Rajasthan Quiz: Folk Music and Musical Instruments

The kamayacha is the signature instrument of the Manganiyar musicians of Jaisalmer and Barmer: a large bowl of mango wood covered with goat skin, with gut and steel strings played with a horsehair bow, giving the deep drone that accompanies Manganiyar singing.

A Bhopa of Pabuji unrolls the painted scroll called the phad and sings the epic of Pabuji through the night, accompanying himself on the ravanhatta, a bowed instrument of a half coconut or gourd with a bamboo neck, a skin face and a row of jingling bells.

Maand is the most refined style of Rajasthani singing, close enough to classical music to be treated as a raga in its own right, and Kesariya Balam Aavo Hamare Desh, made famous by Allah Jilai Bai of Bikaner, is its best known composition and effectively the state's signature song.

The Kalbelia folk songs and dances of Rajasthan were inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010.

The algoza is a double flute: the player holds two pipes at once, blowing a drone on one while playing the melody on the other, and a shepherd or a Langa musician can keep this up for long stretches using circular breathing.

The bhapang is a small drum of a hollowed gourd with a skin head, through which a gut string runs; the player plucks the string and tightens or loosens it to slide the pitch, producing the talking tone of the Mewati folk songs.

The Terah Taali is performed by women of the Kamad community, devotees of the folk deity Ramdevji of Ramdevra, who tie thirteen manjiras to their wrists, elbows, waist and ankles and strike them in rhythm while seated, often balancing pots or holding a sword in the mouth; the men accompany…

Ghan instruments are solid bodies that sound when struck or shaken, without a stretched skin or a vibrating string, and the khartal, a pair of wooden blocks clapped together by Manganiyar performers, is the classic Rajasthani example, as are the manjira, the jhanjh, the thali, the chimta, the ghungroo and…

The folklorist Komal Kothari and the Rajasthani writer Vijaydan Detha founded Rupayan Sansthan at Borunda in Jodhpur district as an institute of folklore, and for half a century it recorded the songs, epics and instruments of the Manganiyars, Langas and Bhopas; Kothari also brought these musicians to audiences outside India.

Panihari takes its name from pani, water, and the songs belong to the daily walk to the well or the stepwell and back with pots on the head; their images are of the rope, the pulley, the pot and the long road, and they often carry a woman's complaint or…

Rammat is the open-air folk theatre of Bikaner and Jaisalmer, performed around Holi on a raised platform with the nagara and the dholak, and its akharas are a part of the towns' Holi calendar.