Epic Nepal

The research programme "Epic Nepal: language and oral literature of western Nepal" is centered on a corpus of recorded materials, beginning with recordings made in 1969 by two French scholars, the anthropologist Marc Gaborieau and the ethnomusicologist Mireille Helffer.

We have chosen to concentrate on the huḍkelī, an oral epic declaimed and sung by musicians of the tailor caste. The genre takes its name from an hourglass-shaped drum, the huḍko. A corpus of performances of these epics, beginning with seven recordings from 1969, is in preparation as a web archive.

Research based on the corpus is being conducted from anthropological, linguistic, literary and ethnomusicological perspectives by an international team. The program is sponsored by the French National Agency for Research (ANR).