अब के सावन घर आजा पिया (कजरी / ठुमरी)

The kajri is the Banaras women's monsoon song — traditionally sung by women waiting for husbands and beloveds who have gone away. Unlike the thumri proper, the kajri has a stronger folk character and a simpler musical structure, though in the hands of a master like Siddheshwari Devi the border between kajri and thumri dissolves. This HMV recording from around 1946 is one of her most loved: the text's simple appeal — 'come home, beloved, the rains have come' — is given layers of emotion through her signature Banaras bol-banao treatment.

Khamaj's warmth and its mix of natural and flat swaras make it one of the ragas most suited to the monsoon kajri. In the slow dadra cycle Siddheshwari Devi extends single phrases into long meditations, the word 'sawan' (monsoon) becoming a sustained note of longing.

The kajri's poetry belongs to a specific seasonal and emotional register: the 'virahini' — the woman separated from a husband or beloved who has gone to a distant city — voiced at the height of the rains. 'Ab Ke Sawan Ghar Aaja Piya' condenses the entire emotional situation into six words: the season has come (the traditional signal for reunion), but the beloved has not. Khamaj, the raag of this kajri, uses both the natural (shuddh) and flattened (komal) nishad, giving it a bittersweet, simultaneously warm-and-melancholic quality that classical musicians associate with the late monsoon and the feeling of something beautiful and heavy at once. The preview line 'more naina barse rimjhim megha' (my eyes rain like the monsoon clouds) is among the oldest and most loved in the Braj monsoon-poem tradition, where tears and rain are always made of the same water — the beloved's absence becoming continuous with the season's downpour. The text is traditional and pre-1920, placing it unambiguously in the public domain.

Siddheshwari Devi (8 August 1908 – 18 March 1977) was the granddaughter of the acclaimed singer Maina Devi and was raised by her aunt Rajeshwari Devi, herself a renowned vocalist. She trained under sarangi player Pandit Siyaji Maharaj and later Rajab Ali Khan and Inayat Khan, but considered Bade Ramdas her primary guru. By the mid-1940s, when this HMV recording was made, she was already celebrated as 'Thumri Queen' — a title Kesarbai Kerkar had bestowed — and Ustad Faiyyaz Khan had publicly announced: 'After Gauhar Jaan and Mallika Jan, this crown is yours.' The kajri was one of the seasonal forms at the core of Banaras women's music, and Siddheshwari Devi's treatment of it — importing khayal-ang elements into what was largely a folk form — gave the kajri a new classical authority and brought it into the formal recording and concert canon. M. S. Subbulakshmi later sought her out specifically to learn bhajan singing, testimony to how far her musical reach extended across regional traditions.

The kajri as a documented classical form owes much to Siddheshwari Devi's recordings, which brought it from the domain of folk practice into the concert and recording canon. This recording is regularly used in ethnomusicological teaching as a primary document of Banaras women's seasonal music.