Haryana Quiz: Folk Music, Dance and Saang

Pandit Deepchand is the first great name in the history of Saang and is credited with turning a loose village entertainment into a sung play with a structure: an opening invocation, a story carried in verse, prose passages between the songs and a troupe built around the poet.

Lakhmi Chand is the best known Saang poet of Haryana, honoured as the Surya Kavi or sun poet and commonly called the Shakespeare of Haryana for the range of his plays and the quality of his raginis.

Dhamal is counted the oldest dance of Haryana and belongs mainly to the Mahendragarh and Jhajjar belt, where the men of the village gather on the open ground on a full moon night of the Phalgun season, form a wide circle and dance to the beat of the dhamal drum…

Loor belongs to the sandy Bagar country of the south-west of the state, around Bhiwani and Mahendragarh, and is danced by women and girls in the month of Phalgun and at Holi, when the spring crop is standing.

Khoria is danced by the women of the household among themselves once the men have set out with the wedding procession.

The Gugga or Gugga Naumi observance falls in the month of Bhadon, when the followers of Gugga Pir, the folk deity associated with protection from snakes, carry the chhari, a tall staff decorated with peacock feathers and coloured cloth, from village to village, dancing and singing his ballad as they…

The Ragini is the stanza song of Haryana, built on a fixed refrain to which the singer returns after every verse.

Pandit Jasraj was born in a village of Haryana into a family of musicians and became the best known voice of the Mewati gharana, which takes its name from the Mewat region on the Haryana and Rajasthan border.

A traditional Saang troupe was made up entirely of men, and the younger singers took the women's parts in costume, singing the same raginis in a higher register.

Chhathi takes its name from the number six, and the ceremony falls on the sixth day after a birth, when the mother and the newborn are brought out, the household is purified and the women of the family and the neighbourhood sing and dance in the courtyard.