Bihar Quiz: Folk Music, Dance and Theatre of Bihar

Bhikhari Thakur, born in 1887 at Kutubpur Diyara in Saran district, wrote the play Bidesia about a wife left behind when her husband migrates to Calcutta for work, and the name was then applied to the whole style of Bhojpuri naach he built, with its songs and its launda dancers.

Jhijhiya is danced by women of the Mithila region during Navratri, each carrying on her head an earthen pot pierced with many holes and holding a lighted lamp; the dance is offered to the Goddess and is traditionally believed to turn away witchcraft and evil spells.

Jat-Jatin is danced in the Mithila and Koshi tract of north Bihar, usually by a pair representing the husband Jat and the wife Jatin; the song moves through their quarrel, the failure of the rains and the husband leaving the village in search of work, which makes it the folk…

Bismillah Khan was born at Dumraon in 1916, in the present Buxar district, into a family of shehnai players, and later settled at Varanasi.

The Darbhanga gharana, carried by the Mallick family under the patronage of the Darbhanga Raj, is one of the surviving gharanas of Dhrupad, the oldest form of Hindustani classical singing; Pandit Ram Chatur Mallick and Pandit Siyaram Tiwari belong to it.

Mahendar Misir of Misrauliya village in Saran district composed and sang Purbi, a light classical folk form built on the longing of a wife whose husband has gone away, and he is remembered as the emperor of Purbi.

Sama-Chakeva is the Mithila festival in which girls make clay figures of the birds Sama and Chakeva, sing for the long life of their brothers through the Kartik nights and set the figures afloat or bid them farewell at the end; the songs are among the best known of Maithili…

Vidyapati, the Maithili poet of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries who was honoured as the Maithil Kavi Kokil, wrote padas on Radha and Krishna that were sung in performance, and from this singing grew the Kirtaniya plays of Mithila, also staged as Bidapat Naach.

Domkach is a wedding dance of the women of the household: once the men go off with the barat, the women of the groom's family sing and dance through the night in the courtyard, taking the men's parts themselves in a comic imitation.

Sharda Sinha, called the Bihar Kokila, carried the Chhath songs of Bihar from the river ghats to recordings heard across the country, and she sang Maithili and Bhojpuri wedding, Sohar and Sama-Chakeva songs as well.

Reshma-Chuharmal is sung and staged in the Magahi speaking tract south of the Ganga, around Patna, Nalanda and Mokama.