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: // 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. // 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