Maharaja | en

Rajasthan, the «Country of the Kings» in the desert of India, is the home of some of the richest and most diverse traditions in Indian art and culture, demarcated by the Swamps of Kutch, in Gujarat, to the South, the Arawalli Mountains to the East and the Sindh, in Pakistan, to the West.

MAharaja is a group gathering together the leading figures of the musician castes of Rajasthan. Outrageously elegant and beautiful, malicious and majestic, these musicians, poets and shamans reflect in their music the sumptuous surroundings of their region. Theirs is a music of ecstasy, a whirlwind of climaxes punctuated by the gentle gesture of a breathtaking tune, an authentic magical experience.

The ancestors of these musicians played an important role in spreading the teachings of the many sects of mystics, the Sufi and Bhakti movements, through ballads and devotional songs. For the warriors, they were familiar figures on the battlefield, where their praise of past heroes and their exploits, through epic tales, plus their ridicule of the enemy, would encourage bravery and boost morale.

Living like simple villagers at heart, in the most remote areas of the desert where the 21st century does not exist, the members of MAharaja are often described as the Gypsies of Rajasthan. They are not, ethnically speaking, Gypsies, but the music they are playing today still represents what was played at the time of the great migration. In India, they are called «Kalakar,» meaning «sacred servants of the art.»

Maharaja’s music covers a vast spectrum of emotions, from profund melancholy to irrepressible joy. This heartfelt music of pure pleasure and pain is played with an impetuous spirit, an eerily beautiful, structured music with close, droning harmonies and rapid, subtle rhythms—highly communicative and captivating for audiences worldwide, though it originates from a true no-man’s-land and is unequivocally the primitive form of North Indian classical music (Jhangra). Westerners can groove to their raw, rural form of stringed qawwali blues (a sound based in Arabic, Indian and Gypsy scales), enjoy their rich and highly refined repertoire of folk, devotional, praise and epic songs, and be amazed by their visually vibrant, cinematic appeal.

«…Their devotional songs uplift and mesmerize as players come together in a frenzy, palms uplifted in supplication…» —the Independent, London .