different formations of voice are mutually constitutive. Neoliberal discourses of democracy feature the voice as an element of transparent government and reiterate the sentimental fantasies of emotional directness and immediacy that characterize FM entertainment programs. One must wonder, What material qualities of the radio or the 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 programs. Telephone and telegraph technology were initially introduced by the British Residency in 1872 and were used in specic Rana family homes by 1935.33 The rst private lines became available only after the Ranas were removed from power in 1951, although only 100 lines were put in place at that time (Nep l Dursanch r a a Sansth n [Nepal Telecommunication Corporation] v.s. 2056). When I rst trava eled to Nepal in 198990, telephones were still a rarity in most urban middle-class homes. The most common way of reaching a person within the Kathmandu Valley was simply to go to his or her house or to call from a corner shop. As a material object, telephones entered most homes after they had acquired televisions and at the same time as refrigerators; they signied a level of middle-class domesticity and disposable income initially associated with those who traveled or had contacts overseas. Telephones became a common household technology in Kathmandu in the 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 professional 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 as connecting distant places as much as distant people. Common greetings on the telephone suggest the way in which the voice is conceived of as a material, embodied part of oneself that can travel to another place. When telephones rst a entered Nepalis homes, often a person answered the phone by asking, Kaha b ta fon garnubhaeko? (Where are [you] calling from)? Similarly, the caller usually asked, Kaha 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 k nma paryo ([Youve] landed in my ear). a This telephone greeting is now a sign of class position. It is no longer used by more cosmopolitan Nepalis and is mocked by them as ga ule (of the village). The very sense of the materiality of the voice may be closely tied to a lower class position, which suggests, in part, who is speaking in Rumpum conversations. One woman, for example, began and ended her conversation on Rumpum Connection by profusely thanking the FM family for allowing my phone and my voice to reach Nepal (mero fon ra swar Nep lm pugyo). a a
During the mid-1990s, youths began using the phone to connect with otherwise inaccessible acquaintances through what is colloquially known as a blaf kal (bluff call). The friendships that develop through these bluff calls are often between two people who have been introduced by a mutual friend, or they are the result of a misdialed or randomly dialed number.34 A 23-year-old daughter of a family I frequently visited often invited a young man to the house and to family events. He lived close to the apartment where I was staying, and one evening while we were traveling home together, I asked him how he and Sarjana had met. He replied matter of factly, On the phone. He had apparently misdialed his friends number and reached Sarjana instead. They began to talk and quickly became regular phone friends. Only after a year or so of this phone relationship did they begin to meet each other in person. The purpose of these bluff calls is to engage a stranger (usually a member of the opposite sex) in conversation and hopefully reestablish this connection again and again.35 In a letter sent to the program Friends and Trends on Hits FM station in October 1996, a listener described his participation in a bluff-call relationship this way: She . . . started [a] bluff call about 4 years ago. Gradually we became phone friend[s]. . . . We used to talk about several topics, such as music, cinema, education, love, etc. . . . I couldnt forget those golden moments when we shared our views about everything. Relationships that develop over the phone in these bluff calls are powerful because they appear to be unentangled and circumvent the usual pressures of family and social control.36 One popular radio presenter told me about a phone relationship he had over the course of two years with a young woman whom he had never met. He fondly remembered this as his only real relationship. The ability to connect over the phone becomes a context that many young people in Kathmandu describe in subjective terms as a freer and more real emotional attachment. The subjects of urban youth who appear to be represented through the phone in fact emerge through their conversations on the telephone. The form of sociality on FM radio echoes the form of such bluff-call conversations. Bluff calls begin as a meeting between strangers who become intimate in part because of the sound of their voice and their conversations about a shared public world. The phenomenon of bluff calls, like the programs on FM radio, relies on an audience-oriented subjectivity in which a person constitutes him- or herself by addressing a stranger in intimate terms. Stranger intimacy is an attribute of most modern publics, which Michael Warner denes as a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself (Warner 2002:50). Although the telephone conversations between two individuals may not constitute a public, the form of discourse that bluff calls rely on bears strong resemblance to the self-organized discourse 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 audience. Like all FM programs, the conversations on Rumpum Connection are
performances that produce not only a connection to another distant person but also, crucially, a self-conscious, othering relation to oneself. This seemingly distant relation to oneself is a fundamental part of the Kathmandu callers experience on Rumpum Connection: as they sit in a room with other family members or friends, they simultaneously speak and hear their own voices broadcast over the radio. Indeed, part of the appeal of speaking on FM radio in its early days was the ability to connect with others while simultaneously hearing oneself projected back through the radio, thereby seeming to be in two places at once. As one FM station manager told me, It doesnt matter what you say. People just want to talk and hear their voices broadcast next to them. This double relation between self-distancing and self-recognition is characteristic of all forms of mediation, William Mazzarella argues, including ritual as well as mass-mediated forms, where the relationship is particularly obvious (Mazzarella 2004:357). There is something specic about the relationship between self-recognition and the othering of oneself on Kathmandu FM programs. The self-distancing aspect of Rumpum Connection conversations is doubled. On the one hand, there is the spatial distance that denes a diaspora, and, on the other hand, there are the effects of the media (radio and telephone) that create and simultaneously seek to subvert this spatial distance through temporal simultaneity and a fantasy of presence. On many FM programs, as in many bluff calls, novel relationships and discourse occur as if these ways of thinking about self and social relationships were always therethey just needed a form and place for expression. The FM band presents itself as just that place, even as it creates the discourse and terms on which this expression takes place. Rumpum Connection creates what Axel calls a diasporic imaginary within Kathmandu. The diasporic imaginary is a social process that constitutes a specic diasporic community, not primarily through a relationship to place but through formations of temporality and affect (Axel 2002:412).37 The circulation of public conversations on Rumpum Connection effectively makes the diaspora and urban Nepali subjects appear to be already established social entities, linked together in this performance of intimate attachment between Nepalis in Kathmandu and abroad. The diasporic imaginary produced on Rumpum Connection is different from Axels example of the Sikh diaspora, not only in terms of its content but primarily because it engages those not living in the diaspora. Anamika believed the reason so many people liked to hear these intimate family conversations is because it gave them an idea of what it is like to live and work abroad and it reminded them of their own connections with Nepalis overseas. Listeners, however, thought the program was primarily about communicating with relatives or friends, and the conversations I heard always centered on family affairs and events in Nepal and only discussed what it is like to live abroad in the most general terms. Although the programs content does not discuss life in the diaspora explicitly, 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 are presented as connected yet distinct from those listeners in Kathmandu. In this sense, as Anamika surmised, the program reminds people of their own connections with Nepalis overseas, and in the process, constitutes the Nepali diaspora as spatially separate 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 states Radio Nepal programs and those of commercial FM stations, listeners reply that FM programs are live. In contrast to the scripted monotone of Radio Nepal, live FM broadcasts foreground the seeming directness of their transmission through, among other things, a poetics of spontaneity, accident, or technical mishaps. The liveness of FM broadcasts encodes a temporality that is immediate and instant, in which individualized subjects are brought into simultaneous and intimate connection via the apparent miracle of broadcast technology. The scene projected by live broadcasts is one in which the radio host and the listeners appear physically distant from one another but nevertheless talking to each other at the same time. The constitutive links between the technology, its temporal features, and the subjects it invokes are obscured by this fantasy of co-presence. Live broadcasting, according to some radio hosts, adds to the authenticity of FM programs. One radio host from Radio City FM 98.8 clearly distinguished her program, Jindagika Ayamharu (Perspectives on Life), from similar programs by claiming that she always broadcasts her program live. Compared to the longer standing program Mero Katha, Mero Gt, 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 Gt] sometimes records his reading [of listeners letters]I know he does, Uma told me, as if she were revealing something she thought Kalyan would rather not have known. Do you know how I 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 particular contrast, 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 were there with the person. People tell me this: I feel that you are with us. A live program produces temporal simultaneity between the radio host and his or her listeners, making them feel as if you [the host] are with us. This temporality is subverted in a recorded program when one hears the hissing of a machine. Recording a live program as it is broadcast does not present a problem for Uma. She recorded every program and kept these cassettes at home in case anyone wishes to hear them again.38 The use of phone calls or listeners letters enhance the self-recognition and self-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 to recognize themselves and their words reexively, as if from a distance. A public reproduces itself through this reexive circulation of its own discourse (Warner 2002:66). These forms of self-reexive circulation resemble the popular forms of self-reexive circulation in other mediafor example, letters from viewers, the presence of studio audiences, or on-the-street interviews. These genres, Warner suggests, create feedback loops to characterize their own space of consumption (2002:71). The reexive circulation of a publics discourse creates new ways of organizing timea temporality marked by punctuality rather than by a continuous stream of 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 with what Raymond Williams (1974) calls the owthe ephemeral nature of which conveys the here and now. People experience this thinning of time as a loosening of social controls, argues Arvind Rajagopal, while it also evokes feelings of closeness and reciprocity to unknown participants who may exist only in imagination (Rajagopal 2001:5). Thus, electronic media such as television or radio in particular seem to have the capacity to subvert or reach beneath political or cultural constraints and reveal underlying essential truths of politics, society, personhood, or emotion. The temporality that the radio medium encodes provides the conditions for people to experience radio conversations as unmediated transactions. On programs such as Rumpum Connection, temporal simultaneity is fundamental to their creation of a shared space of Nepaliness. During our interview at the FM stations ofce, Anamika drew attention to the fact that Rumpum Connection was live, emphasizing its ephemeral qualities: You have to be very quick. Because with a live show, this is the difcult part. You cannot edit. Once it goes on its gone. Anamika felt her most important role in this program was to become an on-the-spot editor and censor, who listened carefully for provocative questions about the government and especially about the King. She also claimed that the programs liveness was crucial to its success. In these brief conversations broadcast 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 abroad frequently interferes with the fantasy of presence and simultaneity generated by the 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 can often hear the differences in time through their groggy voices and yawns. How is your son? Is he asleep? one caller asked his cousin, who resided in North America. Yes, of course, she replied, its 3 a.m.! Because Nepal uses a nonRoman calendar, quite often the failure of temporal simultaneity centers on the differences 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 todays date anyway? Today is November 1 over here. What day is it over there? These intrusions subvert the intended portrayal of simultaneity on the live broadcasts, accentuating the temporal and spatial divides that separate the speakers, a separation that technology creates and then aims to bridge. Technological Phatic Perhaps the failure of complete simultaneity is one reason why so many conversations on Rumpum Connection center almost exclusively on the various medialetters, emails, telephone callsthrough which the speakers imagine they will connect or have connected.39 Roman Jakobsons analysis of the six functions of speech helps us understand the social importance of immediacy and why listeners enchantment with the medium itself appears so often in their conversations on FM radio. To relay a message over the radio or in any conversation, a speaker must convey a referent and a context that the listener can grasp; together, they must share a lexical code, and they must be able to make contact through a physical and psychological connection [that] . . . enables both of them to enter and stay in communication (Jakobson 1987:66). Speech that centers on this ability to make contact is what Jakobson, following Bronislaw Malinowski, refers to as the phatic function of language. Phrases such as How are you? or You know? are often used simply to prolong communication without exchanging any information (Jakobson 1987; Malinowski 1953). This is a standard exchange on an FM call-in show:
Host: Caller: H: C: H: C: H: C: H: C: H: Hello, do you hear me? Yes, I hear you. Hello. Where are you calling from? Im calling from Baneswar. And your name? Im Raju from Baneswar. Okay, Rajuji, have you eaten rice? Yes, Ive eaten. And you? Yes, Ive eaten. And what would you like to say, Raju dai? I like your program very much. And I would like to say hello to my sisters and friends. Okay, Im putting [the phone] down. Goodbye, a big thanks for calling.
This typical conversation functions primarily in the phatic mode. The actual information these two speakers share is minimal. Their exchange centers instead on checking whether the channel of communication is clear. Both host and caller repeat a common colloquial greeting, Have you eaten rice? (Bhat khanubhyo?), which seems to ask for specic information but in fact is used to begin a conversation or simply establish contact between acquaintances passing on the street. It is inected with a sense of familiarity and habitual meeting. Such conversations resemble the conversations frequently heard in the United States when people reach for 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 of social relations. Such discourse becomes the link between technology and voice by 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 identify the caller through two key indicatorsplace (Where are you calling from?) and name (What is your name?). Both of these questions transform an anonymous voice into a particular person with a social identity (Im Raju from Baneswar). At the same time, the question Where are you calling from? may also work to 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, it allows callers to engage in a fantasy of presence by repeating the simple fact that they can connect through the telephone and the radio. On Rumpum Connection, the various mediums that course through any given conversation invoke the speakers relation to Nepal and to the diaspora, for themselves 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 connect through technology, without directly referring to the content of those messages. Such frequent references to various mediums of communication might be thought of as a form of technological phatic speech. The excess of phatic speech on Rumpum Connection reveals the mediating qualities of the voice and also becomes a poignant expression of intimacy. Using technological phatic speech, Rumpum callers draw attention to the media through which they communicate between Kathmandu and the diaspora as they construct a dialogue that is largely about contact itself. Here is an excerpt from a conversation broadcast on Rumpum Connection between Indira, a Nepali woman working in Israel, and a male relative, Purusottam, presumably her husband, in Kathmandu, that illustrates the use of technological phatic speech.40 Particularly striking in this exchange is the overlap between the visual and the voiced, as speakers try to picture their loved ones on the other end of the line. After the requisite statement of their names, the conversation begins with Indira asking about her young daughter, whom she eventually talks to on the phone:
Purusottam: Indira: P: I: P: I: P: Is everything okay there? Everything is ne. How is everything there? How is my daughter? She is listening right now. I told her that her mothers phone call would come here today. Shes sitting right here. Oh ho! How happy am I! A big thank you to Kantipur FM, from my side. 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) in Israel.Did she call or not? She hasnt called. When are you going to call again? After three weeks.
Presumably, Purusottam said something about money, referring to the missed phone call or switching the subject completely, as Indira responds:
Indira: Send money? How should I send money? Sending money involves many, many problems. What to do?
Purusottam quickly tries to steer the conversation away from money, perhaps to avoid discussing such a personal subject through this public medium:
Purusottam: Indira: First I will talk to my family, and then we will talk on the phone [about sending money]. Promise to call me on Saturday. I will wait all day at the phone . . . . Tell my close ones that I miss them a lot and think of them. Nobody sends any letters to me. I check the mailbox every day, and nothing comes. Every day the mailbox is empty. I have looked every day. Listen, listen, did the letter from Dangol reach you yet or not? I received one letter only, the one of October 26, to which I replied. Did you receive that yet? That letter hasnt reached here yet.
P: I: P:
A few minutes later, Indira asks to speak to her daughter, who has been sitting by the radio listening in. A little girl, probably between six and eight years old, gets on the phone:
Daughter: Indira: D: I: What will you bring me from there, Ama? Oh, pants, dolls, clotheverything for my princess. . . . Did you receive anything from your father for Deshain? Yes, shoes, clothes. Thats all. 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 immediately with a discussion of moneythe main reason Indira traveled to Israel and a key medium through which Nepalis abroad relate to their families in Kathmandu. The veiled and sometimes explicit discussions of money reveal the complex issues of class in this diaspora. Most callers on Rumpum Connection have managed to get enough money to travel abroad, but once there, they have become part of the vast laboring class, struggling rst to pay back their debts at home and then to earn enough to contribute to their familys income. As in many Rumpum conversations, the discussion of money indicates the failure of this medium to adequately connectIndira notes only how difcult it is to send money. The subject of money in Rumpum Connection conversations simultaneously evokes the affection implied in sending money and its use as a medium of intimacy between distant families. As Danilyn Rutherford (2001) has argued, the exchange of money not only homogenizes values and erodes intimacies, it often serves as a vehicle 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. In the 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 the one 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 as tokens of affection between Nepalis in Kathmandu and abroad. When speaking to her daughter, Indira asks for a photograph that depicts the fathers affectionate giving on the national holiday of Deshain. As with hearing their voices over the phone, seeing a photo indicates to Indira that her daughter is really there. The indexical properties of the voice and a photograph create dreams of direct access to the person on the other line or the person pictured in the photograph. However, too much talk about money is somewhat taboo, particularly in such a public setting as an FM radio program. Purusottam quickly turns the conversation away from the exchange of money to the exchanges they engage in through other mediumstelephone calls and letters. Here again, the focus is on the possibility of connecting and failure to connect: Did [Ritu] call you or not? She hasnt called. Or Did the letter from Dangol reach you yet? I received one letter only . . . to which I replied. Did you receive that yet? That letter hasnt reached here yet. Even more poignantly, Indira remarks on her constant checking and disappointment at seeing an empty mailbox day after day. For making contact, each medium has its advantages and disadvantages: radio generates temporal simultaneity; letters delay contact and are often discussed in terms of a potential future. In another Rumpum Connection conversation, a young man discusses the benets and problems with chatting over the Internet. Nowadays we cannot even do voice chat, the young man says to his cousin in North America. Whenever I go on line, you are not there, and whenever you go on line, Im not there. Little information is actually exchanged in these references to other technologies. Such technological phatic discourse evokes the pathos of the program and thereby draws in an audience of listeners. Like many FM radio hosts, Anamika herself has become a fetish of connection with a special power to facilitate connection between people living far away.42 Anamika told me that she frequently receives giftschocolate, perfume, jeans, bags, cards, knickknacksfrom her listeners in Kathmandu and around the world. Sometimes listeners come to meet Anamika at the studio, as they do with many FM radio program hosts. More often, however, as she explained, Its only over the phone and over the mail. That person hasnt seen me, and I havent seen that person. The form of attachment that people express toward Anamika is somewhat different from the aura of a celebrity. It is assumed that listeners can and will enter into gift transactions with her in ways that strikingly resemble the acts and desires discussed 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, they incorporate Anamika into these same exchanges. Conclusion As in many places, contests over political power in Nepal often involve gaining control over the media to communicate with subjects or citizens. Given the signicance 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 FMs studio in October 2005 are not at all surprising. This article is concerned only with the constitutive processes enacted by technology rather than with the alignment of sides in the current political conict. None of the conversations explored herein refer explicitly to the politics of the nation, but their forms of mediation and the meanings they generate register some of the national anxieties being produced in Kathmandu today. For example, the simple and persistent desire for contact across borders, which may be taken away at any moment, is perhaps one key symptom of the current political and economic distress. In this article I have traced the connections between the materiality and mediating qualities of radio and telephone voices and the discourses of transparency and emotional directness that the voices invoke. Sentimental discourse about unmediated, real or true emotions and notions of transparent governance are two formations of voice that are mutually constitutive, arising together in the context of neoliberal democratic reform and the dislocations associated with it. Through the technologies of voice explored here, urban Nepali subjects and a Nepali diaspora emerge together as distinct already present social entities that subsequently encounter the miraculous workings of technology. More poignantly, these technologies of the voice reveal, to listeners and anthropologists alike, the mediation of everyday social life within and outside the radio and telephone context. As Nepal increasingly becomes a site of military and economic crisis, even after April 2006, life abroad appears to offer the only promise of escape. Yet Nepalis in Kathmandu also are confronted with the extremes of material wealth associated with this promise and by stories about the difculty of working abroad and frequent encounters with brute oppression. I have shown that the emergence of this diaspora occurs not primarily through attachment to place but rather through specic temporalities and relations of affect, each of which are effects of technological mediation. Dreams of contact and the excess of phatic speech on FM radio programs both allay and express the contradiction between a desire to ee and the failed promises of the diaspora. More than this, it is in such moments of political and economic crisis that something normally concealedthe power of technology to create illusions of realnessis revealed through technological phatic speech. Unlike discourses that attempt to make a technological apparatus vanish so that the voice appears all the more real, this phatic discourse emphasizes the agency of technology involved in satisfying the seemingly antecedent desire for connection. In technological phatic speech, subjects appear as individuals who exist prior to the broadcast or telephone call and whose needs and desires are met by the miraculous interventions of technology. By looking closely at the materiality of communication by radio and telephone, along with the discourses they produce, the voice can be seen more clearly as an effect of technology and a medium rather than as a metaphor and seat of consciousness, agency, and intentionality. This formulation requires us to consider the materiality of the sonic voicethe lilts and tones that people refer to as
particularly evocativeas well as the cultural and historical construct of the voice as a sign of transparency and emotional directness, and as a key element in democratic discourse. It requires us to consider the overlaps of different mediums within any given technology of voice and ask how these overlaps are productive of the voice as well as of the subjects the radio and telephone seek to represent. And nally, it requires us to consider the signicance of diasporic voices that emerge as a ghostly presence in Kathmandu. This ghostly presence of the diaspora, created through technologies of voice, evokes a pervasive sense of what it means to be Nepali within urban Nepal today.
Notes
Acknowledgments. My thanks goes rst and foremost to Nepalis who have helped and engaged me at different levels of my research: Sanjeev Pokharel for his help on research on manpower agencies and for conversations and support in Nepal and elsewhere, Saroj Dhakal for help with transcription and translation, and members of Kantipur FM, particularly Anamika Pradhan, for giving me their time and insights about FM radio. I would also like to thank several individuals whose comments on earlier drafts of this article helped rene the argument: Virginia Dominguez, Aaron Fox, Daniel Karpowitz, Mandana Limbert, Kenneth McGill, Penelope Papailias, Jesse Shipley, Michael Silverstein, Karen Strassler. I am grateful for the editorial suggestions and assistance provided by Ann Anagnost and the editorial staff at Cultural Anthropology as well as three anonymous reviewers. Support for this research was 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 has consistently been critical of the current government and king. Because this station draws its audience across all segments of the Nepalese population, it poses a threat to the current government. 2. Isolating the valley from the rest of Nepal has been a common strategy of many Nepali governments to preserve political power. During the Rana oligarchy (18461950), people needed passports to enter and exit the valley. The Rana family, who maintained close 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 rulers of 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 has worked 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 sentiment now endemic in the valley. The three-week-long nationwide strike in April 2006, which demanded that the King renounce his political power, suggests that this strategy was not completely effective. 3. ZNet Asia is an Internet site that publicizes recent political incidents, reports, and critical thinking about social issues around Asia. 4. Rumpum Noodles is a product sold by Asian Thai Foods Ltd. that is primarily distributed in Nepal, India, and Bhutan. Their main factory is near the southern Nepal city of Bir tnagar and their corporate ofces are in Kathmandu. Rumpum Connection is no a longer being broadcast on Kantipur FM and was most likely canceled after the government raid on Kantipur FM when many programs broadcast outside the Kathmandu valley were shut 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 material social practices that constitute social life; rather, the concept reveals interconnections between the two (cf. Williams 1977:158164). 6. Throughout this article, I aim to show the processes of interpellation as constituting urban Nepali subjects and the Nepali diaspora through technologies of the voice. Whenever I refer to the categories of Nepali, the diaspora, and the voice, I am referring to social entities and concepts that are not originary but rather arise as an effect of the technologies of voice I discuss here. 7. Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang (2002) makes a similar point in discussing the transnational identity of Shanghai Chinese who identify with overseas Chinese through lms, TV shows, and popular songs. Yang suggests that this subjective mobility presents challenges to state modernity and the regulations of state that determine how to be Chinese. This situation differs from the Nepali context, particularly because the Nepali state encourages Nepalis to 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 closing off the boundaries of Nepal and attempting to circumvent media that cross over national and regional borders. 8. This emphasis on the various technological forms follows Marshall McLuhans (1965) focus on the formal quality of particular media. In contrast to McLuhan, I show the overlaps of different technologies within a single media and suggest that the form and content 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 of presence evoked by the voice in her discussion of Thai spirit mediums. Derridas 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 of Derridas reversal of the speech versus writing dichotomy. In their reliance on written texts (such as listeners letters and stories), many FM programs produce a form of voiced writing 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 gramophone in south India during the early 20th century made it possible to imagine ones ears as separate from oneself; ones ears could hear the music more perfectly than ones guru or musical instructor. 14. A third, slightly different understanding of voice is rooted in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin (1981) views any utterance as a composition of voices, that is, a composition of differing social perspectives and worldviews that are consistently drawn on in discourse, reworked, and never completely ones own. This fundamentally social perspective emphasizes that the voice always carries ideological messages and is always directed toward a listener and an answer (even when one speaks alone). The voice for Bakhtin is situated in voiced practice and genre composition, in the dialogues of novels, in the everyday conversations and narratives that populate our world. I do not explicitly engage with Bakhtins notion of voice here, although his writings do inuence my understanding of language throughout. 15. Request programs were part of Radio Nepals programming intermittently since its inception in 1951 and call-in programs became a staple in Radio Nepals programs after 1983 (Humagain 2003). However, broadcasting and informal interaction on FM was distinctly different, cultivating distinct vocal personalities of the radio hosts.
16. Initially, the government rented time slots to different FM stations on this single FM band. After several years, the government began issuing private licenses for companies to 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 are broadcast over the Internet and can be heard abroad. 18. See Liechty 2003 for an extensive analysis of consumption practices in Kathmandu, ranging from media to education. 19. As many scholars of the South Asian diaspora have argued, colonialism specically, institutions of indentured laborset the context for the vast number of migrations from the subcontinent, thereby creating social categories like the migrant, overseas south Asian communities, people of south Asian descent living outside south Asia, 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, British India was nevertheless the context in which people from Nepal crossed borders. Onta 1996 discusses the emerging Nepali national identity among educated Nepalis in British India through the rediscovery of the now renowned national poet Bh nubhakta in the 1920s. a This elite group, located primarily in Darjeerling, might be considered the rst Nepali diaspora. 20. Sandhya Shukla (2003) points out that movement to and from the diaspora must be distinguished from both immigrationa one-way, permanent move to another nation and migration. Migration tends to focus primarily on patterns of work and movement that constitute subjects through state laws and particular nations, whereas diaspora forces us to contend with the relations of affect and global belonging that stretch across national borders and simultaneously constitute Nepali subjects (Shukla 2003:13). 21. Manpower agencies work particularly for countries in the Persian Gulf, for Malaysia, 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) of Nepal comes through the remittance economy (Seddon et al. 2001:43). See Gurung 2000 for ofcial and unofcial statistics on the number of Nepalis working abroad, many of whom are employed through manpower agencies. 22. Stories abound about the large-scale corruption, bribery, and deception carried out by the manpower agencies in Kathmandu. One of the most traumatic incidents occurred in August 2004 when 12 Nepali laborers who had initially been sent to Jordan by Moonlight Manpower Agency were redirected to Iraq, where they were captured and killed by the militant group Ansar Al-Sunna (Adhikari 2004; Khadka 2004). In contrast to the radio conversations of Rumpum Connection, from which political criticism is explicitly censored, the mediation of this event, through videos of the killing circulated over the Internet and graphic newspaper accounts, became the grounds for critiquing political and economic hardships inside Nepal. The incident provoked heated protests from Nepalis in Nepal and around the world, who interpreted the workers deaths as a sign of the Nepali governments failure and the corruption of the manpower agencies (see, e.g., Singh et al. 2004). A tragedy that had occurred abroad became a critical example of the ills occurring at home. In rather drastic terms, this incident shows the way in which the Nepali diaspora is emerging as a social category through its mediation of events and is becoming an integral part of public life in Kathmanduone 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. Overseas Indians was a crucial category for Indian nationalists in the 1920s, providing examples of plantation life abroad to critique colonial rule and forward a program of nationalism in India (Axel 1996:427).
23. As in many countries of the South, English enables people to travel in transnational circuits, particularly for education and professional work abroad. Numerous English language institutes can be found throughout Kathmandu, and I often had the experience of young Nepalis asking me to teach them English, because, as people say, English is the international language. 24. Nina Glick Schiller and Georges Fouron (2001:2023) identify three key features of 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 such as the Shanghai television programs that feature overseas Chinese (Yang 2002) or the Greek lms that frequently show images of Greek Americans (Penelope Papailias, personal communication). 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 a public performance before an invisible, imagined audience that draws on, but also differs from, Lauren Berlants (1997) notion of the intimate public sphere. 27. Meena could also very well be Anups older cousin, whom he would also address as Didi (older sister). 28. Nepalis refer to close friends and cousins using the kinship terminology for siblings. Sambhu (as well as Arav) may be Anups cousin, or he may be Anups actual younger brother. 29. The discourse of transparency to describe a less corrupt, more participatory form of government, with its association with liberalizing political regimes, has parallels in many parts of the world. Quite often, it is used not only to signify good governance but also, more specically, to mark a shift in political power. Interestingly, these political ideals are often associated with a particular technological innovation or mediated expression that makes the ideals of transparency material and sometimes even visible. Karen Strassler writes about the Indonesian dream of transparency during the Reformasi Movement of 1998, which opposed the Suhartos regimes reliance on the dimly-lit operations of organized terror (Strassler 2004:692). Photographs, she suggests, became a fetish in the service of transparency, having the power to authenticate historical truth and provide unmediated access to the ideals of transparency and the Reformasi movement (Strassler 2004:696). Using a different technology, the renovation of the Bundestag (state capitol) after the unication of Germany included a large glass dome and glass siding to signify the transparent nature of the new government. In Nepal, the dreams of transparency are often expressed through reference to the technology of radio, particularly FM radio, and the seemingly unmediated quality of the voice it conveys. 30. Dean Leder (1990:103) argues that the body and the process of embodiment is as much about difference and absence as it is about presence. Because of its connection to the body, 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 a local version of stardom (Barker 2002a). 33. According to tradition, the place where the British Residency was located, Lainchor (pronounced line-chor; [chor meaning crossroads]), got its name from the fact that it had the rst 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 in the past few years, there has been a signicant drop in the number of bluff calls. One
journalist comments on this shift, There are times when you are scolded just because some brat from the school continuously gives you bluff calls. And arent those calls a real pain in the neck? . . . The introduction of [caller ID] has really minimized all those above problems. . . . Thanks to the rules and regulations as well, you no longer have to get a 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 in the United States. The purpose of the latter is simply to tell a joke and hang up. The sociality of bluff calls more closely resembles Internet sociality, which encourages continued intimate conversation among strangers. In Kathmandu, FM radio and the Internet emerged as popular media 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 the introduction of telephone technology into Indonesia, when, as Joshua Barker writes, the disciplines normally brought to bear on public and domestic spheres (by way of overhearing 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 the particular content and form of bluff-call conversations. See Rafael for a discussion of how phone technology also has the capacity to reveal what was once hidden, to repeat what was meant 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 Nepalis suggested, even while they asserted that in their phone conversations they could express themselves most truly and freely. 37. Axel also includes corporeality as central to his understanding of the diasporic imaginary, an issue I do not address here. 38. I did not nd any listeners of Umas program who also recorded the programs, but undoubtedly they exist. In my extensive research on Kalyan Gautums program Mero Katha, Mero Gt, many of the listeners recorded the program when their story was read and replayed 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 that it requires no medium (Morris 2002:383). Morris writes of the Thai fantasy of spirit mediums who are thought to be so powerful that their voice can be heard without incarnating in a human body. Ironically, in everyday conversations on FM radio, the emphasis on technological mediums actually reinforces the seemingly pure transmission and contact enabled by technology. As with Thai spirit mediums, many FM radio conversations center exclusively 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 mother will apply to go because she is thought more likely to be granted a visa by ofcers who expect her to return to her children. Israel is one common destination for women. According to a recent government survey, there were 156 Nepali women registered through the government as 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 in late September or October. 42. In this sense, Anamika is like Morriss spirit mediums, referred to above (see N. 39). The difference is that Anamika is not a voice without a body but rather, a voice that embodies the powers and possibilities afforded by technology.
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ABSTRACT Through the public broadcast of intimate telephone conversations between Nepalis abroad and those in Kathmandu, the diaspora is made present in Kathmandu. On these commercial FM programs, the voice is viewed as a key sign of emotional directness, authenticity, and intimacy. Simultaneously, the gure of the voice has been central in discussions about the promises (and failures) of democracy and transparent governance. These two seemingly distinct formations of voice are mutually constitutive. Sentimental discourse about the voice reiterates modern neoliberal discourse about democracy and vice versa. Both are crucial to the formation of an urban Nepali subject in this political moment, which is deeply shaped by the gure of the diaspora. [voice, diaspora, Nepal, media technology, publics, intimacy]

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

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