Lyrics of Hindustani Vocal Music

Video Transcript

"Many songs in this stunning music have to do with the love play between the Lord Krischner and his concert Ragas and this is an expression of the popular religion, spirituality and the longing to unite with the beloved or the divine. Vocalist were most commonly women and still there are a lot of female vocalist, many more than instrumentalist. Until late 1930's, the women were professional musicians belonging to a special class of entertainers where they lived usually in matrilineages and didn't marry in the conventional sense. They were artists who lived among themselves; they were lineages of mother's and daughters carrying on the art and they were often patronized by a king or a futile lord and many of these songs were sung in a salon where they might want to express that kind of affection or flirtatiousness to one of the audience members who were overwhelmingly male, so these special lyrics could have special meaning. "