Bio
The 1st Naumati Baja Gulmi UK is a band of former Gurkha officers based in and around Farnborough and Aldershot, led by Mr Om Prasad Thapa, president of the large Nepalese community in Rushmoor. Om established the band in April 2010 to preserve the traditional ceremonial music of Nepal. He says bands like this were common in most villages before the Maoist insurgency, but when he returned to his home country in 2007, they had all but disappeared. He brought the instruments back to the UK and taught himself and other members of the Nepalese community to play them, in order to keep their traditional music alive.
1st – They were the first band to play Nepalese ceremonial music outside of Nepal.
Naumati Baja (literally – nine musical instruments) is a group of nine traditional musical instruments played in Nepal and the Himalayan regions of Sikkim, Darjeeling and Assam during auspicious occasions, such as marriages.
Gulmi – the district in Nepal, from which the Rushmoor community originally came.
In 2017, the 1st Naumati Baja Gulmi UK collaborated with Nathaniel Mann (of Dead Rat Orchestra) to form the Nepali and English Joint Traditional Musical Band. They recorded an album themed around local hero Charles Franklin Cody, which premiered at Anvil Arts in Basingstoke on 2 April 2017. At the concert, Dr Durga Bahadur Subedi, the Nepalese ambassador to the UK, said, “This is a wonderful example of the British and my Nepalese brothers and sisters. They co-operated with each other and collaborated with each other. This is a very good sign of integration of my community to the mainstream British society.”
