![]() Having no children of his own, he treated me like his own daughter. About her guru, Siddheswari used to say : "No one could possibly get a more generous and affectionate guru. Siyaji's father Shyamacharan Misra, and uncle Ramcharan Misra had been good musicians. Noticing the talent and eagerness of the young girl, Siyaji Maharaj began to teach her. I used to go to them to listen to the records of popular singers like Janaki Bai, Gauharbai and several others. About this period of her life, she once said : "We did not have luxuries like the gramophone. Her childhood was an unhappy one as she lost her father also very soon. Brought up in this musical atmosphere, Siddheswari absorbed a great deal of the art right from her infancy. As Siddheswari lost her mother when she was barely 18 months old, she was brought up by her maternal aunt, Rajeswari, who was a famed disciple of Maina Devi, Mithailal, and of the great Moizuddin himself. She was the inheritor of great musical traditions from a family which produced several famous singers like Maina Devi, Vidyadhari Devi, Rajeswari Devi and Kamaleswari Devi. ![]() Girija Devi is far younger than the others, and is of a different generation.īorn into a famous musical family in Varanasi in 1903, Siddheswari traced her musical lineage to her maternal grandmother Maina Devi, a reputed singer of Kashi of nearly a century ago. Among those who have kept up these traditions till now in full glory, the outstanding names of this century have been Siddheswari Devi, Rasoolan Bai, Badi Moti Bai, Begum Akhtar, Mahadev Prasad Misra, and Girija Devi. Bhaiya Ganpatrao, Moizuddin, and Shyamlal Khatri were some of the trail-blazers who gave this modern orientation to Thumri. ![]() When classicists began to frown down on this type of music with abhinaya, the singers took to the Bol-Banav-ki Thumri in which the emotional contents of songs are effectively brought out through vocal expressiveness only, that is, beauty of notes, voice modulations swara-combinations, and a specially emotion-charged style of singing. ![]() They were musical 'stars' who shone brilliantly in the courtly era but when the 'darbari' era ended they did not hesitate to step out into the glare of public acclaim. All four of them were inheritors of great traditions of music from a glorious era of the past when music dominated the lives of musicians from childhood to death. ![]() First went Begum Akhtar in 1974 at the age of 60, and then her older contemporaries, Rasoolan Bai, Badi Moti Bai and Siddheswari Devi. "With the passing away of Siddheswari Devi on March 18 1977, the last of the four great pillars of Hindustani light classical music is gone. ![]()
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