Music Schools

In 1896, Vishnu Digambar Paluskar ran away from his teacher Pandit Balkrishnabua Ichalkaranjikar, a court musician at Miraj. Like his contemporary, Ravi Varma, in the visual arts, Paluskar wanted to move away from feudal patronage and address the marketplaces of growing urban centres. He started a music school, the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, at Lahore in 1901. Over the next thirty years, dozens of similar schools spread throughout Northern and Western India, e.g. the Saraswati Sangeet Vidyalaya in Karachi (1916), the Gopal Gayan Samaj in Pune (1918), the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in Kolhapur (1920) and the School of Indian Music in Bombay (1925). Paluskar’s action stemmed from a nationalistic disaffection from the feudal gharana system which was then sponsored and owned by the nobility who kept its repertory available only to the Guru’s kinsmen. His colleague, V.N. Bhatkhande, compiled and published all the available classical musical compositions in an accessible textbook, Hindustani Sangeet Paddhati (1921). Equally influential was the simultaneous effort to define a primitive notation system capable of recording the complex performance codes. Barring a few notable exceptions, the bulk of the students in the new system lacked the rigour of the traditional discipline, but they were also free from the conservatism of gharana ideology. They usually found their way into the recording industries of Lahore, Karachi and Calcutta, into the Sangeet Natak and Company Natak troupes and, after 1932, into film. Master Krishnarao was trained at the Bharat Gayan Samaj, actress Shanta Apte at the Maharashtra Sangeet Vidyalaya, Pandharpur. The parent school in Lahore also produced several musicians and composers central to the Lahore-based film industry: Rafiq Ghaznavi, an extremely popular ghazal singer with best-selling records in Karachi and an actor-music director in films like Prithviraj Sanyogita (1933), Bahen Ka Prem (1935) and later in some Mehboob and Sohrab Modi films. Prof. B.R. Deodhar, disciple of Paluskar and key ideologue for the music school aesthetic, stated in 1933 a position closely analogous to that prevalent in the art schools. In his opinion, the major issues facing classical Indian music were those of voice production and the antithetical relationship between Indian music and Western principles of notation, which made it difficult to arrive at indigenous systems of orchestration as well as to find equivalents for perceiving pure sound effects (like thunder or rain sounds). His polemical view was that these could only be solved through borrowing from Western classical musical systems (Deodhar, 1933).

Glossary