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India's cultural diversity is so phenomenal that one
might well postulate that benign anarchy is one of the
guiding principles of her cultural institutions. The variety
of her languages, practices of worship, celebrations of joy
and observances of grief, her arts and crafts etc. is
bewildering. So it is also with her music. Not only are
there several contexts in which music might be performed,
( e.g. rituals ; observances of vital events such as birth,
death, marriage etc.; concerts and recitals, and so on ),
there is also a tremendous variety of themes,
interpretations, styles and traditions, not to mention
regional or microlocal differences. In the present article,
I am concerned with Hindustani Classical Music, which is a
term that I shall use interchangeably with the term " Art
Music ". Even within this genus, one finds a great variety
of traditions and styles of performance, of compositions, of
Ragas and their renderings, making a systematic study of
this subject a challenging task.
Certainly there have been attempts to systematize
Hindustani Classical Music - the Indian passion for taxonomy
could scarcely be expected to waste such an opportunity.
Nevertheless, traditional works on this subject are not as
numerous as one might expect on a priori grounds,
considering the long history of the subject. For example, in
her detailed study of the history of Indian music (Footnote
2). Emmy te Nijenhuis lists only 30 - 32 specifically
musicological works spanning the period between the 3rd and
the 19th centuries A.D., not counting multiple annotated
editions of the same treatise. The majority are in Sanskrit,
and are relatively inaccessible to the average reader.
With the steady growth of interest in Hindustani
Classical Music which has taken place over the last thirty
years in North America, one can expect an increased interest
in its musicology as well. Even if one shares the disdain of
the Performer for the non-practising theorist, it would be
difficult to deny that some systematization provides a
common language and syntax for musical study and discussion
and thereby helps to reduce the ambiguities inherent in the
give and take of musical life.
Among twentieth century attempts to study Hindustani
Classical Music systematically, I believe that the work of
Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande occupies a special place. His
efforts at systematization were the first modern ones
undertaken with a scientific spirit, and they have had so
much influence that his ideas provide much of the vocabulary
of musical discussion today. Moreover, the work that he did
brought about profound changes in the socio-cultural and
educational context in which Hindustani Classical Music was
performed in his day, and these changes have had an
enormous influence on the way Hindustani Classical Music is
practised today. It is my aim in this article to discuss
briefly Bhatkhande's life and work.
His Life. (Footnote 3).
Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande was born on August 10, 1860,
on Janmashthami, the day which marks the festival
celebrating the birth of Lord Krishna according to the Hindu
lunar calendar. His family was a middle class Brahmin family
of modest means. The family had its roots in Ratnagiri
district, not far south of Bombay on the west coast of
India. His father had a high school education and was
employed as an overseer/accountant of temple properties at a
well endowed temple in Bombay.
The second of five children, Vishnu seems to have had a
healthy, uneventful childhood. He showed some aptitude and
liking for music, being sporadically interested in the
flute. In any event, he was certainly exposed to a certain
amount of music, due to his father's association with the
temple, which served as a venue for ritual musical
performance. At the age of 15, through the introduction
provided by a neighbour, Gopalgiribuwa by name, he started
taking Sitar lessons from a man by the name of Vallabhdas
Damulji, an accomplished musician, who in turn had been
trained by a well regarded Been player of the time,
Jeevanlal Maharaj. It is a commentary on his milieu that he
had to undertake this training on the sly. It was not
considered proper for members of high caste families to
study art music in a rigorous professional manner, although
participation in music in a religious context was common,
and indeed would be a point of pride in such families. The
secret of his Sitar lessons could not long be concealed in a
well-knit family. Fortunately, his father, perhaps
recognizing an unquenchable musical passion, allowed him to
continue the study of the Sitar, provided that Vishnu
undertook to do so as an amateur - he must never perform in
public, and he must promise not to allow music to interfere
with his academic studies.
Young Vishnu, ( or Annasaheb as he was usually called
by then ), continued the study of music throughout his
college days. He attended Elphinstone College, Bombay, from
which he graduated in 1885 with a Bachelor's degree, took a
law degree in 1887, and was admitted to the Bar the same
year. He practised law at the Bombay High Court ( 1887-89 ),
and the Karachi High Court ( 1889-1910 ). Early in the
latter period, ( I cannot determine just when ), he was
married, and shortly thereafter, a daughter was born. But
the marriage was ill-fated. Annasaheb lost both his wife and
daughter in 1900 and 1903 respectively after short
illnesses. These events had a profound effect on him. He
never married again, never gave further "hostages to
fortune", and devoted an increasing proportion of his mental
life to the study and contemplation of music. True to his
promise to his father, he never sought to be a performer,
although he was quite a competent and sensitive one, judging
from contemporary reports. His bent was more for acute
observation, analysis and synthesis. This naturally led him
to the study of musicology; and this meant the musicology of
classical vocal music - Indian tradition has always accorded
primacy to vocal music above other media. So much did this
absorb him that he gradually withdrew from his law practice,
and essentially abandoned it in 1910. He had independent
means by then, and thereafter his practice of law was
limited to acting out the role of executor to two large
estates until the legatees attained majority. For the rest
of his time, he undertook what can now be seen as an
extraordinarily ambitious project : He set out to understand
thoroughly the musicology of Hindustani Classical Music of
his day, its relation to historical sources, and to
catalogue as fully as he could the vocal music then in
practice, with respect to styles and compositions.
This task would absorb him for the rest of his life. He
was ruthlessly single-minded in the pursuit of his goal. He
travelled the length and breadth of India. On his travels he
located and studied historical source works on music, almost
all in Sanskrit, a language in which he was fluent. He
interviewed other scholars and musicologists concerning
their interpretations of the texts as well as their opinions
of the prevailing state of the art, and above all, spent
countless hours with some of the best performing musicians
of the time, trying to understand the relation between the
system propounded in these classical texts and the actual
musical practices that these performers had imbibed from
their respective oral-aural traditions. The microscopic
study of their music and musical lore, including the study
of precise points of similarity and difference in their
renderings of particular Ragas and compositions became the
ruling passion of his life.
A prodigious amount of work now began to appear from
his pen. Over the next 26 years ( 1910-36 ), he produced
four major works : (1) "Shrimallakshyasangeetam", a
collection of Sanskrit verses which summarise his findings
about the structure of various Ragas ; (2) "Hindustani
Sangeeta Paddhati", a four volume work in Marathi, later
translated into Hindi, containing a detailed exposition of
his researches, written in the form of a Platonic dialogue;
(3) "Kramik Pustak Malika", a six volume work in Marathi,
also translated later into Hindi, which contains
compositions that he had collected in his travels from
scores of performing musicians and their families. He
invented his own system of notation for this purpose. This
work, with over 1850 compositions, including over 300 of his
own, is still in use as a standard source in the curricula
of most musical institutions in India today; (4) A longish
scholarly article, " A Comparative Study of the Music
Systems of the 15th, 16th, and the 17th Centuries ", which
appeared in a quarterly publication entitled Sangeet,
published by the Marris College ( now known as Bhatkhande
Sangeet Vidyapeeth ), Lucknow.
Apart from these works, he supervised the publication
of 26 other musicological works by other authors. Some of
these were old Sanskrit texts critically annotated by him,
others were editions of works by contemporary authors in
which he had participated substantially as a discussant. All
of them involved a sizable effort on Pandit Bhatkhande's
part ( by now, he had come to be known as " Pandit " - a
learned man ). In addition to this there were, of course, a
large number of occasional essays, articles and so on, not
easy to trace fully now. He also kept a diary of his
reflections and encounters. I believe that these amount to
some 2000 manuscript pages, and are archived at Khairagarh,
Madhya Pradesh, in India.
Pandit Bhatkhande sufferred a stroke in 1933, the
effects of which more or less confined him to bed for the
next three years. He continued his activities from the
sickbed, writing and editing the final volumes of Kramik
Pustak Malika. He died on September 19, 1936, on
Ganeshchaturthi, the day on which Hindus pray to the
elephant god Lord Ganesha.
His Work
In order to appreciate his work fully, one needs to
understand the musical as well as the social milieu in which
he lived. It would be impossible to do this in a short
article. I can only hope to give the reader an inkling of
the scope and significance of his work, and thereby of his
life.
It will be convenient to view Bhatkhande's work under
several headings : (a) Musicological research and
Systematics; (b) Collection and Documentation of musical
compositions; (c) Original, creative work of musical
composition; (d) Scholarly and educational work, e.g.
editing, didactic writing, organizing institutions of
musical instruction, planning of curricula etc.; I shall set
down my thoughts briefly under these headings.
(a) Musicological Research and Systematics.
Bhatkhande's Magnum Opus, " Hindustani Sangeet
Paddhati ", is a four volume work of over 2000 pages, cast
in the form of a Platonic dialogue between teacher and
student. It is a work of great detail, and although its
structure as a dialogue sometimes tends to lure the argument
into long digressions, it is a literate and on the whole a
comprehensible work with a consistent internal logic.
The main problem that he set out to tackle was to
understand whether the enormous variety of musical practices
that he observed in the art music of his day could have
arisen by differentiation from a common systematic basis.
Most musicians saw ( then as now ) their training as being
rooted in a system that went back several hundred years. In
order to understand what such a system might be like,
Bhatkhande first turned to the study of several Sanskrit
works which had traditionally been regarded as the sources
of ancient systems. Prominent among these were the Sangeeta
Ratnakara ( The Ocean of Music ) of Sharngadeva, the
Sangeeta Parijata of Ahobala and the Raga Vibodha of
Somanatha. Somewhat to his consternation, he found that
there were a large number of inconsistencies between the
systems propounded by these works. Even when considered
individually they sufferred from a certain flabbiness of
expression and occasionally of concept as well. The basic
terminology of musical scales was not the same in different
sources, and the obvious difficulty of communicating in
writing a physical phenomenon such as sound made the
discussion of finer points of intonation all but
inscrutable. After a detailed study of the internal
consistency as well as the interrelations between these
texts, Bhatkhande came to the conclusion that they could not
be viewed as providing a canonical basis for the art music
that was then prevalent, whatever one might claim about
their having provided such a basis in the past. Bhatkhande's
researches into this question led him to do interesting
experiments with certain string instruments with fixed and
movable frets which were designed for experimental use - the
Chala Veena and the Achala Veena - modelled after
descriptions in these classical works. These instruments
made it possible to compare different descriptions of
musical intervals to some extent. His conclusions, were
detailed and definite, and the arguments by which he arrived
at them are fully set out in the first 135 pages of
Hindustani Sangeeta Paddhati Vol.2. In these pages
Bhatkhande describes his experiments, ( which involved
understanding the relations between various theories of
consonant sound which had existed in the ancient and
medieval world, e.g. Pythagoras' celebrated progression of
fifths, the various modes of Greek music such as the
Aeolian, Phrygian, Dorian etc. ), and seeks to arrive at a
plausible guess as to what the musical scale used by Indian
musicians might have been. He found that one could not
accurately establish the relation between the terminology
followed by the various texts mentioned above. Naturally,
without this information, it was essentially impossible to
try to reconcile the many inconsistencies between these
works in their conception of various Ragas. Although he
came to some tentative conclusions concerning an underlying
protosystem, he found that they were too shaky as a basis on
which one could hope to support an edifice of
systematization. He therefore decided to proceed
inductively, and set out to arrive at a plausible guess at
an underlying system, from voluminous observation and
documentation of existing art music, followed by an
abstraction of its common features. This was surely an
ambitious task; to put it in perspective, one can compare it
to the task one would face if one tried to reconstruct the
system underlying western music by studying the classical
western music that is played today.
Fortunately for him, he was able to enlist several
leading performing musicians of his time to help him in this
task. To be sure this was not done easily, but involved
patient - and sometimes servile - persuasion. But in the
end, he managed to get the help of several such musicians
who had a vast knowledge of traditional compositions often
handed down orally from father to son over several
generations. Their method of transmission, which was by
rote, at least made it plausible that the basic tonal-
structural features of a Raga might have survived
essentially intact over the years, although clearly both the
phrasing and the texts had probably changed. On the basis of
extensive study of hundreds of these compositions, as well
as comparisons of the prevailing practices for particular
Ragas with descriptions of those Ragas in historical
sources, he came to certain conclusions both in respect of
the scale that underlies Hindustani music, as well as the
structural conventions that govern various Ragas. This led
him eventually to propose a classification of some 180
Ragas which were then in practice into 10 groups which he
called Thaats, a classification which today forms the
basis of instruction in most musical schools. He ventured to
place this classification before his contemporaries as a
" Paddhati " ( i.e. a System ) that underlies Hindustani
Classical Music.
Because it represents a very influential and concrete
part of Bhatkhande's work, I would like to discuss his
classification briefly. His starting point was the Mela
system which had found general acceptance in South India.
This system, expounded circa 1640 A.D. by the musicologist
Venkatamakhi, gave an enumeration of "parent scales" or
Melas, based on certain rules. Since the system is basic
to an understanding of almost any system of classification
of Indian music, I will describe it in a simplified
way.(Footnote 4). The reader who has no taste for technical
discussion may skip the next page or so without too much
loss.
Let us recall that in Indian music the notes of the
octave have the names
SA, RE, GA, MA, PA, DHA, NI, SA.
We shall denote these by
S, R, G, M, P, D, N, S>
In addition there are of course, certain notes which
are flat or sharp versions of some of these. They are :
Komal ( flat ) RE, which will be denoted by r;
Komal GA, which we denote by g; Tivra ( sharp ) MA,
denoted by M+; this is the augmented fourth; Komal DHA,
denoted by d; Komal NI, denoted by n. Thus the full twelve-
tone scale is labelled as :
S, r, R, g, G, M, M+, P, d, D, n, N, S.
However, unlike in western music, these names do not
refer to notes of a fixed absolute pitch. Rather, having
decided the register and key in which the performance is to
take place, the performer selects the fundamental pitch,
designates it as the first note of the octave, and gives it
the label SA, the succeeding notes being named as above.
Thus, for a performer who selects C as the fundamental, the
notes will be named as follows :(Footnote 5).
S, r , R, g , G, M, M+ , P, d , D, n , N, S
C, C\# , D, Eb , E, F, F\# , G, Ab , A, Bb , B, C
Under the Mela system, each Raga is considered to
have been derived from a particular " parent scale ", which
is called a Mela ( or more fully, a Swaramela -
literally : a compatible collection of Swaras or pitches ).
For example, using C as the fundamental, the scale
S, r , G, M, P, d , N, S>.
C, C\# , E, F, G, Ab , B, c.
is a particular Mela, called Mayamalavagoula in South
India, ( and as will be seen below, called the Bhairav
Thaat in Hindustani music ), from which Mela spring
several Ragas. In order for a scale to qualify as a
Mela, Venkatmakhi proposed certain rules : (a) A Mela
must always contain S, P, and S>, (the initial note of
the next octave); (b) It shall contain one and only one of
the two notes M and M+; (c) Of the remaining four notes
of the lower half of the full scale, namely r, R,
g, G, a Mela shall contain exactly two notes; (d) Of
the remaining four notes of the upper half of the full
scale, namely d, D, n, N, a Mela shall
contain exactly two notes. Using these four rules it is
easily determined that there can be exactly 72 Melas.
However, Venkatamakhi realised that not all these Melas
are musically viable and pleasing, and he determined that 19
of them were in common use in the Karnatak music of his
time. Although compositions exist in Ragas using material
from the other Melas, some of them have a somewhat
contrived air about them, and the 19 Melas he noted as
commonly prevalent form the basis of Karnatak musical
instruction to this day.
Bhatkhande realised that, as far as Hindustani
Classical Music was concerned, the parent scales apparently
in use were far fewer in number. This was partly due to
differrent aesthetic conventions, which frowned upon the
frequent juxtaposition of pitches which were only a semitone
apart. Thus the scale
S, r, R, M+, P, d, D, S
would be an allowable Mela, but Hindustani music does not
use it because of the preponderance of half-note intervals
in it. Bhatkhande then considered augmenting Venkatamakhi's
rules with an additional rule that would deal with this fact
: namely that a parent scale shall have just one note from
the following pairs -( r, R ), ( g, G ), (
d, D ), and ( n, N ). Clearly this would
eliminate many half-tone intervals. With this additional
rule, one gets 32 scales that are allowable. Bhatkhande
called each of these scales a Thaat ( literally : manner
or style ) and seriously thought of adopting this set of
scales as a basis for his classification of Hindustani
Ragas. But he eventually decided to use a smaller number,
partly for pragmatic reasons, i.e. ease of recall. By using
a well reasoned inductive argument, he identified 10 such
Thaats as being in common use, each of which he named
after an important Raga which would be the Doyen of that
Thaat. He then proceeded to ascribe the Ragas which were
then performed ( some 170-190 in number ) to one or the
other of these Thaats. As an example, we may look at the
Bhairav Thaat which is the scale
S, r , G, M, P, d , N, S>.
C, C\# , E, F, G, Ab , B, c.
( Recall that this is also the Mela Mayamalavagoula ). It
is named after the Raga Bhairav which in a sense typifies
Ragas of this Thaat. Several other Ragas use material
from this scale, for example the Raga Jogia which uses the
material S, r, M, P, d, N, S>.(Footnote 6).
Similarly there are 9 other Thaats e.g. Asavari, Bhairavi,
Bilawal, Kafi, Kalyan, Khamaj, Marwa, Poorvi and Todi, each
named after a principal Raga in that Thaat, which is
supposed to be a prototype for other Ragas of that Thaat in
their use of the scale. To sum up, Bhatkhande classified the
then prevalent Ragas into 10 Thaats based on a precise set
of musical ideas.
Since the number of possible scales is a good deal
larger than 10, it must be expected that any classification
that sets out with only 10 Thaats is bound to suffer from
some inadequacies and inconsistencies. Bhatkhande's attitude
on this point was far from dogmatic. He explicitly allowed in
Hindustani Sangeeta Paddhati the validity and logical
appeal of a finer classification with more Thaats, but
settled on 10 Thaats because he felt that it led to an
adequate system which would not burden a student's memory
unduly. Ambiguities which inevitably arose were resolved by
an ad hoc consideration, appealing to musical performance
practice and the internal dynamics of the Raga.(Footnote 7).
Today, essentially all the institutions of Hindustani
musical instruction use Bhatkhande's classification ( in
varying degrees of detail ) as a basis for their curricula.
Bhatkhande's system also forms the lexicon of discussion
among musicians and musicologists, although, for reasons
mentioned just above, its acceptance is not total. It is
clear, however,that it is the only attempt at classification
that has found reasonably wide acceptance.
(b) Collection and Documentation of compositions.
In order to comprehend the system underlying the music
practised in his day, Bhatkhande travelled the length and
breadth of India. During these travels, he talked with
musicians and musicologists, learning both their theoretical
practical ideas, and collected a large number of traditional
compositions which had typically been handed down in
hereditary musical families, which at that time formed the
core of musical practitioners in North India. Most of these
families consisted of Muslim musicians, whose forebears had
scattered to the small towns and rural areas of North India
after the disintegration of the Mogul empire. The ancestors
of these families had mostly been court musicians either at
the Mogul court or at smaller courts of the many vassals of
the Moguls. With the advent of British rule, which did not
extend such patronage, most of the court musicians scattered
to smaller towns, and there formed the nucleii of musical
traditions. They were called Gharanas or Khandaans
( literally : households or families, i.e. lineages ).
Over the next century these families maintained their
musical traditions by oral transmission within the family.
However there were several harsh realities in their musical
life. They lived frugally, often under conditions of
privation, and were far removed from the general educational
and cultural processes to which they had access previously
while at court. This led to the creation of a class of
highly specialized musicians, often very talented and well
trained, who were however generally uneducated, and
certainly far removed from any scholarly inclinations. Their
method of study was by rote; the principle that the Ustad
( teacher ) was a canonical authority whose wishes were
absolute law to the Shagird ( disciple ), was actively
cultivated and enforced. Even asking a question or
expressing a doubt was often regarded as an indication of
incipient dissent, and therefore as impertinent. Over time
these families became highly inbred musical lineages, who
jealously guarded their lore, which was after all the means
of their precarious livelihood. Any effort towards
systematizing that lore would naturally be seen by them as a
step towards making it more easily portable and accessible
to others outside the pale. Small wonder that they were
unsympathetic, and often actively inimical to any such
efforts. Such Hindu musicians as then existed were mostly
trained by one of the Muslim Gharanas, and were not always
allowed to learn all that their Ustads might have had in
their possession. In turn, many of the Hindu musicians were
also subject to similar economic and societal pressures, and
thus came to share the same prejudices against efforts to
systematize music, and indeed against scholarship and
analysis in general.
Stepping into this milieu, Bhatkhande sufferred two
basic disabilities. He was far removed from any Gharana;
and he advocated an intellectual understanding of musical
practice by espousing the cause of systematization. Ever the
rationalist, he wanted to get to the root of every practice,
and would go to great lengths to get answers to his many
questions. This ran counter to the established ethos of
acceptance of authority, so much so that he encountered
active hostility from many quarters. The story of how he
succeeded in breaking down the resistance of some of the
best musicians and in obtaining access to many of their
traditional compositions is fascinating.(Footnote 8). Here I
have to content myself with simply reporting the result - he
was able to collect over 2000 compositions, some dating back
over two or three centuries. He carefully wrote them down,
attended to correcting obvious interpolations and
corruptions, and notated them with a notation system of his
own devising. About 1500 of these, ( together with some 300
of his own compositions ) appear in the six volumes of the
Kramik Pustak Malika. The rest, some 500, are presumably
with his papers and diaries at Khairagarh.
The Kramik Pustak Malika, a six volume work, is a
work of major archival significance. It is basically a
collection of notated compositions, grouped according to the
Ragas in which they are composed. It contains 1849
compositions in 189 Ragas. To this day there is no
compendium of traditional compositions which comes close to
it for variety and accuracy. It contains many Dhrupad
compositions, some set to unusual Talas. Notwithstanding
the well-known inadequacies of notation as a guide to the
performance of Hindustani music, the collection has proved
to be enormously useful, and is regularly used by practising
musicians, especially in Maharashtra state. Its use by
musicians has had another important effect : namely the idea
that notation can play a role in preserving, albeit
sketchily, the musical intent of the composer has now come
to be accepted by performing Hindustani musicians in India.
This is evidenced by the appearance of published volumes of
collected compositions of many individual musicians. Several
such volumes have emerged in recent years, and this practice
can now be regarded as well-established. Most of these
volumes follow the system of notation devised by Bhatkhande.
This phenomenon is surely due in large measure to the work
of Bhatkhande. Clearly, the very acceptance of the idea that
notating compositions can have some utility ( long out of
favour with the majority of Hindustani musicians, and indeed
not universally accepted even today ), will have
substantial impact on Hindustani music from the archival
point of view.
This article has already become longer than I intended.
I shall have to be even more casual about the other headings
under which I set out to view Bhatkhande's work.
(c) His compositions.
Bhatkhande's work as a composer is extremely
interesting to a musician who believes in the importance of
literary and prosodic aspects of a composition for the total
enjoyment of music. A study of the compositions in the
Kramik Pustak Malika which can be ascribed to him reveals
a nice command of these aspects. This is a feature that many
traditional compositions lack, ( perhaps having lost this or
that fine feature over the gulf of decades of oral
transmission ). He also pays great attention to the
characteristic phrasings of the Raga, sometimes
incorporating the solfage cleverly in the text in such a way
that the letters of the solfage do double duty as a part of
a meaningful word in the song, while retaining their
appropriate musical pitches. In this respect he follows the
great tradition of classical Sanskrit poetry, in which such
complex devices were often employed with great effect and
skill. A fuller analysis of his compositions would be a
subject worthy of further study. It would not only
illuminate his creative genius more fully, but would also
serve to illustrate well the devices and themes that are
common to many compositions in Hindustani music. A reader
could thus get a feeling for the cultural data with which a
good audience is expected to be equipped to fully enjoy a
Hindustani musical performance.
(d) Scholarly and educational work.
Bhatkhande believed fervently that the age of mass
musical education was just dawning in India. Time and again
he expresses in Hindustani Sangeeta Paddhati his dismay at
the fact that in his day the upper echelons of society
regarded the performance of art music as a decadent and
degrading occupation associated with prostitution and
orgiastic excess. The sociological reasons for this attitude
are complex and numerous, and will not be dwelt upon here.
Bhatkhande felt strongly that a civilized society cannot
regard the practice of music as degrading. He had a vision
that some musical training would in time become an essential
part of the formation of every person who could be regarded
as educated. I suppose that this noble vision ( shared as
well by other visionaries, e.g. Jefferson ) will always be
an unattained goal that inspires human effort. Bhatkhande
strove hard to propagate this point of view. He did so by
various methods. Editing and publishing musical and
musicological work by other authors, bringing it within
reach of the middle class was one facet of this
activity.(Footnote 9). He did a lot of it, having been
involved in the publication of over two dozen substantial
works by other authors in one role or another, not to
mention more casual popular and journalistic writing. Lack
of space does not permit a fuller description here. Even
more far-reaching in impact was his founding of several
institutions of musical instruction, in Baroda, Gwalior, and
Lucknow for example, and the adoption of a standard
curriculum of musical instruction by these institutions.
Although these institutions are not in the educational
mainstream, being in this respect similar to conservatories
in the West, their existence has served to dispel the social
prejudices against music as an occupation. Today, musical
skills are widely sought after by the upper echelons of
Indian society, and many professionals in India have adopted
musical performance as a secondary vocation, which in many
case evolves into a primary career if they get recognition
and popularity. I feel that Bhatkhande's writing and the
example that he set by his own life had a major role in
bringing about this change of attitude, especially in
Maharashtra. He was thus an important participant in the
process of cultural change to which other contemporary
figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, Sourindra Mohan Tagore,
and Vishnu Digambar Paluskar contributed. His dream of
integrating music education as an essential component of
secondary education remains unfulfilled and current
educational trends in India do not allow one to hope that it
will soon be a reality. Perhaps the main function of such
noble dreams is to provide the spur to the efforts of
visionaries like Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande.
Acknowledgements
I have benefitted from personal discussions with many
musicians in the preparation of this article. Among them are
K.G.Ginde, Dinkar Kaikini, C.R.Vyas and Yunus Hussein Khan.
Conversations with them have helped me to refine my
understanding of the musical milieu of the past, and the
nature of Pandit Bhatkhande's contribution. While thanking
them for their time, I want to emphasize that the views
expressed in this article, together with their shortcomings,
are my own. Finally, I would like to thank Ashok Ranade for
allowing me the use of the archives and the library of the
National Centre for the Performing Arts, Bombay.
Footnotes
Footnote 1: Chatura Pandit ( literally : the Clever or
Crafty Scholar ) was Bhatkhande's pen-name.
Footnote 2: Emmy te Nijenhuis; Indian Music, History and
Structure; Handbuch der Orientalistik, Band 6; E.J.Brill,
Leiden 1974.
Footnote 3: The reader who knows Marathi can find a detailed
account of Bhatkhande's life in S. N. Ratanjankar; Pandit
Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande; Maharashtra Government
Publications, Bombay,1973.
Footnote 4: In order to keep the discussion manageable, I
have simplified certain points, concerning nomenclature of
notes, which arise inevitably in an accurate discussion of
the Mela system which is in use in Karnatak music. Thus
the Karnatak names for certain notes have been replaced by
their closest Hindustani equivalents. I believe that this
does not do too much damage in a non-technical article. For
a more careful discussion of Melas, see for example the
article by Harold Powers in The New Grove: Dictionary of
Music and Musicians, Vol. IX, pp. 69-166; W. Macmillan \
Sons, London, 1981.
Footnote 5: If the performer chooses a different fundamental
note, say for example Eb, the notes would be named with
corresponding changes:
S , r , R, g , G, M , M+, P, d, D, n , N, S>
Eb , E , F, F\# , G, Ab, A , Bb, B, C, C\#, D, Eb
Footnote 6: The tonal material does not by itself specify
the Raga of course. One needs to describe many other
characteristics, such as its ascent-descent structure,
sonant-consonant pair, and above all, its characteristic
phrases.
Footnote 7: Indeed, the resolution of such ambiguities seems
to have been a bit of a cause celebre at certain times. It
was a subject of heated debate among certain factions of
musicians in Maharashtra, as evidenced by contemporary
writing, and probably elsewhere as well. Between 1918 and
1922, Bhatkhande organized three conferences during which
considerable time was devoted to a discussion of the
phrasing and dynamics of certain major groups of Ragas, so
that one could attempt to ascribe ambiguous Ragas to
appropriate Thaats in a reasonable manner. Many of the
best performers of that time attended these conferences, and
apparently they even produced some concensus on certain
musical points, as one can gather from references to this
fact in the prefaces of two volumes of the Kramik Pustak
Malika.
Footnote 8: He spared no tactic; of the classic Indian
formula of Sama, Dama, Danda, Bheda, ( which is roughly
equivalent to Beg, Buy, Borrow, Steal ), he tried all except
the last method!.
Footnote 9: He even played on the susceptibilities of the
society of his day in unexpected ways; for example, knowing
that educated people in Maharashtra had a great respect for
Sanskrit, he wrote his work "Shrimallakshyasangeetam" in
Sanskrit, under the pseudonym Chatura Pandit, and cited it
as a reference in his other writings. Being a work in
Sanskrit many people automatically thought that it was an
old work, and therefore worthy of the respect owed to
canonical works. Bhatkhande did nothing to dispel this
misapprehension. To be fair to him, he never lied about it
either, emulating a famous incident in the Mahabharata.
All of this had a mischievous air about it, and I think he
enjoyed the double entendre implicit in his pseudonym;
Chatura means clever, but it also means crafty.
About the author
Ramesh Gangolli was born in Bangalore, India, and educated at the
Universities of Bombay and Cambridge, and at MIT. After taking his
doctoral degree at MIT, he taught there for a year before joining the
faculty of the University of Washington, Seattle in 1962. He taught in
the Department of Mathematics, serving as Chair between 1981-84 and
1991-93. He has been active in mathematical research as well in education
during most of his career, and has served in a number capacities in
service to the profession: on advisory committees of the National Science
Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research
Council, as a Trustee of the American Mathematical Society, Chair of the
AMS's Committee on Education, and in other similar roles. For the last
five years he has served as Principal Investigator of two (NSF supported)
projects involving K-12 mathematics teachers from six school districts in
the Seattle Metropolitan Area.
Ramesh Gangolli also maintains a serious interest in the classical music
of India and teaches in the Ethnomusicology Program in the School of
Music. He is a singer, having received training initially from his friend
Sharad Gadre, and later as from several fine vocaists of North India: the
late Ustad Yunus Hussain Khan, Pt. Dinkar Kaikini, and the late Acharya K.
G. Ginde. He has also been engaged in the study of the texts of the oral
repertoire of the hereditary lineages of vocal musicians (gharanas) of
India. He has given a number of recitals and lecture demonstrations in the
US and in India relating to his work. He is currently Professor Emeritus
of Mathematics and Adjunct Professor of Music at the University of
Washington. He also serves currently as President of Ragamala (a volunteer
organization based in Seattle, devoted to the Music of India and South
Asia), which he helped to found in 1981.
Ramesh Gangolli (gangolli@math.washington.edu)
Dept. of Mathematics GN-50
University of Washington
Seattle WA 98195.
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