Скачать или смотреть Siddheshwari Devi & Rasoolan Bai | Rare Lost Video Snippet | राजा डर लागे | raajaa Dar laage

राजा डर लागे
अरे सूनी अटरिया

We owe eternal gratitude to @ambindia and @vinaypande for ensuring that this dadra set to the eight-matra Kaherva remains in the public domain:    • Rasoolan Bai and Siddheshwari Bai sing tog...  

In fact, till Syed Mohd Irfan shared a snippet from a video of the two of the greatest thumri singers in our recorded history, there was no other copy of this anywhere on the internet other than the audio shared by the Pande brothers, from which this has been extracted:   / 1236985580086382592  

I had thought this complete video was destroyed, lost forever, but the emergence of even this short snippet kindles hope that a full copy of the recording might exist somewhere.

As Aneesh Pradhan put it in Scroll:

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This jugalbandi is marked by an open acknowledgement by both vocalists of each other’s artistry. They respond freely to each other’s melodic explorations, rather than maintaining a cautious distance. While this is so, their performance is free of any competitive spirit, as they do not appear to interject or disturb each other.

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To celebrate the two, a poem by the late Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali:

The season of the planes

In Kashmir, where the year
has four, clear seasons, my mother
spoke of her childhood

in the plains of Lucknow, and
of that season in itself,
the monsoon, when Krishna’s

flute is heard on the shores
of the Jamuna. She played old records
of the Banaras thumri-singers,

Siddheshwari and Rasoolan, their
voices longing, when the clouds
gather, for that invisible

blue god. Separation
can’t be borne when the rains
come: this every lyric says.

While children run out
into the alleys, soaking
their utter summer,

messages pass between lovers.
Heer and Ranjha and others
of legends, their love forbidden,

burned incense all night,
waiting for answers. My mother
hummed Heer’s lament

but never told me if she
also burned sticks
of jasmine that, dying,

kept raising soft necks
of ash. I imagined
each neck leaning

on the humid air. She only
said: The monsoons never cross
the mountains into Kashmir.

Siddeshwari Devi:    • Siddheshwari Devi  
Rasoolan Bai:    • Rasoolan Bai