Thumri’s relationship with dance is evident even in its name which many musicians consider to derive from the word ‘thumak’—roughly translatable as the gait of the dancer, at once graceful, coquettish, sensuous. And almost all thumri singers will also say that thumri is (gale se bhav batana, gale se nirat karna), showing bhav, dancing with the voice. So at the very deepest, inmost level, in its essence, thumri is dance. At a more evident level, traditionally, thumri singers have embellished their singing with gesture and gaze, and in turn, an important part of a kathak dancer’s repertoire has been the dancing of thumri ‘songs’. In these forms, swar, poetry and movement illus¬trate, but also infinitely extend each other’s meaning(s). And finally, a whole genre of thumris were composed expressly for dance. Both thumri singers and kathak dancers have tended now to forget this relationship, or at least the more explicit expression of it.
May-June 1989, volume 13, No 3