ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the role of hip-hop in shaping youth culture in Nepal in the aftermath of the civil war between the Maoists and the Nepali state (1996–2006). Maoism in Nepal visibilised and vocalised the difference between the country and the city of Kathmandu, while it also allowed rural youth to become the main actors of the political discourse involved in the process of nation building. The war-like vocabulary of Nepali hip-hop, along with the note of social realism added by its early Kathmandu-based practitioners, is read in the light of such post-war political discourse, where hip-hop becomes a means for the politically alienated urban youth to inscribe themselves into the national imaginary. Contrarily, as hip-hop transitions into Nephop, its rural practitioners use the form to express youth delinquency and freedom associated with an aspirational urban existence, while their subversive language is co-opted into the larger counterculture of defiance in post war Nepal. This chapter then traces the trajectory of hip-hop for a decade in Nepal − 2011 to 2021 − and understands the changes and negotiations made by its urban and rural artists, not in isolation, but in relation to the dominant political discourse of post-war Nepal.
