Each year during Teej, when married, unmarried, and widowed Nepali women travel to their natal homes to fast and celebrate, they also sing. For decades, these songs, known as Teej Geet, have functioned as something closer to a public forum than simple festival entertainment, a rare, sanctioned space where women can voice grievances about marriage, in-laws, and social expectation that daily life otherwise gives them little room to say aloud.

Table of Contents

1. From Dukha Songs to Songs of Resistance
2. A Space Researchers Say Has Been Overlooked
3. The Panchayat-Era Shift Toward Revolution
4. 2006 and the Turn Toward Economic Independence
5. Modern Songs Naming Specific Injustices
6. A More Recent Turn Toward Commerce
7. Conclusion

From Dukha Songs to Songs of Resistance

Historically, women’s pain, anger, and frustration were channelled through what are known as dukha songs, literally songs of suffering or hardship. Today, that emphasis has shifted, with many contemporary Teej lyrics calling on women to act, to change the social, economic, and political conditions shaping women’s lives across the country, rather than simply naming the hardship itself.

A Space Researchers Say Has Been Overlooked

Academic researchers studying Teej have argued that scholarship on the festival has largely left its songs out of consideration, with existing literature often reducing them to little more than generic folk love songs. That gap matters, researchers say, because the songs themselves are where much of Teej’s real social and political commentary actually takes place, not in the ritual fasting or worship that tends to dominate outside description of the festival.

The Panchayat-Era Shift Toward Revolution

According to culture researcher Mishra, Teej songs before the Panchayat era largely made women’s own miseries the direct subject of the song. During the Panchayat period and into the multiparty system of the 1990s, that changed, with Teej songs beginning to carry genuine elements of revolution rather than simply cataloguing suffering.

2006 and the Turn Toward Economic Independence

A further shift followed the end of Nepal’s civil conflict and the democratisation that came with it, as growing employment and education opportunities gave many Nepali women new economic independence. Mishra credits singer Komal Oli’s song Poila Jana Pam with helping usher in this new wave of Teej songs after 2006, a period marking a clear turning point in the genre’s tone and subject matter.

Modern Songs Naming Specific Injustices

Contemporary artists have continued that tradition of direct social commentary. Singer Sophia Thapa’s 2020 song No Barta Please urged women pressured into fasting during Teej not to give in to that expectation if it wasn’t their own choice, while also naming discriminatory customs like drinking khutta ko pani, the water used to wash a husband’s feet, as practices that maintain gender hierarchy. Komal Oli’s 2018 song Pheri Teej Aayo Baba, performed with a women’s group in Bardiya, moves from naming social problems to proposing solutions, closing with a call for women to dance together and work cooperatively. One earlier Teej song is credited with directly challenging the stigma of dowry, playing a real role in shifting public awareness of the practice.

A More Recent Turn Toward Commerce

More recently, some commentary has noted a further shift, as Teej songs move from villages into cities, their words and style changing along the way. Where earlier songs carried the real, lived stories of mothers and grandmothers, discrimination, inequality, the desire for freedom, some now argue that new Teej songs increasingly centre on market and business rather than women’s lived experience, a change some describe as a genuine loss of the genre’s original voice.

Conclusion

Across generations, Teej Geet has functioned as one of the few widely sanctioned spaces where Nepali women’s frustrations, desires, and critiques of their own social position could be spoken, sung, and heard collectively, evolving from private laments into open calls for change and back again into something more commercial. Whatever direction the genre takes next, its history so far offers a genuinely rare record of what Nepali women have wanted to say, set specifically to a tune the rest of the year rarely gives them room to sing.