1936
The return to painting backdrops
this time making Kailasa out of a mountain around Kolhapur
The sound was stitching centuries together at a precise point.
Wajid Ali Khan thought it, as word, as sound of word when he was made to leave his naihar, Lakhnau.
Wajid Ali whose relief was a private leisure house of the ras leela performed in kathak, where he played the lover, the beloved. The sound of those words outlived him. One day a large man would let into his open eyes, those many paintings of the Nawab, sometimes a hovering head over a chestful of the most delicately emboridred flowers, his own left nipple, like the largest flower in the meadow, flower and more than flower, peering out of the kurta, provocatively declaring his right to that pleasure. Or the more staid one at his tomb, where he looks like a gruff, proud old man, neverthelss bearing muslin that was soft on that skin. That day, Wajid Ali would dance from within Amjad Khan. But that would happen on the morrow. Today, this man who liked to look sensual in his photographs, revealed his simpler side as he walked across a moving camera, holding a harmonium, singing live.
Deep from within a well where, past the honeyed walls of alcohol, the voice struck a timeless spring- a chashma - because water is larger than history.
The gramaphone needle would tease out of the vinyl the ancillary sound of a finger at a tabla, maybe at a loss with the voice, barely hitting the taut skin stretched across the tabla. 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
