Taking Our Story Home

Hands of Time, a story and music collaboration weaving histories and tales from Wales and Rajasthan was premiered at BtB earlier this summer, despite almost half our creative team being missing due to visa difficulties. Nevertheless, the show went on, and then transferred to Festival of the Voice in Cardiff. Last Saturday night, we took the story home to Mehrangarh Fort where so much of it is set, and performed to a packed out audience of some 400 people in the beautiful courtyard gardens of the Fort. What began as a creative collaboration became a profound communal ritual of re-membering forgotten souls and re-weaving a ragged patch of Mehrangarh’s history. The very walls of the fort listened, and I sense the standing ovation we received was as much for the lost stories we honoured as it was for our performance.

The Hands of Time team at Beyond the Border, July 2018. Left to right: Divya Bhatia, Angharad Wynne, Manjeet Rasiya, Smita Bellur, Gwilym Morus-Baird and Dara Khan Manganiyar

This Wales-India odyssey began four years ago.  Supported and indeed encouraged by Wales Arts International, David Ambrose and I began a journey to develop a creative storytelling partnership between Beyond the Border Festival and Indian artists. A year later, we met Divya Bhatia, Artistic Director of Jodhpur Riff (Rajasthan International Folk Festival – JRiff), and a creative partnership between our festivals began.

On my first visit to JRiff at Mehrangarh Fort, the huge, red sandstone fort that sits like a brooding hunting hawk, overlooking the desert city of Jodhpur, I was intrigued by vermillion plaques depicting hands, placed at some of the fort’s seven great gates. I watched as women in jewel coloured saris pressed palms and foreheads to these plaques and kept them adorned with garlands and tinsel decorations. I asked one of these women about the hand marks, and she replied simply “They are hands of Sati.”

31 Sati hands on the left hand side of Loahpol gate, as you enter Mehrangarh Palace

That first visit was part of a research trip to build a creative partnership between BtB and JRiff, which is held annually during the full moon of October. During that first visit, I learned that ‘Sati’ were women who immolated themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre, or in the case of the Sati of Mehrangarh, women of the zanana or harem of the maharajas as well as their rani ~ queen. This ancient practice dating back to at least 3^rd century BCE in the region was outlawed by the British in India in 1861, however, rare instances continue to be reported. Some consider it a decision based on honour, others consider it to be a mark of deep, abiding love, but clearly in some cases it was about coercion too.

One of the 200 or so letters sent by Thomas Gruffydd to his family.                                                       In the National Library of Wales’ Garn Archive.

The creative process is an extraordinary thing. I’ve learned that casting the net wide during the research phase works best for me, and simply to be open to what is caught in it. The first silver fish in the net was a Welsh nabob called Thomas Gruffydd, the third son of Jane and John Wynn Gruffydd of Garn estate in Denbighshire. He left Wales at just 15 years of age to join the 20^thBengal Native Infantry, in the pay of the East India Company. All that is left of his 27 years on this earth are some 200 letters he sent home to his parents, siblings and grandmother, kept in the archives of the National Library of Wales. Other intriguing silver sprats caught the net included two stories gifted to me by storytellers in the desert villages on the far west of Rajasthan bordering on Pakistan, that I met with interpreters during a research trip to the region last year as we built the project. These weren’t easy stories to tell in the version I’d heard, but I worked with them to try to tease out a telling.

Meeting with traditional Rajasthani Storytellers in desert villages on the border with Pakistan in October 2017

While I was working on these, the shades of the Sati of Mehrangarh were powerfully present in my thoughts. They tugged at me, demanding my attention. And so I dug deeper and contacted the Fort’s archivists. We batted emails back and forth and spoke over a couple of phone calls. What became clear very quickly, was that only the names of the ranis of the maharajas of Marwar (for whom Mehrangarh was one of their most important seats of power), were recorded by history. There are a few exceptions, in cases where the women of the zanana produced sons who became particularly powerful in some way. But other than that, the thousands of royal courtesans housed in the Palace of Glimpses at Mehrangarh had left no trace, other than those who committed sati.

The archival team were able to tell me more about the rituals surrounding Sati, and some preparations particular to those of the women of the Fort. The women of the zanana preparing to immolate themselves on the Maharaja’s pyre would don a red bridal sari, apply henna on their palms and while passing through the Zenani Deodi (Ladies Passage/Gate) would dip their palms in a platter full of henna-kumkum paste and make a handprint on the entrance of the gate wall. Earlier these handprints had been made on paper, wood, stone and silver slabs – sometimes later carved by the silversmiths, and placed in the royal temple at the Fort, alongside the shrine to the Goddess Nagnechiya, to be worshipped.

In time this tradition moved to the walls of the gates; this was first done during Maharaja Bakhat Singhji’s reign where handprints were pressed to the sidewalls of the Lohapol gate.  On the left wall of Lohapol there are five Sati Handprints. Four are of the concubines and one is that of the queen of Maharaja Man Singh (1803-1843) who became Sati after his death.

I was moved by the thought of thousands of women who had spent their lives kept excluded from the world, most leaving no mark upon it, others leaving only their hand-print and their memories in the Fort’s walls before committing Sati. There are some 100 sati hands in and around Mehrangarh, none of their stories are remembered or told. As mentioned, I knew that five were the Sati of Maharaja Man Singh, the last independent Maharaja of the Kingdom of Marwar, who entered a treaty relationship with the British in January 1818. These dates tallied with Thomas Gruffydd’s time in India – just about. A story was gathering.

I wanted to create a story for one of the Sati of Mehrangarh. Re-member just one of these women to honour all those forgotten souls of the Palace of Glimpses– a story to honour their memory and give form and flesh to the gaping wound of anonymity. And from somewhere, somehow, Heera emerged from leagues of dust, desert and time. My work was simply to use knowledge and research to apply checks and balances to a character that manifested fully formed – almost too real, too vibrant and full of her own story to simply be a product of my imagination. Writers and creators the world over experience this, each culture has its own way of explaining it. For me, I know that I gave Heera her name – I chose it. It means ‘diamond’. The rest I cannot in all conscience claim….it is simply ‘her’.

Hands of the five women of Maharaja Man Sing’s court who immolated themselves on his funeral pyre in 1843. One of these was his queen. The names of the four others are lost to history. Located on the right side of Loahpol gate as you enter Mehrangarh palace.

Weaving Heera, Thomas and Man Sing’s story with the lush green, grey misted threads of Wales and the pale, sun soaked, jewel coloured threads of Rajasthan has been one of the keenest creative joys of my life. Moreover it has taught me a good deal and felt like a profound act of reclaiming something lost. It has been a privilidge to cradle the fragile fabric of their lives in my hands. I know that their story has moved audiences, and deeply touched the wonderful team of musicians I worked with on this project – Gwilym Morus-Baird, Smita Bellur, Dara Khan Manganiyar and Sawai Khan Manganiyar.

The Hands of Time family ready to perform during JRiff on 26th October at Chokhelao Bagh, Mehrangarh Fort. From left to right: Sawai Khan Manganiyar (dholak & vocals), Dara Khan Manganiyar (Kamaicha & vocals), Angharad Wynne (storyteller), Smita Bellur (vocals) and Gwilym Morus-Baird (guitar and vocals).

Last Saturday night as some 400 people settled to listen to us share Thomas and Heera’s story in Chokhelao Bagh, the Garden’s within Mehrangarh, there was an intense sense of listening, as though the very shadows and even the walls of the Fort were craning to hear the story unfold. Swallows feature a lot in it, and they swooped by the dozen diving around me as the sun set and the story commenced, before eventually retreating at dusk to their clay nests beneath the high arches of the fortress’ seven great gates.

My belief is that beyond simply telling the story, we re-membered something important that evening, and in so doing, healed a little of the ‘forgetting’, patched a few frayed pieces of the web of history and helped those like Thomas and Heera live beyond the fine, short threads of their lives.

In profound moments of life, I find that the universe speaks eloquently through synchronicity . Following the performance many people came up to us, wiping tears from their eyes to thank and congratulate us or ask questions. One mother and her daughter approached me. The mother said “I’m wearing a Rabari embroidered dress.” I looked at and admired the beautiful hand stitched designs that overlaid the silk and cotton of her kurta. I had described such stitching on Heera’s black dress and coloured Rabari chunari. Then I turned to her daughter. What they hadn’t noticed, was that the black fabric of her more western styled dress was covered in small, fork tailed swallows. It was veritable villanelle of synchronicity, and felt significant in some unfathomable way.

Stories are powerful things. They are used for healing by many cultures, used as ritual tools and as incantations to re-member the ancients. They are ways of communicating with the gods as much as with each other. On this Calan Gaeaf or Haloween, as we light the jack-o-lanters, let’s remember to tell the stories of our ancestors. That is, essentially what this festival is about: remembering ancestors, telling their stories and honouring them in that re-membering, because while we are remembered, we are never truly dead.

WEAVING – mystical poets, words & music

Nine yards, ten yards –

that completes one stretch of cloth.

Sixty threads in the warp,

Nine panels interlocked,

seventy-two extra threads

added to the weft             ~ Kabir

 

Our performance was long since set for Sunday morning at 11am in Mehrangar Fort’s beautiful Chokelao Bagh gardens as part of JRIFF’s ‘In Residence’ series which is essentially an interactive session combining informative talks alongside performance and question and answer sessions.

Each of our Indian musicians were involved in other JRIFF performances and collaborations during the festival, but we managed to gather for a few hours on Saturday morning with Darra and Sawai at the Scholar’s Retreat within the Fort. Towards the end of the session, as we waited for some chai to arrive, Darra suddenly began to play an old Welsh folk song ‘Yn y Gwydd’ on the kamaicha. Gwilym had woven the song into our storytelling performance, and by now the musicians had heard us rehearse it a number of times.

Manganyiar musicians like Darra and Sawai, learn by listening and repeating. They memorise and perfect a huge body of traditional music in this way from about six years of age, without notation. But this was the first time that Darra had ventured to play one of our Welsh tunes. Gwilym quickly picked up his guitar and began to jam along, weaving chords in harmony with the melody. I joined in with some hesitant and very basic alaps (a form of intoning through and above the music within the scale which our Indian friends did as easily as breathing – but I did not!) and Sawai returned to his dholak and began a percussive beat. It was a precious glimpse at what more time could achieve in terms of fusing the musical styles together and pushing each music culture’s bounds. But, with just a few hours of rehearsal time left, once Smita arrived from other rehearsal commitments to join us, our focus had to return to the work in hand.

We developed a show that used stories a little like Russian dolls, one opening to the other, and then closing each and drawing the threads of each tale together at the end. A story that appears in a similar form in many traditions across the world, that of the grandmother who weaves the world, formed a frame into which the mythic births of two mystical poets, the Welsh quasi mythic – quasi historical poet Taliesin and Kabir, India’s beloved Sufi weaver poet were folded together. Around these we wove songs using Taliesin’s poetry with some new words from Gwilym in Welsh and English, sung dohes (or excerpts of Kabir’s poetry) in both Hindi and Marwar, a declamation of a section Taliesin’s poem Cad Goddeu performed by Gwilym using a pastwn, as it might have originally been performed, tied together with beautiful desert and Welsh folk melodies.

We chose mystical poetry as the meeting point for our two cultures, to be precise, the Sufism of India and the early Welsh poetry of the Cynfeyrdd (c. 550-700 AD) that has a spiritual even magical quality. Taliesin is the best known of the Welsh Cynfeyrdd and happily, has a great story attached to his birth.

Taliesin was an early Brythonic poet of Britain, whose work has survived in a Middle Welsh manuscript, the Book of Taliesin. He was a renowned bard who is believed to have sung at the courts of at least three Brythonic kings. In legend and medieval Welsh poetry, he is often referred to as ‘Taliesin Ben Beirdd’ (“Taliesin, Chief of Bards” or chief of poets). He is mentioned as one of the five British poets of renown in the Historia Brittonum, and is also mentioned in the collection of poems known as ‘Y Gododdin’.

According to legend Taliesin was a reincarnation of Gwion bach who swallowed the drop of pure inspiration and knowledge, that the sorceress Ceridwen had intended for her own son. He was adopted as a child by Elffin, the son of King Gwyddno Garanhir, and prophesied the death of Maelgwn Gwynedd from the Yellow Plague. In later stories he becomes a mythic hero, companion of Bran the Blessed and King Arthur.

The Sufi poet Kabir on the other hand, was a 15th-century Indian mystic poet and saint, whose writings influenced Hinduism’s Bhakti movement and his verses are found in Sikhism’s scripture ‘Adi Granth’. While his early life was in a Muslim family, he was strongly influenced by his teacher, the Hindu bhakti leader Ramananda.

Many legends exist about his birth family and early life. According to one version, Kabir was born to a Brahmin unwed mother in Varanasi, by a seedless conception and delivered through the palm of her hand. She then abandoned him in a basket floating in a pond, and baby Kabir was picked up and then raised by a Muslim family.

The similarities in Kabir and Taliesin’s birth stories were just too delicious not to use as a way of weaving these two mystical poets’ stories.

Back to Gwilym and his pastwn. Reference to reciting poems or ‘cywyddau’ using a pastwn or staff to beat time and underline the rhythm of poems, appears in the work of the Welsh poets of the nobility from about the Fourteenth Century. This declamatory form was used to present cywyddau at the halls of noble patrons in Wales. Gwilym would be performing a fragment of Taliesin’s work in this way under canvass on grass rather than a great feasting hall, so we needed a stone to make the necessary sound. We asked Mana our artist co-ordinator to find a slab with a surface area large enough for Gwilym to easily hit it with his pastwn, but light enough not to break backs while carrying it to the performance venue. We all decided that a stone from Merhangar fort was not a good idea – it’s an archaeological site after all. So we left in in Manna’s capable hands.

The JRIFF team are a pretty extraordinary bunch, and regularly work miracles: finding replacement reeds for bagpipes in India, getting a replacement double base for a musician within 24 hours, and finding the perfect stone for Gwilym. In the end, it came from Jodhpur airport – which, due to its proximity to Pakistan, is highly militarised. Despite armed guards, Mana managed to pick up two stone floor tiles that were being replaced and stash them in a car boot while picking up arriving artists from their flight, and so all was well. After that at each rehearsal, Mana would remind us “your stone is in the boot”. Anyone listening might well have thought that we were speaking in code!

Smita and Gwilym in the audience during the pre performance talk. Photo credit: JRIFF / OIJO

Sunday dawned as sunny as each day had been, but even hotter. Jodhpur was experiencing a heat wave. In the late 30 degrees each day, it was considered uncharacteristically hot for the time of year. By the time we finished the sound check in the beautiful round, open sided Bedouin style tent in Chokelao Bagh gardens – designed to give a nod to a Celtic roundhouse, after which this series of collaborations between Wales and India has been named – the temperature was pushing 39 degrees. Already, European performers had become unwell in the intense heat at the Festival and returned to cooler climes earlier than planned. We were determined not to succumb, and drank what seemed like many litres of water as the audience began arriving.

Darra and Sawai accompanying master storyteller Savai Khan during the talk. Photo credit: JRIFF / OIJO

The first hour was a talk about the storytelling traditions of Rajasthan and Wales and an introduction to this project, shared between RIFF’s Artistic Director, Divya Bhatia and myself, and a demonstration of one of these traditions by renowned Marwar storyteller Savai Khan. With mid day temperatures now topping 40 degrees, the sweat running down my back was in danger of flooding my microphone pack tucked inside the waistline of my trousers, and I felt pretty lightheaded as I introduced Gwilym, Smita, Darra and Sawai, ready to begin the show.

Photo credit: JRIFF / OIJO

The audience were as hot as we were, but they had continued to gather throughout the introductory session until by the time Darra played the first haunting notes on his Kamaicha to open the show, the seating area was full and the hush of deep listening met our sharing of songs and stories. We journeyed together from the deserts of Rajasthan to the centre of the earth, on to the Dyfi Estuary in Wales and to Varanasi before bringing performance to an end and the audience safely back to the shores of the here and now. As we closed the show the sea of faces ahead of us were tear stained but smiling, and full of generous appreciation. We had all been present in the weaving and were bound together by the experience.

Hot but happy, heading for the hotel

An hour later, after many enthusiastic conversations, kind comments and insightful questions, and requests about how to find out more about storytelling from an audience who, in the main had never before attended a storytelling event, Smita, Darra and Sawai headed off to prepare for their evening performance and Gwilym and I wondered down through the high gateways of magnificent Mehrangarh Fort, past the elephant gates in search of our car. Happy and content, we were ready to retreat to our air conditioned hotel, to shower and rest, before returning to RIFF for Smita, Darra and Sawai’s Moonrise concert. After all, they were by now more than friends, we were bound by music and stories and the creative journey we’d made.

Smita, Darra and Sawai tuning up for the Moonrise concert. The perfect end to our day.

Threads

“He fashioned his loom

Out of earth and sky:

He plied the sun and moon simultaneously

As his twin shuttles.” ~ Kabir

Three years ago, David Ambrose, Artistic Director of Beyond the Border International Storytelling Festival and I began a quest to develop a Wales – India storytelling collaboration to be presented at our festival next year. Like all good quests, it’s had its fill of seemingly impossible tasks, a cast of kings and queens (or Maharajas and Ranis in this case), master musicians, impregnable fortresses, exquisite palaces, colourful storytellers and simple village dwellings. Along the way, we’ve come face to face with elephants, been mobbed by monkeys, besieged by set backs and near death experiences, blessed by the generosity and wisdom of total strangers, ridden strange magical carriages (namely tuk-tuks) through hair raising traffic and, like all good quests and traditional tales, there is a happy ending with treasures (cultural) and learning galore. More than anything, we have a veritable cauldron full of stories and songs to share with audiences in India, Wales and beyond.

But this isn’t the end, rather it’s the beginning of a two year partnership between Beyond the Border Festival (BtB) and Jodhpur International Folk Festival (JRIFF), kindly supported by Wales Arts International, through which we will explore Wales and Rajasthan’s traditional stories, music and poetry.

More than that, meeting as we do across a 500 year chasm between the end of noble patronage of poetry and music in Wales – which still sustains the Manganiyar and Langar artists of Rajasthan- there are conversations to be had and learning to be shared. From Wales we bring a message about the importance of holding onto the rich weft and weave of cultural tradition still alive in Rajasthan, that is now under threat from changing social structures and the fact that fewer and fewer young Manganyiars are interested in continuing the musical traditions that have been the bedrock of their forefather’s way of life. From the traditional musicians of Rajasthan we’re witnessing first hand the glories of an unbroken hereditary tradition and the skills, music, stories and poetry passed down from generation to generation, which provide Gwilym and I with a tantalising sense of what our ‘tradition’ in Wales might have looked like structurally until the unravelling of the artist – patron relationship in Wales during the reign of Elizabeth I.

Having visited JRIFF festival in previous years to research and prepare this project, I happily returned to Jodhpur last week to pull together a team of performers from Wales and India, and to prepare and present the first performance of this partnership at JRIFF festival.

Gwilym and I landed at Jodhpur on Monday afternoon last week. We were welcomed by Mana who would become our invaluable team buddy and sometimes translator, coordinator of rehearsals, cars, chai, and virtually all our needs – from the mundane to the bizarre! More about that later.

We were then whisked off to the Welcome Hotel, our base and rehearsal space for the coming few days. Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god led the way, sitting happily on our car’s dashboard, sweeping obstacles from our driver, Hansraj’s way. These included an array of holy cows, goats, dogs, family laden tuk-tuks, shepherds, pot carrying women in bright orange and pink saris and mopeds weighed down with churns full of milk – all driving or walking on either the wrong side of the road towards Jodhpur or right in the centre of it. It was great to be back in the benign chaos and colourful serindipity of this place.

On Tuesday morning we met our fellow performers for the first time. Coming together for the first time were: singer-songwriter and Welsh Medieval literature academic Gwilym Morus; Smita Bellur, an Indian classical vocalist who specialises in the field of Hindustani Classical Khyal and traditional Sufi music (Qawwali); Darra Khan, a master komaicha player and his nephew, Sawai Khan a singer and percussionist, both of the renowned Manganiyar community of desert musicians, and me.

Shyness and language difficulties were soon overcome by curiosity and wonder at each other’s culture, music and storytelling traditions. Finding a common thread amongst four languages: Welsh, English, Hindi and Marwar (the traditional language of this region of Rajasthan) as well as across our vastly different cultural backgrounds seemed a little daunting at first, but as we spoke and shared music we quickly discovered words, sentiments and story motifs common across our culture.

Thanks to a shared mother language – though Wales and India are thousands of miles apart – we share some words. Proto Indo-European from which the Celtic languages are a direct descendent, is also the parent language of Indo-Iranian which gives birth to Sandscrit from which Marwari and modern day Hindi are derived. One of these words is ‘tant’. In both Welsh and Marwari, it refers to the string of an instrument. In Welsh, we have a saying ‘taro tant’ which means that something has hit home, something resonates with us. As friendship grew over cups of chai, fragments of story translated from English to Hindi by Smita, and sweeping melodies were conjured by Darra and Gwilym, we began to resonate deeply with each other.

Instrument strings metaphorically became threads that wove loosely together into the fabric of a show. Smita introduced us to verses by Kabir the weaver Sufi poet of India, and Dare and Sawai honoured him with desert ragas that spoke his words and celebrated his wisdom. Not being short of mystical poets in Wales, Gwilym and I introduced the grandfather of them all, Taliesin. Suddenly the weave tightened as we discovered that Taliesin and Kabir shared a similar birth story motif.

We left the rehearsal room that first day as friends, excited by the prospect of what we were creating, but rather daunted by the amount of work to be done in the remaining two and a half days, before we would present the show at Jodhpur RIFF.

We’ll fill you in on our adventures and what we learned about each other’s cultures over the coming few posts as Gwilym and Smita also post here. For now, here’s a short introduction to the wonderful storyweavers and musicians joining me on his project:

GWILYM MORUS, Singer, Musician

Gwilym Morus is a musician, singer- songwriter and expert in the ancient oral, mythic and poetic traditions of Wales. Since 2005 Gwilym has released several albums of original material, which fuses the folk and classical traditions of Wales and world music. He was lead singer and percussionist for a twelve piece afro-funk outfit called Drymbago. He has also been responsible for collaborations with musicians from Palestine, including a collaborative project called ‘Gwybodaeth Amgen’ which resulted in a number of performance pieces and the album ‘O Fethlehem i Fangor’ (Dec. 2005). For further details about his albums and music, visit mwncinel.com

In 2002 Gwilym returned to University as a mature student to study Welsh literature at The School of Welsh, Bangor University. He then went on to complete a Masters and a Doctorate at the department, specialising in Medieval Welsh poetry and the Welsh bardic tradition.

For his doctorate he investigated the dramatic persona of the court bard and anthropological aspects of the Welsh bardic tradition, particularly during the Gogynfeirdd period. He has also worked as a research fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, comparing the performance practices of African and American tribal cultures with those of the Welsh bards.

In 2012 he received a grant from the Welsh Arts Council to develop a research project on the performance styles and techniques of medieval bardic declamation. The project performed at Bangor University’s Voicing the Verse conference in May of that year. Details and videos of performances can be found at his music website: mwncinel.com/datgeiniaeth.

SMITA BELLUR, Singer, Musician

Smita Bellur is a versatile Indian classical vocalist who specialises in the field of Hindustani Classical Khyal and traditional Sufi music (Qawwali). She is also adept at other genres such as Ghazal/Thumri/Chaiti and other semi-classical varieties, does collaborative work with fusion rock/pop bands, playback singing for movies, retro-hits from Indian Film music. Having sung (live in concert) at more than 300 venues ranging from Classical/Sufi music festivals to Corporate events.

Smita has 3 album releases to her credit: Kaisi Madhur Shyaam – itunes/Amazon, Vachan Kirana – Lahari Audio, and Shareefara Pada – GIPA/Kalkur Audio. She is working on new musical productions and recordings of specialised Sufi music/Ragas.

She has won 3 awards for her contribution to the field of music – Rotary Vocational Excellence Award 2010, ‘Sangeeta Shri 2007’ and ‘Dr. Puttaraj Gawai Krupa Bhushana Prashasti’.

She regularly broadcasts on India’s national broadcasting network- All India Radio/Doordarshan, and from media/TV Networks and radio channels such as ETV Urdu/Kannada, Zee, Doordarshan, TV9 and Suvarna/Asianet and All India Radio/Doordarshan, FM channels such as 92.7BIG FM in addition to Twaang, Youtube, Facebook, Sound Cloud on the Internet.

She is committed to regularly working with her music to support causes like: fundraiser for Shankara Cancer Foundation, fundraiser for Rotary’s End Polio mission (through an audio CD release), songs for MNREGA propagation etc.

She has a keen interest in propagating Hindustani Classical and Sufi music through her NGO Nadanubhava Foundation® (free-to-listen live concerts of upcoming artistes); more than 80 programmes have been successfully done.

DARRA KHAN MANGANIYAR (Kamaicha)

Born in the village of Hamira (Jaisalmer district, Rajasthan), and son of Padma Shri awardee Sakar Khan, Darra learnt to play the kamancha at a very early age. Growing up in a family steeped in musical tradition, he was fortunate to be surrounded by uncles and cousins to play, practice and learn with. At age 12, he performed at the Sangeet Natak Akademi in Delhi. His first international performance was in 1999 at the Theatre du la Ville in Paris. Today, he is regarded as one of the best kamancha players in the world, having taken over performance duties from his father (who died a few years ago). Dara Khan is part of the world-touring Manganiyar Seduction, has performed with Grammy-winning artists such as Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, and has played at London’s Royal Albert Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Lincoln Center in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and at festivals in Europe and Australia.

About the instrument: The 17-string kamancha (or khamaycha) is a bowed instrument. Made of mango wood, its rounded resonator is covered with goat skin. Three of its strings are made using goat intestines (soaked in milk, hand stretched and cured over a period of several weeks) while the other 14 strings are steel.

SAWAI KHAN MANGANIYAR (dholak, khartal, morchabg

At 21 years of age, Sawai is a rising star among the Manganiyar community. He’s a versatile percussionist and rapidly gaining a name as a vocalist. This video provides a better introduction to Sawai than any amount of words could.