Badma-Handa (Buryatia)

She is versatile- equally easily and refined she performs folk songs and pop-music. But her true love is old folk songs in authentic performance, which she sings with the accompaniment of the folk instruments.

“It seems to me, that my mission to become a singer, performing old buryatian folk songs, was in me genetically, far beyond my birth. Anyway, when I was in my mother’s womb, I heard the long buryatian tunes for sure: whether my mother sang them, or I heard the fascinating tunes from my remote forefathers. Anyhow, I can’t imagine myself without the folk melody, charming sounds of limbe and morin-huur’, - says Badma-Handa.

Badma-Handa was born in the Inner Mongolia – the region of the northern China – in 1979 in a buryatian family. Her grandmother and grandfather escaped from the communist regime repressions of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the thirties. The refugees tried to keep together, preserving the language, traditions and a national dignity. The songs that Badma-Handa sings are the old folk buryatian songs, almost forgot at their homeland because of many years of suppression of the true national values of the Buddhists and Buddhism in the USSR, but they continued living in their authentic way in a small buryatian community on the territory of China.

Now Badma-Handa moved to the native land of her forefathers and became a real star in Buryatia. Her unique voice and a charming manner of singing at once win the hearts of the listeners regardless where she is singing – in a small club in Buryatian village or in New York. Just listen how she is singing and try mentally to sing after her – you can be almost sure that you’ll fail; it seems unbelievable how long she can keep one breath. One can’t hear when and how she takes the air over. The timber of her voice is ringing and pure, and when you listen to Badma-Handa singing, sometimes it seems that you can hear the pure mountain stream running, the birds singing cheerfully high in the sky above the endless buryatian prairies, the wind howling mournfully above the icebond Baikal, and sometimes you imagine that the Great Chingiz-Han is enjoying her singing.

Text by Erkin Tuzmukhamedov

Exhibitions of festival «Tibet-2005»