Field Briefing: The Khristiya Bhajan

This blog post is a re-post of part of a newsletter I sent out in December.

Do you ever wonder where your hymnal comes from?

Maybe your place of worship does not have a printed song collection, but instead projects lyrics so that everyone can sing together or includes printed copies of call-and-responses, anthems, or psalms in the bulletin each week. Nevertheless, do you ever wonder where these come from or who curated these collections?
 
That was the question that started my research on the Khristiya Bhajan in the first place. This song collection used in all evangelical Protestant churches in Nepal. Growing up in Nepal, these songs wove together my fellowship experiences and acted as my primer as I learned to read Nepali. But there was no information about where this collection came from. Certainly different people had written these songs or translated them—but no lyricists were named in the hymnal. Surely someone composed those melodies or took the time to borrow a folk tune and use it to sing someone else’s lyrics—but no composers or arrangers were listed. And these songs did not just come together on their own—someone curated the collection. So, while not exactly a true research question, my own curiosity propelled me into this research as a graduate student.
 
One of my answers turned out to be a man named Ron Byatt.
 
I first heard his name mentioned by Samuel Karthak, the worship pastor at Gyaneshwar Church in Nepal (who passed away due to COVID-19 earlier this year). Loknath Manaen—the hymnal’s long-time editor and publisher whose own works are included in the hymnal—had much more to say about him. Cindy Perry, a fellow researcher, gave me his then email address, and I was able to exchange several emails with Ron back in 2009 and 2010 as I wrote my master’s thesis. After that, his email address changed, and we lost contact. My first news of him was at the beginning of November from Loknath, who told me that Ron had passed away in May of this year (2021). Here, while not the complete story, I want to outline the work that Ron put into creating this hymnal and briefly share about its impact.
 
Ron Byatt (1928–2021) came to Nepal from the UK in 1957 to work in adult literacy project run by the United Mission to Nepal (UMN) in a town called Amp Pipal. As a musician, he showed interest in Nepali folk music he encountered while living in the area and paid attention to the songs Nepali Christians were singing. In 1959, he released a small booklet called Lo, Hami Sabaai Prarthanaa Garau (Let Us Come Together and Pray). It contained twenty original Nepali-language Christian bhajans, or devotional songs, as well as translations of the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Beatitudes. Another partner in Amp Pipal, Jonathan Lindell, noticed Byatt’s work. As chair of the Literacy and Literature Committee at UMN, he asked Byatt to create a song collection for the entire Nepali church. At the time, the church in Nepal was not even a decade old—Nepal had only opened its doors to the outside world after the democratic turnover in 1951, and the first church was established in 1952. By the time Ron and his wife Mary arrived in 1957, the Christian community in Nepal was small but quickly growing.
 
To create this larger song collection, first, Byatt sat with Christian musicians and composers to record their works. He initially used a Boosey & Hawkes recorder. It weighed seven kilograms and was powered by two 67.5-volt batteries that had to be imported from the UK. He worked with this recorder for a year, but then bought a better-built, more portable Philipps recorder, which only weighed three kilograms and ran on AA batteries (more) easily available in Kathmandu. Next, he wrote down the lyrics as dictated by the musicians or composers with whom he was working and transcribed the melody lines using Western music notation. In addition to recording in Amp Pipal, Byatt traveled to other parts of Nepal to find composers and musicians. Byatt identified many of the songs that people sang from Darjeeling and Kalimpong—places in northeast India where the Nepali Church originated in the late 19th century and the home from which many Nepali missionaries came—so he asked permission from those composers to include their works in the Nepali song collection. It took Byatt eight years to complete this work. In the end, this song collection had a total of 450 Nepali-language Christian bhajans. Byatt named this work Nepali Bhajan Sangraha. Byatt took the manuscript to Darjeeling in 1967 and initially printed 5,000 copies. Two additional printings were run in the 1970s. All these copies were hand carried into Nepal for distribution.
 
Byatt would go on to do two complete revisions of this hymnal, one in 1978–79 and another in 1983–84. Each time, Byatt went through the process of collecting more songs from Nepali musicians and composers and assessing which existing songs to keep and which to leave out based on feedback from Nepali congregations and his Nepali collaborators—namely, Loknath Manaen, who acted as the hymnal’s editor and publisher until 2004. The name Khristiya Bhajan was given to the 1979 collection and remained with the subsequent editions. The 1984 edition of the Khristiya Bhajan was the base that formed the hymnal I became acquainted with in the 1990s.
 
What I write here is only a small part of what Ron did as a community development worker to Nepal and how he and Mary ministered with and to their Nepali colleagues. It is also only a small part of how these songs came to be sung in Nepali-speaking churches and influence at least three generations of Christians in Nepal, impacting not only their corporate worship but also their theology and efforts to spread the gospel to new hearers. It also affected an expat kid, showing her how God can be worshiped and adored across cultural forms and languages. As I’ve continued my research, I’ve had opportunities to share my findings with younger Christian Nepalis who are much more interested in the origins of some of the church traditions and liturgies with which they grew up. Telling the stories of this hymnal has been a good place for them to start understanding the short but significant heritage of their faith in Nepal.