Music as Resistance: Revisiting Melawa Devi and Her Songs

This paper aims to investigate how Melawa Devi takes music as an instrument to form her agency from the minimum resources available in her transitional phases of life struggles. To address this objective, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of gender subaltern has been employed as theoritical perspective and Naila Kabeer’s framework of women empowerment to access the contextual layers surrounding Melawa Devi’s narratives associated to her music career. This paper equally examines the representative songs of Melawa Devi with regards to the aesthetics of resistance consciousness. The findings show the essence of her creative struggle that transformed her into a bold singer cum song and music composer in Nepali music history. In conclusion, when Melawa Devi and her song have been studied from the perspective of subaltern historiography, she appears as an empowered music mentor skillful to use music as a tool to resistance and existence.