- Lived:
- born 1956 (sources differ on the day), Ganiyari village near Bhilai, Durg district, Chhattisgarh (then Madhya Pradesh) — died 5 July 2026 at AIIMS Raipur; the life ran from village courtyards to the world's concert halls and back home every time
- Field:
- Pandavani — the solo sung Mahābhārata of Chhattisgarh; first woman to perform it standing, in the kapalik style
- The Big Idea:
- India's biggest epic does not need a stage set, an orchestra or even a book. It needs one voice that has the whole story inside it — and Teejan Bai proved the voice could be a woman's, over every rule that said it could not.
- In their words:
- She liked to say, in interviews across four decades, that when she sang she did not play Bhīma — she became him (a paraphrase; she said it many ways, always with the same verb).
- If you remember one thing:
- A teenage girl from a community her own neighbours looked down on stood up to sing an epic that women were only allowed to sing sitting down. Her village threw her out. The world let her in — and she carried the village form to the world without changing one note to please it.