1936
The return to painting backdrops
this time making Kailasa out of a mountain around Kolhapur
It was a song and a sound that was punctuating the centuries. Wajid Ali Khan sang it when he was made to leave his naihar, Lakhnau. One day a large man would let into his open eyes the form of the Nawab painted sometimes, among a meadow festooned with embroidered flowers, his revealed left nipple one among them...sometimes, looking like a gruff, proud old man bearing soft, plain white muslin on his body..As all those images entered the being of Amjad Khan, Wajid Ali would one day dance from within him. But that would happen tomorrow. Today, this dark eyed man with sensual eyes and lips was walking with a harmonium, singing the song of a forced estrangement, live before the camera. Wajid Ali Shah was finding a divine tongue. From within a well whose walls were wet with the honey of alcohol came that sound, that had sunk, deeper and deeper into the soil till it found the secret spring of song. That song would dissolve the boundaries of time that seperated Wajid Ali's moment from this one.
The gramaphone needle would tease out of the vinyl the stored sound of a finger hitting the skin stretched across the table mouth. And the well of the gramaphone horn would crackle with the thick wafting threads of the bow pulled across a taut string.
the song, on youtube
