Bhatkhande was also exposed to variety of musical styles, as he heard several vocalists and instrumentalists who visited Mumbai from other parts of India.īhatkhande concomitantly pursued his academic education and became a lawyer. Here, Bhatkhande learnt hundreds of traditional compositions from Raojibuwa Belbaugkar, Ali Hussein and Vilayat Hussein, all of whom were employed as teachers by the Mandali. He then became a member of the Parsi Gayan Uttejak Mandali, perhaps the first formal music club to have been established in Mumbai. He learnt sitar from Vallabhdas Gopalgiri and Buwa Damulji. Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860-1936) found himself in this environment and his initial love for music transformed into a single-minded mission to build an institutionalized and codified system of education for Hindustani music in the early part of the twentieth century.īorn in Mumbai, Bhatkhande played flute as a young boy, but got further drawn into the subtleties of Hindustani music. The first few music clubs met with opposition from some quarters for a variety of reasons, but they soon became an integral part of the musical life of urban India. The new perspective that took seed in the intellectual elite resulted in the formation of music clubs, which were set up to disseminate traditional knowledge to those outside hereditary musician and songstress families and to encourage amateurs to take to musical performance. Performance was also a prerogative of hereditary performers. This form of training placed heavy demands on the dedication and receptivity of the shishya. This was at a time when training in music was imparted by the oral guru-shishya or master-disciple tradition, primarily to those belonging to families of hereditary musicians and women performers. Indian art music proved to be one such symbol and steps were taken to transform the traditional method of training and performance in order to place the art form on par with other subjects of academic learning. The growing national consciousness in the face of British colonial rule and the need to establish India’s ‘glorious’ past to the Indians and British, led sections of the intellectual elite to search for symbols of national cultural identity. The influence of Western education in nineteenth century India motivated the Indian intellectual elite to incorporate ideas from this system into other areas of their social and political life.
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