TWO MEN AND MUSIC

Nationalism
in the
Making of an Indian
Classical Tradition


Janaki Bakhle

1

 3
Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further
Oxford University’s objective of excellence
in research, scholarship, and education.

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi
New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto
With offices in
Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece
Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore
South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright ©  by Oxford University Press

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 
www.oup.com
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bakhle, Janaki.
Two men and music : nationalism in the making of an Indian classical tradition / Janaki Bakhle.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN- ----; ---- (pbk.)
ISBN ---; --- (pbk.)
. Music—Social aspects—India. . Bhatkhande, Vishnu Narayan, -. . Paluskar,
Vishnu Degamber, –. I. Title.
ML .B 
′.—dc 

        
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

THREE

THE CONTRADICTIONS

OF MUSIC’S MODERNITY
Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande

The year was . Music had been in the public eye for close to two decades.
Princely states were still providing the major source of both employment and
economic stability for musicians, but independent schools for teaching music
had been founded in cities in all three presidencies. In Bombay Presidency,
music appreciation societies in Pune, Bombay, Satara, Sangli, and elsewhere
had begun conducting classes for select groups of young men and, occasion-
ally, women, and the process by which musical education for a middle-
class public would become systematic seemed under way. It was a time that
an interested contemporaneous observer might have described as one of prog-
ress. And yet, no less a figure than Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, a
renowned musicologist and scholar, wrote in a letter to a friend that he felt as
if he were witnessing the impending demise of music.
The recipient of Bhatkhande’s letter in  was his close friend and col-
league Rai Umanath Bali, a taluqdar from Daryabad, close to Lucknow. Rai
Umanath would have read this lament: “Poor music. I really do not know
what sins music has commit[t]ed. No protector comes forward to champion
its cause. Nobody appreciates its great utility. People will certainly have to re-
pent one day. The next decade will kill most of the leading artists and scholars


and by the time the people wake up there will be only fifth class musicians
left to please them.”1 This premonition of loss seems extraordinary, voiced as
it was by Bhatkhande, already well known by then as a protector and cham-
pion of Hindustani music.
When Bhatkhande spoke and wrote, he did so mainly about North In-
dian vocal music, and within that subfield of Indian music, his accomplish-
ments were many and wide-ranging. By the second decade of the twentieth
century, he had excavated and made public a large number of old manu-
scripts. He had collected and notated thousands of musical compositions that
he had subsequently compiled in many pedagogical volumes. He was a pro-
lific writer of historical and musicological treatises on music in Sanskrit and
Marathi (his native language) and an influential theorist and historian. A few
years after writing the letter to Rai Umanath Bali, the two of them collabo-
rated with another wealthy zamindar, Nawab Ali, to found a college of music.
Toward the end of his life, he was sought after by rulers of princely states to
explain the intricacies of music, by leaders of the nationalist movement to es-
tablish departments of music in newly founded universities, and by high-
ranking officials in the provincial governments to proctor examinations and
evaluate teaching methods and curricula in new schools of music.
Bhatkhande’s accomplishments had all been in the service of music.2 He
had spent the first two decades of the twentieth century actively involved in
bringing music to the forefront of public consciousness, advocating the need
to make music easily available in terms of access to both musical perform-
ances and musical learning. And yet, in , his lament sounded heartfelt.
Had something changed between when he began his career in music in the
early years of the twentieth century and a mere two decades later? Had some-
thing gone wrong? There was a clear sense of an impending failure, alluded to
in his letter, and indeed, as we shall see, his own failures were quite real. In
the literature about him, biographical and historical, these failures have all
but disappeared. Because of his successes Bhatkhande is considered an icon
not just in the modern Indian state of Maharashtra, but also in the larger
world of Hindustani music in India.
In this chapter, the focus is both on Bhatkhande’s accomplishments and on
what is left out of the extant literature: his disappointments, failures, and flaws.
He is presented as a flawed secularist, as a failed modernist, and as an arrogant
nationalist. This may seem an odd way to proceed, but a close look at his
failures enables one to disentangle his tripartite understanding of music—

   ’ 


modern, scholastic, and secular—otherwise occluded by hagiography and dis-
missal. At a time when music and faith were being successfully soldered to-
gether by musicians like Pandit Paluskar, Bhatkhande insisted that music and
religion be kept apart. When South Indian music was carving out for itself a
unique place in Indian history in which its origins were being posited as un-
touched by and unlinked to North India, Bhatkhande advocated the integra-
tion of North and South Indian music. Without it, he believed, a new nation
would sing not in a unified chorus but in differentiated cacophonies. In the
course of his travels, he met a number of eminent musicians and scholars who
spoke of Indian music’s undoubted antiquity. He responded to these charla-
tans, as he perceived them, with disdain. For him, late-nineteenth-century
music had a young, two-hundred-year genealogy, which meant that India’s
music, as he saw it, was fundamentally modern, not ancient, but its youth did
not detract from its status as national classical music. Put another way, even
though he argued that a nation, any nation, needed a system of classical music,
his argument did not assume the necessity of an ancient pedigree.
Nationalism in and of itself was not Bhatkhande’s sole focus, and national
politics, whether Gandhi’s noncooperation movement or Ambedkar’s and
Periyar’s anti-Brahmin causes, were not his concern. His letter to Rai
Umanath Bali made no mention of the noncooperation movement, Chauri-
Chaura, or Gandhi’s arrest in March , something that had happened a
few months before he penned the letter. There was no such evasion when it
came to music’s national future as Bhatkhande envisioned it. Music, in order
to be nationalized, had to be institutionalized, centralized, and standardized.
It had to be put into a national academy to which everyone could have access.
But before that could happen, it needed a demonstrable and linked history,
one with a text or a few key texts that explained foundational rules, theories,
and performance practices. This history also required a historical point of ori-
gin, but unlike his contemporaries, Bhatkhande had no particular investment
in putative ancient Vedic origins. Music’s history could do as well with a
foundational text from the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
This vision of a modern yet Indian music nationalized and instituted in a
recognized academy never acquired quite the successful punch Bhatkhande
hoped it might in independent India. Indeed, the music college that he
founded began to founder almost as soon as it began. These failures are juxta-
posed against the overwhelming success of his contemporary, Pandit Paluskar,
about whom we shall read in the next chapter. And it is this vision that seems

   


particularly relevant today, when the institutionalization of national classical
music, North or South Indian, appears inextricable from all that Bhatkhande
questioned, such as the mutually exclusive trajectories of North and South
Indian music; the uncritical worship of one’s teacher, who was assumed to be
a spiritual guide; the imputation of spirituality to the performance of music;
and the maintenance of secrecy and suspicion, in particular, around questions
related to easy access to primary sources, documents, letters, and the like.
For all that Bhatkhande maintained a radical perspective on music for his
time, he is also one of Indian music’s most contentious, arrogant, polemical,
contradictory, troubled, and troubling characters. It may be better to view
him not as a charlatan or a savior, but as a tragic figure, one who was his own
worst enemy. All through his writings, there is ample evidence of elitism,
prejudice, and borderline misogyny. In the pages to follow, a few of the most
egregious examples of his contempt, his anti-Muslim prejudice, his Brah-
minic elitism, and his privileging of theory over practice as it relates to music
are offered without camouflage or disavowal. Yet nothing Bhatkhande wrote
or said was uncomplicated, and he constantly qualified his most troubling as-
sertions. As a result, there is simply no way to box his life and its trajectory
into simple categories or directions. Every anti-Muslim utterance, every elitist
claim, and every arrogant dismissal was qualified by what remained a con-
stant throughout his life—an obsession with textual authority. What moti-
vated him was a modern and modernist pursuit: the search for proof, demon-
strability, documentation, history, and order. His classicism was modern, his
prejudices were not restricted to any one group, his elitism was qualified by a
powerful desire for egalitarianism, and the austerity he demanded of musi-
cians was amply lived by him as example.
Bhatkhande made three compelling and radical claims. First, respectfully
but firmly, he rejected the authority of the Vedas. Second, he was unfailingly
skeptical not just about the Natyashastra but also about most texts from the
ancient period, settling instead on a seventeenth-century South Indian text as
the only one that had any real bearing on contemporary music. Third, he be-
lieved in the concept of secular music, meaning that the performance and
pedagogy of music should be rejuvenated in the modern period, untouched
by a discourse of religion or spirituality. Not one of these ideas has taken hold
in the world of performing arts, whether in performance or pedagogy. Sixty-
odd years after Bhatkhande’s death, much of classical music is suffused with
sacrality, held up by the notion of the ancient guru-shishya parampara. The

   ’ 


Vedas and the Natyashastra are routinely assumed to hold the secrets of Indian
music’s performative origins. This state of affairs bears little resemblance to
Bhatkhande’s actual work and writings.
As befits a tragic figure, the unwitting saboteurs of Bhatkhande’s dreams,
desires, and vision have not been his competitors or even their students. For a
man who spent his life making music visible, scholastic, and secular, the most
ironic of his failures is a posthumous one, effected by his own devotees and
students, who have done exactly the opposite of what he advocated. People
who were acquainted with him or his students police the documents that
would allow a critical history of his life to be written. Scholars are greeted
with skepticism, even suspicion. The archive is closed to the public, and
many students, men and women, begin their lessons by prostrating them-
selves at their teacher’s feet and do not question why this should be so.
At the turn of the millennium, there was a music gathering in Bombay
dedicated to Bhatkhande. One of the leading musicians in the city, a student
of one of Bhatkhande’s students, presided over the occasion. At the base of
Bhatkhande’s portrait, adorned by a marigold garland, stood a silver incense
stand. The proceedings began with a speech about his greatness. There was
deep respect for his memory at the gathering, and the atmosphere was rever-
ential. No one made a mention of his radical claims or his prejudices, and
while there were occasional questions, vigorous or polemical debate was out
of the question. A leading historian and scholar of music, Ashok Ranade,
spoke of a future of music in which students would be obligated to question
their teachers, a future in which music teachers might perhaps learn from
their students. But even he spoke of this future as something still to happen.
“Yenaar aahe vel,” he said in Marathi, “the time is approaching.” Close to sev-
enty years after Bhatkhande’s death, it has not yet arrived. How did it happen
that a vision that began with scholastics, debate, and secularism culminated
in garlands and incense? To some extent, Bhatkhande has to be held account-
able; in order to do that fairly, we need to begin with Bhatkhande’s life, where
he was born, his early years, and his education, then move with him through
his musical tours, writings, institutional success, and, finally, his last days.
Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande was born on August , , into a Brah-
min family in Bombay. His father worked for a wealthy businessman. Neither
of his parents was a professional musician, yet he and his siblings were taught
music; this was not unusual in a family of his class background. At the age of
fifteen, he began receiving instruction in sitar and shortly thereafter began

   


studying Sanskrit texts on music theory, a field of inquiry that would remain
with him as an obsession all through his life.3 In , he joined the Gayan
Uttejak Mandali, the music appreciation society whose history was detailed
in chapter . The Mandali exposed Bhatkhande to a rapidly expanding world
of music performance and pedagogy, and for the next six years, he studied
with musicians such as Shri Raojibua Belbagkar and Ustad Ali Husain, learn-
ing a huge number of compositions, both khayal and dhrupad.4 However,
music was still a sideline for him. He received his BA from Elphinstone Col-
lege, Bombay in . In , he received his LLB from Bombay University
and embarked on a brief career in criminal law. He abandoned it to turn his
full attention to music after the death of his wife in  and his daughter in
.5
The first thing Bhatkhande did was to embark on a series of musical re-
search tours, the first of which was conducted in  (when his wife was still
alive). During this tour he traveled to the provinces of Gujarat and Kutch. In
 (the year after his daughter’s death) Bhatkhande traveled extensively in
South India. He resumed his touring in  with visits to Nagpur, Hyder-
abad, Vijayanagar, and Calcutta, and concluded in  with a tour of Alla-
habad, Benares, Lucknow, Agra, and Mathura.6
He traveled with a series of questions—one hundred of them. His major
project was to search out and then write a “connected history” of music, and
it began with these tours, which he believed would give him some clues to
help recover some missing links. In the course of his travels, he got some
clues, and had to abandon others. How he coped—ideologically, affectively,
and intellectually—with what he found is a large part of this story. The osten-
sible reason for the tours was to visit religious sites and see the country, but
Bhatkhande was less interested in those objectives than in meeting music
scholars. A single-mindedness of purpose dictated his approach in each city.
He refused offers of introduction to professional lawyers and businessmen,
claiming that he had no desire to trade superficial comments on the weather
but wanted to get on with the business of meeting scholars of music and mu-
sicians.7 Aside from an occasional compliment to some monument, his di-
aries are devoted solely to his musical pursuits.
In his reliance on random interlocutors, there was an ethnographic
quality to Bhatkhande’s approach to his research. Mornings in new cities al-
ways began the same way. After waking up, he set out in search of scholars and
patrons of music. He found them by asking people on the streets if they knew

   ’ 


the names of famous people who had an extensive knowledge of music. In
this question alone, one can locate the success of music’s move into the cul-
tural sphere. A layperson on the street could now be approached to provide
information about music and musicians. With this information, acquired at
random, Bhatkhande set out to locate the residences of the people whose
names he had found. Once he arrived, he used his letters of reference and in-
troduction, bluntly stated his purpose, and set up appointments to meet
and talk. If he happened to attend a music performance he considered it a
serendipitous event, but his primary interest was to meet other scholars of
music, not spend all his time listening to music. A curious way to write about
music, one might think. But Bhatkhande was interested less in the actual per-
formances of music than in the theory that underpinned the education of the
musician.
Bhatkhande kept several diaries of his tours. The status and location of
the originals is unknown. The person entrusted with them, a self-styled stu-
dent of Bhatkhande’s by the name of Prabhakar Chinchore, reportedly found
them squirreled away in an old library, following which he kept them secret
for years. Here and there the odd musician or the occasional critic was al-
lowed a sneak peek at parts of this “authentic archive,” but in general, and far
more than the archive of his rival, Paluskar, Bhatkhande’s materials have been
kept away from the public. Prabhakar Chinchore had contracted Alzheimer’s
disease by the time the research for this book was conducted, so at this point,
the origins of the diaries are unknown. Three of the four diaries had been
copied in handwritten cursive Marathi. They could certainly have been doc-
tored, but given the paradoxical reverence with which Bhatkhande’s students
treat his memory, it is likely that the master’s words were simply copied word
for word, a document of greatness for distribution among the believers. At
any rate, they are considered authoritative, and that is itself significant even if
experts agree that the copies in circulation are not in Bhatkhande’s handwrit-
ing. Since these texts are considered authoritative by the cognoscenti, they
have a special place in the archive of music.
In one of these diaries, Bhatkhande referred to his potential readers
(vachak),8 suggesting that even in a format as seemingly private as a diary, he
was writing for a future audience, not just noting down personal memories
for family members alone. The diaries were not merely accounts of his travels,
but also the blueprints for his future writings. Along with recollections of the
day, he worked out both musicological minutiae and the narratological style

   


he would adopt in his more formal texts—in particular, in the five-volume
Hindustani Sangeet Padhati. People he talked to in his travels reappear as
figures in his formal texts. He kept notes for himself and wrote parentheti-
cal comments that draw the reader into a private exchange regarding his
interlocutors.
Bhatkhande did not interview the people he met so much as he interro-
gated them, seeking out what he judged to be their ignorance. He always
began with deference and compliments and then moved on to gentle ques-
tioning, which became increasingly aggressive. The interview culminated
with him having maneuvered his interviewee into a situation where the only
possible response to a technical question was to confess ignorance. In all these
encounters, Bhatkhande met only men. He had little regard for women musi-
cians and did not believe he could learn anything from them. This was not
because they were women but because, given the condition of music at the
time, women were less likely than men to have access to the kind of informa-
tion he believed would set music free.
Bhatkhande used this barrage of questions even with well-known authors
of texts on music. While the diaries provide evidence of an extraordinary in-
tellect focused on a singular project, they also point to Bhatkhande’s high
opinion of his own scholarship. Somewhere in the middle of an interview
with a music scholar, he would ask, “Do you read Sanskrit?” Shortly there-
after, the questions would take on a patronizing tone: “Are you sure you un-
derstand Sanskrit?” He would ask it again. “Are you sure you have understood
what you’ve read? Because I don’t think you have.” Invariably, his interviewee,
a musician, would confess ignorance of Sanskrit. Confession, however, was
not enough. Bhatkhande would often confirm his diagnosis. “So, you don’t
understand Sanskrit, cannot sing any of the ragas in the granthas you claim to
have read, and have not understood the granthas themselves?”9 Bhatkhande
then corrected his interviewee, set his knowledge of Sanskrit straight, and
even offered to sing parts of music that were written about in the Sangit Rat-
nakara,10 the text about which he had just received the confession of igno-
rance from his browbeaten subject.11
In this attempt to expose the lack of textual and theoretical understanding
of music, he questioned not only scholars and patrons, but musicians as well.
He asked them the same questions over and again. “On what authoritative
text or source (adhaar) do you rely for your musical knowledge and perform-
ance? Which books have you read in music? Which texts were you told about

   ’ 


by your teacher? Have you ever seen those texts? Can you show them to me?”
Their response was usually that they had not read anything, had never seen
these texts, and had received instruction without asking their teachers all the
questions Bhatkhande believed were vital to their education. A tradition
(parampara) was in place, and they had abided by it. He reported such en-
counters with no apparent awareness that his techniques might not have been
greeted with warmth. Instead, Bhatkhande wrote that his efforts to reeducate
people had met with great appreciation!12 On occasion, he apologized for his
forthrightness but qualified this with the suggestion that since both he and
his interlocutor were engaged in the same noble pursuit—the search for the
foundations of music—he hoped no offense would be taken. From the hos-
tility he generated, it is clear that offense was taken and offered in equal mea-
sure. Bhatkhande was not popular among musicians or among other scholars,
who found him arrogant and aggressive.13
In the course of the musical tours described in his diaries, Bhatkhande
met many people—scholars, musicians, and others. This chapter will deal
with three exemplary conversations: with Sri Subbarama Dikshitar, a well-
known authority on South Indian (Carnatic ) music in Etaiyapuram in Tinn-
evelly District; with Raja Sourendro Mohun Tagore, a well-known authority
on North Indian (Hindustani) classical music in Calcutta; and with Karama-
tullah Khan, a sarod player in Allahabad. These conversations reveal a bit
about Bhatkhande’s personality, opinions, aspirations, and desires. They also
point to a sense of disquietude, an ambivalence that would not go away.
On December , , in Etaiyapuram, Bhatkhande met Sri Subbarama
Dikshitar (–).14 Dikshitar was the author of Sangeeta Sampradaya
Pradarshini (one of the first notated compilations of Carnatic music composi-
tions, published in ) and, at the time, one of the most celebrated of Car-
natic music scholars. Initially Dikshitar was reported by Bhatkhande as akin
to an “ancient sage whose face shone with wisdom” and whose knowledge of
music equaled his own.15 Bhatkhande’s narrative begins with Dikshitar as a
humble but learned man who acknowledged at the outset that he was not fa-
miliar with Sanskrit per se even though he had a great many couplets
(shlokas) from the Sangit Ratnakara memorized. This is, by itself, a curious
comment, since the Dikshitar family was well known for its proficiency in
Sanskrit. So what Bhatkhande presented as honesty on Dikshitar’s part could
well have been simple modesty. Dikshitar answered, if not always to
Bhatkhande’s satisfaction, his questions about the use of the chromatic scale

   


in Carnatic music, the use of only twelve microtones (shrutis) as opposed to
the twenty-two in the original text, and the genesis of the seventy-two
melakartas. He also agreed to procure for Bhatkhande what would have been
for him a priceless gift, a copy of a seventeenth-century text, Venkatamakhi’s
Chaturdandi Prakashika (c. ). Dikshitar claimed that it was a more recent
and authoritative source for Carnatic music’s orderliness than the Sangit Rat-
nakara and offered to explain it to Bhatkhande.
By the end of the conversation, Bhatkhande remained unimpressed by the
singers of Carnatic music, but awed by its impeccable system. Here one can
get a preliminary glimpse into his agenda: he had begun formulating what
would become his own system of Hindustani music.16 But systematizing
music was a far easier task than finding a “connected itihaas (history).” This
kept eluding him. Instead of connections, he got fragments and inconclusive
answers. He wanted material links between texts and current musical prac-
tices, but few existed. He maintained the hope that someone (else) would in-
vestigate the links between the fixed scale in Vedic chants and current music,
yet it was not an interesting intellectual quest for him or the sole focus of his
search. Had he been so invested, he might have prejudged the music differ-
ently and moved on. Instead, he heaped scorn on most assertions that con-
temporary music could be traced back in a straight line to the Vedas. He re-
turned to his search many times and asserted that music was an ever-changing
art. And in one of his most radical assertions, Bhatkhande stated that music
as it was then performed had a history going back only two hundred years,
not two thousand. Therefore, and because it changed constantly, music had
to be viewed as a modern form. This assertion won him no friends among his
music contemporaries, many of whom were equally concerned with empha-
sizing that music was, by definition, timeless and eternal, yet derivative of the
Vedas. What Bhatkhande was searching for was textual authority, one or two
Sanskrit texts that could serve as benchmarks for contemporary musical per-
formances. For him, these texts would enable the writing of a history of
change, not a history of stasis or of civilizational continuity. But even with
Sanskrit texts, in particular the one he was most taken with, Sharangdeva’s
Sangit Ratnakara, he could not in the end make them fit the bill as the ur-
text; neither could any other scholar.
These were not his only problems. He wanted to establish a link between
the Sangit Ratnakara and Carnatic music so that he could use it to bridge the
gap between the Sangit Ratnakara and North Indian music. He had hoped

   ’ 


that “with the help of this music I can identify where the missing links are be-
tween an earlier music and contemporary music.”17 He believed that the
Sangit Ratnakara was the closest textual source for North Indian music per-
formances, but if now, as Dikshitar had told him, the Chaturdandi
Prakashika was more relevant than the Sangit Ratnakara, the historical time
frame he was working with was closing, approaching the seventeenth century
as a starting point rather than the thirteenth. This should have made his his-
torical project easier, and his conversation with Dikshitar may have been the
reason he would assert in his writings that contemporary “classical” music
had a two-hundred- rather than a two-thousand-year history. While he ac-
knowledged that the sources exercised a “veto power” over his desire for a
connected history, he never fully let go of this ideal.
But if texts were disappointing, Bhatkhande also had no real aesthetic ap-
preciation for Carnatic music:
In the South, the emphasis on tala [meter] has diminished the won-
der of melody . . . all singing here is bound to each beat of the tala.
There is a jerk per maatra [beat] and this “yaiyy yaiyy” style of
singing—if they sing like this then I will in all honesty rate their style
quite low. If you calculate the number of beats between two
aavartans [cyles] and if you emphasize through jerks each beat while
waiting for the next one and then pounce on it like a hungry cat, I
am afraid I cannot find such music appealing. . . . This is my
prejudiced opinion, and singers here will not be happy with it nor do
I expect them to be. . . . They will say their music is popular, but
popular music is not necessarily good music.18

He turned to Carnatic music mainly for its formulas and order.19 His desire
to establish a Sanskritic base for Carnatic music was propelled by an instru-
mental purpose. If such a base could be established that met with his scholas-
tic approval, he intended to use it to systematize North Indian music. His
criticism of Carnatic music was balanced by his dislike for the arbitrariness
and lack of order in North Indian music, where tradition and performance
dictated the rules of music rather than the other way around. His desire to
know the intricacies of Carnatic music was governed by a drive to affix a sys-
tem of similar rules (niyam) that would be understood by all practitioners,
students, and connoisseurs of North Indian music.
The most important result of his conversation and meeting with Sub-

   


barama Dikshitar was the idea that Venkatmakhi’s Chaturdandi Prakashika
might be useful in restoring order to the current disordered state in Hindu-
stani music. Here one also sees his desire to have “throughout the country one
style of music.” Some years later, in , at the first All-India Music Confer-
ence held in Baroda, he would voice a hope that if both systems of music
could be integrated, the nation would sing in one voice. The imperative was a
unifying one, and he saw his task as fraught but necessary. “My efforts will
initially meet with great disapproval, but after an age the road I have chosen
will appeal to succeeding generations, in particular an educated society, this is
my hope . . . God has chosen to relieve me of my householder responsibili-
ties, perhaps in one sense this is the reward for that pain.”20 However, before
such nationwide systematization could happen, one major hurdle needed to
be overcome: “First the rules of ragas have to be fixed once and for all just as
they are here.”21
Following his southern tour, Bhatkhande went to Calcutta in November
. If Etaiyapuram had cost him one link but given him another, Calcutta,
by way of his conversations with its residents, gave him confirmation of his
credentials. For many years, Bhatkhande had admired Raja S. M. Tagore
(–). Tagore was not only a wealthy zamindar but also a notable au-
thority on Hindustani music. He had authored, edited, and published several
books on the subject.22 Trained in music at an early age, he received instruc-
tion from famous musicians such as Kshetra Mohan Goswami and Sajjad
Hussain. Bhatkhande was eager to meet Tagore and narrated his meeting with
warmth, directing his readers to Tagore’s generosity, dignity, and knowledge.
He noted how quickly he had established a sympathetic friendship, finding in
Tagore’s views on music and history confirmation of many of his own. It was,
as one reads from his other narrated conversations, the only worthwhile
meeting for him in Calcutta. Tagore even arranged for Bhatkhande to receive
copies of several old treatises on music.
Most of his other conversations in Calcutta had been frustrating mainly
because he reported that people he met asserted far too easily and without
proof that all Indian music was divine since it hailed from the Sama Veda or
the Atharva Veda (– ..). They also invariably claimed knowledge
not just of Sanskrit but also of Western classical music. Bhatkhande narrated
these declamatory conversations with barely concealed exasperation. The fig-
ure of the pedantic pandit was one he would use in his writings as a key sym-
bol of what he called nirupyogi panditya. And it was in Calcutta that he would

   ’ 


come to the sense that it was vitally important to keep music separate from
both religion and politics, the latter understood as high-level governmental
negotiation and conflict. Perhaps this is why, despite the nationalist tumult
around him, his diaries bear no mention of Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, or
Ambedkar, and it is only in the occasional personal letter that he lets slip a
comment that reveals any knowledge of or interest in the political happenings
of the time. His sense of the need for an unsacralized music can be seen from
his account of a conversation with Raja S. M. Tagore’s brother, Gaurihar
Tagore, in which Bhatkhande had responded to a question with this answer:
“Yes (I am), indeed a Brahmin,” and “it is not that I don’t have faith in God,”
but “I consider faith and music to be separate subjects. I believe that in the
twentieth century they should stay separate. If that is not done, it will
amount to a disrespect for music.”23
Bhatkhande shows here his acute sense of history. It is “in this century”
that music needs to be kept away from faith. By itself, the demand does not
seem unusual, except when compared to the wishes of his contemporary, Pan-
dit Paluskar, for whom the crisis of contemporary music was resolved by fus-
ing faith and religiosity with the performance and pedagogy of music in the
belief that this fusion was the essential element that set Indian music apart
from the West. By contrast, Bhatkhande’s critique of music seems distanced
from any deep engagement with the nature or capabilities of Western music.
Bhatkhande had no interest in showing that Indian music and musicians
could do all their Western counterparts were capable of, such as assembling
bands and orchestras. Indeed, he not only had no knowledge of Western clas-
sical music, he had very little interest in it, and as a model for Indian music,
the only aspect of it that was relevant was the bar system, which he used to
notate meter. But even there, the only accomplishment of that borrowing was
to divide tala into compartments. As such, we get no sense from his work that
he was in competition with the West, and his sense of urgency was propelled
by a local and located unease about the current practices of musicians, which,
in turn, lent heft to his belief that without his intervention, the future of
music would falter. When he looked for models either to oppose or mimic, he
looked to North and South Indian music. His sense of order came from
South Indian music and his sense of aesthetics from North Indian music. In-
dian music, by definition, could be systematic, old without being ancient,
and unlinked to faith without sacrificing its native quality.
Although Bhatkandhe’s conversation with Gaurihar Tagore was useful as a

   


way of expressing his secularism, it was not as directed as his dialogue with
S. M. Tagore. There he brought up the question of his elusive connected his-
tory. From the beginning of the conversation, the question of an adequate
history plagued him. “Is it even going to be possible to write a history of our
music?” he asked him. “If it is possible, how should it be written? Where does
one start? Where and how can one establish a reliable chronology? In Akbar’s
time, Tansen was famous, but he has left behind no written record.”24 Even if
history does not march forward in a straight line, where music was con-
cerned, it had taken too many undocumented detours. Tagore was the only
figure in Bhatkhande’s diaries who escaped being damned by faint praise or
caustic criticism, because Bhatkhande was able to have a scholarly conversa-
tion with him about textual sources. Even though Bhatkhande would go on
to write that Tagore’s written works were themselves scholastically weak, he
recollected his meeting and conversations with him with unqualified pleas-
ure, gratitude, and regard.
In Allahabad, on the last leg of his tour, Karamatullah Khan, a sarod
player from Allahabad, presented Bhatkhande with one alternative to his
imagined connected history. Bhatkhande was unreceptive. He had a deep-
seated suspicion of musicians as a group, but he had also reasoned that a tex-
tual foundation was essential to the writing of his history. He could not ac-
cept that musicians were the living archive of music’s theoretical history, even
if they were his resource for its performative history. Karamatullah Khan had
come to meet Bhatkhande, having heard about him as the great intellectual of
musical history. He had written his own small work on music and wished
to talk to Bhatkhande because he admired him. In the course of the conver-
sation, he raised the possibility of a different way to understand music’s past
and Bhatkhande bridled in response. Bhatkhande already believed that musi-
cians would resist his attempts to order Hindustani music, and the reason
for that would emerge as a refrain in subsequent works, namely, that “this
work is very difficult and because our music is in Muslim hands it has be-
come even more difficult. Those people are for the most part ignorant and
obstinate and will not like new rules imposed on them, this is my experi-
ence.”25 It is not clear whether he meant musicians as a group or Muslim
musicians in particular, but at any rate, he was skeptical even before the con-
versation commenced.
By way of introduction to this conversation, Bhatkhande wrote, “By and
large, I don’t like discussing music with professional musicians. They know

   ’ 


little but like to fight a lot. They spend a little time with us, learn just a little
from us, and then say they have known this all along. They claim our knowl-
edge is only bookish, not useful for skillful practitioners. I suppose one
should just accept that they are the ones who are virtuous, skilled, can play
instruments and sing, and so we should just acknowledge what they say as the
truth.” Not an auspicious beginning, it would be fair to say. But perhaps what
was emerging was also a process of demystification, a sense that one could
treat a practitioner as someone with whom a reasoned conversation about
music was at least conceivable. The comment also addressed the divide be-
tween a history and theory of music, on the one hand, and its practice, on the
other. This divide was one that Bhatkhande wanted not to maintain but to
bridge. The conversation proceeded:

Karamatullah Khan: What have you decided about Teevra, Atiteevra,

and Atikomal Swaras?
Bhatkhande: Khan Saheb, you must have addressed all of this in the
book you wrote.
K: Yes, I have.
B: Which text did you use as authoritative for your work? Or did you
write whatever came into your mind?
K: Of course not, how could I have written without textual authority?
B: Tell me the name of one Sanskrit text if you can, please, so that we
can then talk about that text.
K: What is the need for a Sanskrit text? Why only Sanskrit? It is not as
if there are not many other texts. I have thought carefully about a
lot of them before writing my own.
B: Were those texts in Sanskrit or Prakrit?
K: No, what is wrong with reading in Arabic and Persian, there are no
lack of texts there. There is one beautiful text after the next on
music in these languages. Music as an art was not confined solely
to Hindustan. Arabia, Iran, these countries too had music. They
too had ragas and raginis, their children and wives, such composi-
tions can be seen for example in “Arabi” raga, I worked through
the  notes given and came up with our “Bhairavi” or our
“maakas” is the same as your Sanskrit “Malkauns.” I studied all of
this and then wrote my book and I will give you a copy. (He does
this immediately.)

   


 B: Khansaheb, are you claiming that your Musalman Pandits trans-
lated our Sanskrit texts and then took them to their respective
countries?
K: No. Not at all. Nothing like it. Music belongs to all countries. I
went to the Paris Exhibition and heard music from all over the
world. I talked at length to various scholars of music there and
then came back and wrote my book.
B: I do not completely follow your meaning, perhaps. Are you possi-
bly claiming that scholars from Arabia and Iran took their music
from our country’s ragas?
K: No, not at all. I am saying those countries had ragas/music right
from the beginning. Whether they took it from here or Hindus
took it from there, who is to decide? Perhaps the concept of ragas
traveled from there to here. It is possible.
[Bhatkhande noted to himself, “This answer in particular made me a
little angry. Ragas from our books are turned inside out, twisted
around in their books, yet we have apparently stolen music from
them, this is what this Khansaheb is declaring.” (Emphasis mine.)]
B: Khansaheb, which is this book, can you tell me its name and year?
Was it Sarmaay Ashrat? [sic]
K: No, No. That is not the book I mean, that is a recent book. I am
talking about books going back hundreds even thousands of years
back, one of which is Tohfat-ul-Hind, a very important work.26

Bhatkhande broke off the conversation here, writing: “Forget it. There is no
point in arguing with this Khansaheb.”27
The arrogance is unmistakable in this conversation, as is Bhatkhande’s
hostility. What we are given in this account is a judgment on a musician fol-
lowed by a conversation that confirms the indictment. The question of theft
is central, going to the heart of Bhatkhande’s project: What are the origins of
Indian music? The immediate impression this conversation conveys is that of
an expansive musician in conversation with an arrogant, prejudiced, and irate
pedant. Moreover, it appears that Bhatkhande was simply lapsing into elite
Hindu prejudice against “low-class” Muslims and rejecting an alternative his-
tory simply because it had been suggested to him by a Muslim musician. We
can concede that Bhatkhande’s prejudice is buttressed by his arrogance; what
we also see in this conversation is his exasperation, once again, with throw-

   ’ 


away historical claims made by musicians. Bhatkhande calls off the conversa-
tion when Karamatullah Khan refers to a text dating back thousands of years.
He had responded similarly in Calcutta with people who cited the Vedas as
references. There is no question that Bhatkhande had in place a conception of
“our” music, which is Indian, of Hindu origin, to which Arabic or Persian
could have contributed, but for which a Sanskrit text might be decisive. Yet,
had he simply prejudged the question of history as either Hindu or Muslim,
he would have stopped with this interview and gone no further in his inquiry.
And in the course of his years-long inquiry, his exclusion of performers as in-
formants was not carried out exclusively on the ground of caste or religion or
gender per se, but as a result of his obsession with scholasticism and the cre-
ation of a modernized, national, cultural institution. This does not, needless
to say, preclude a hybrid origin for Indian music, so one is left with the ques-
tion: Why could he not conceive of one?
Karamatullah Khan was in effect stating that it did not matter whether
ragas had come from Iran or Arabia to India or the other way around, or
what the origins of raga were—music belonged to all countries and people.
This was quite a remarkable argument, open-ended and flexible, but it was
not precise. Had Bhatkhande accepted it, it would have necessitated closing
the inquiry into origins, but much more important, it would have meant that
it did not matter whether or not music was, or could be, demonstrably classi-
cal. From the vantage point of the late twentieth century, Karamatullah Khan
was voicing a prescient and progressive claim against national, ethnic, and re-
ligious essentialism when it came to music. But Bhatkhande was looking for a
“classical” music that existed in his time, not one that used to exist in ancient
times. References to “thousands of years ago” were routinely met with charac-
teristic irritation. The confusion and ignorance of musicians bothered him,
because if they were singing a “classical” music, there was no consensus
among them about the sign or the proof of the classical. There were no
agreed-upon texts or authorities, and every musician was free to cite and in-
terpret the “tradition” exactly as he chose. Moreover, there was no agreement
even as to which were the basic or foundational ragas. One of the frequent
criticisms leveled at Bhatkhande was that he did not know the basics of
ragas—Abdul Karim Khan, for instance, dismissed him as an ignorant
pedant, as we shall see in chapter . What bothered Bhatkhande was not sim-
ply the question of nomenclature, but also the issue of standardization.
Having conducted the research, he bridled when a practitioner of the art told

   


him his history was too limited and exclusionary and usually turned away
when told he did not know the basics. This is why even the wonderful flu-
idity of music’s origins as suggested by Karamatullah Khan had to be rejected.
The suggestion that it did not matter where ragas came from or whether they
were demonstrably Persian or Arabic was not something Bhatkhande could
accept, whether it was suggested to him by a Hindu musician or a Muslim
one.
Bhatkhande was not unique among late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-
century nationalists in caring deeply about a classical and pure past. Once the
origins of music had been decided by Bhatkhande, its future could be pulled
out of the contemporary morass of sectarian divides and familial jealousies.
All nations ought to have a system of classical music. He would have accepted
that there was a certain measure of give and take between different classical
music systems. He would perhaps even have agreed that there was, or ought
to be, a Persian classical music. What he could not accept was that the foun-
dation or system of Indian music was uncertain. Bhatkhande had rejected the
claims that music could be traced back to the Vedas and that the Sangit Rat-
nakara was authoritative. He had stated that the Natyashastra was not useful
for the study of raga-based music. Given all this, it would be hasty to con-
clude that anti-Muslim prejudice alone governed his course of study. Yet, as
we have seen, he could not accept that contemporary music had a non-Hindu
or non-Sanskrit origin.
While this combination of sentiments locates Bhatkhande squarely as a
Hindu nationalist, it does not, by definition, make his vision for music exclu-
sionary. The question of origins related to history, not to contemporary or fu-
ture practice. While music needed a clear and precise historical trajectory, the
future of music was not closed but open, available, and accessible to all. This
is precisely where we see a difference between him and other musicians such
as Paluskar. Even when he precluded a non-Hindu origin for music, he had
no desire to turn contemporary musical performance and pedagogy into
something recognizably Hindu. Paluskar assumed that music was Hindu in
the past and Hindu in the future. Bhatkhande had no investment in a Hindu
music as it was defined for him, whether in Pune, Calcutta, or Tanjore, but
was interested in a national music. For all his prejudice, then, his judgment
against musicians was not based on religion alone or on the sense that Mus-
lims were foreign to India, but on the grounds of documentation, demonstra-
bility, and a sense of secular nationalism.

   ’ 


 I bring Bhatkhande’s travels to a close with one last meeting. In , in
Mathura, he met a Mr. Ganeshilal Chaube, who raved and ranted at Muslims
for their obdurateness, thievery, and ignorance.28 Bhatkhande suggested to
the irate Mr. Chaube that Hindus should share some of the blame for having
allowed their music to decline. Chaube is important here neither for his
tirades against Muslims, nor for his claim that he learned music directly from
the heavens. Bhatkhande describes him as similar to scholars he had met on
his southern tour. Chaube and others could “rattle off various Sanskrit quota-
tions out of context to intimidate people but it should not be surmised from
this that they actually understood what they were saying.”29 The ability to re-
cite Sanskrit by rote was not scholarship. Chaube, as well as others who made
claims on behalf of “music and texts that go back thousands of years,” was
pilloried in caricature and as the epitome of pedantic and useless knowledge
(nirupyogi panditya) offered by charlatan pandits.

Bhatkhande’s Solution: Texts and a Connected History

By , Bhatkhande had finished his tours and was ready to embark on his
own writing projects. By now he was familiar with most of the major Sanskrit
texts, such as Bharata’s Natyashastra (dating from the second century ..
to the second century ..), Sharangdeva’s Sangit Ratnakara (a thirteenth-
century work), through Ahobal’s Sangit Parijat (seventeenth century ). From
our location in the twenty-first century, the obsession with Sanskrit texts
might appear part of an early, elaborated ideological sympathy for a future
Hindutva. Yet to see Bhatkhande’s focus on Sanskrit texts as part of this ide-
ology might not be giving him enough credit and would certainly mean ig-
noring a great many of his assertions. For one thing, his scholasticism would
have inevitably led him to Sanskrit texts on music theory. It would not be
possible to ignore Sanskrit texts even if there could be no straight line from
the Natyashastra to the present. Crooked as the line might be, there was a cor-
pus of texts on music written in Sanskrit, translated on occasion into Persian,
such as Faqirullah’s Rag Darpan, that could not be ignored if Bhatkhande was
serious about writing a complete history. The texts could be deemed irrele-
vant or inaccurate, as Bhatkhande argued, but to not delve into extant trea-
tises on music that predated those in Persian or Arabic would be unthinkable.
What set Bhatkhande apart from his contemporaries in the world of music,

   


then and now, was a lack of investment in arguing that music’s origins could
be traced straight back to and through only a Sanskrit text. Nor did he
quickly collapse Sanskrit with Hindu and then India. Bhatkhande lived in the
period of an emergent nationalism, when all nations search for a hoary past to
legitimize themselves, as Benedict Anderson has reminded us.30 But Bhat-
khande’s search was not a simple Hindu nationalist search. He consistently
emphasized that music as it was currently being played and sung belonged to
a different period, one that was constitutively modern and adequately differ-
ent from previous periods so that any reliance on texts such as the Dhar-
mashastras as a guide for everyday life was seen by him as romantic at best and
anachronistic at worst.
Bhatkhande rejected the idea that the claim for an unbroken history of
music could be sustained merely by asserting that Hindustani music could
reach back into antiquity, to the Sama Veda chants, as the origins of contem-
porary music (prachaarit sangit). He also came to discover that music’s rela-
tionship to texts more than two hundred years old was difficult, if not impos-
sible, to prove. The , couplets of the so-called Gandharva Veda,
supposedly composed by the god Brahma and assumed to be the first text on
the arts in ancient India (the title of Veda suggests that its origins were not
human but divine), were not available in transcribed manuscript form, and
all knowledge of it was based solely on references to it in other Sanskrit
works.31 While he regretted not having done research on the Sama Veda,
chants which were claimed to be the origins of Hindustani music,32 he also
advised his students not to believe that “our” music derived from the Sama
Veda unless and until someone demonstrated how it came together with the
origins of Gandharva music, as suggested by the Natyashastra.33
The Natyashastra had not shown itself to be of much use or relevance, and
Bhatkhande summed up why this was so. “Bharat’s Natyashastra has been re-
cently published and become famous,” he wrote, “and shruti [microtone],
grama [ancient scales], murchana [scales sung in rapid ascending and de-
scending order], jaati [possible precursor to raga]—on these subjects there is
some description but not of our ragas.”34 He had concluded that shruti, as
described in the Natyashastra, was not useful in determining the fixed scale of
Hindustani music. He had not found adequate demonstration of the rela-
tionship between microtones and pitches in the Natyashastra, and in his sub-
sequent writings he expressed sarcasm and contempt for the wasted efforts of
writers on the subject.35 In other words, music’s inescapable modernity—and

   ’ 


its unverifiable interreferential historicity—was both apparent and, to some
extent, acceptable.
Furthermore, on the subject of music’s modernity, Bhatkhande expressed
consternation as to why his colleagues avoided recognizing it. “If ancient
music is now no longer visible, what is the harm in saying that plainly?” he
wrote. “Look at the texts on music in the West, you will find nothing in there
that maintains people’s confusion and ignorance.”36 The issue was clarity,
and there was an abundance of confusion in Sanskrit texts. Bhatkhande had
asked scholars during his touring: “Do you think it is possible to revive any of
the Sanskrit raga rules? If not, where will be the superiority of a scientific or
theoretical musician over an ordinary illiterate, practical singer? Both would
be without foundation.” Furthermore, “if there is a dispute, what work is to
decide? Who is to judge? Will you leave such an important point to the arbi-
trary tastes of ignorant musicians?”37 If there was no consensus among musi-
cians themselves about aesthetic standards, what was to be done? The answers
he received confirmed for him that the paucity of authentic, original (mool )
granthas and the irrelevance of available ones to contemporary musical per-
formances had produced a situation where the only possible solution was for
someone to produce an authoritative text. Such a text had to be foundational,
explaining both the rules and methods of current musical practices. This text
could be used as a standard-bearer in the matter of adjudication of quality, as
well as in the evaluation of historical change over time. “If music is conceded
to be moving constantly, has not the time [arrived] when a new systematic
treatise on the current ragas (including Mohammedan additions, of course) is
desirable, if not indispensable, for the guidance of the public? In view of the
possibility of getting the help of the best musicians, . . . attached to native
courts and in view of the facilities. . . . the phonograph, don’t you think it
practicable? Our ancient Pandits at one time did the same, they made a good
collection of ragas. Will not such a step at least arrest future degeneration and
mark a stop [make a stamp]?”38 The solution was simple. Someone needed to
collect, annotate, and compile the ragas, and write an authoritative, decisive,
historical, and theoretical text. Who better than Bhatkhande himself, given
the time and effort he had spent in learning compositions and languages and
conducting tours?
Over the course of one year, , Bhatkhande composed hundreds of San-
skrit couplets in which he outlined his theory and history of Hindustani music.
He named his text Shrimallakshyasangeet (hereafter SLS ). He also wrote Abhi-

   


nava Raga Manjari and Abhinava Tala Manjari, Sanskrit treatises on raga and
tala. With the authorship of these three texts, Bhatkhande wrote himself into a
long line of music theorists ranging from Sharangdeva to Ahobal. Tradition
was now invented with a classical yet modern genealogy. This modern geneal-
ogy, in Bhatkhande’s view, was what made Indian music classical, because it
had a system, a method of adjudication, order, and stability. In other words, the
condition for music to be classical was that it was modern. And insofar as
Bhatkhande could not simply dismiss Vedic texts or the Natyashastra, he did
what modern historians do; he accommodated them into his narrative as texts
of faded importance but not direct relevance. By doing so, he kept the concept
of antiquity vital to a conception of nationalism, but he did this without falling
prey to the nationalist seduction of drawing a straight line back between cur-
rent music and ancient texts. The gap between theory and practice that “illiter-
ate musicians” had fostered now had a bridge, but a self-aware and modern
one. By , at the age of sixty-eight, he had written eighteen musicological
works—compilations, textbooks, treatises, and booklets. In none of them is
there an uncritical celebration of India’s ancient wisdom, or of the Vedas as the
source of all knowledge for music.

Bhatkhande’s Major Works: Sanskrit and Marathi,

Hindustani Sangeet Padhati

Bhatkhande wrote initially in Sanskrit, which had prestige but limited acces-
sibility. Given his project, this may seem curious, because his interests were
democratic and egalitarian, but it is understandable. A modern national clas-
sical music needed a classical language. Furthermore, there was a scholarly
precedent for him in Sir William Jones’s evaluation of Indo-Persian musico-
logical treatises, many of which were translations of Sanskrit treatises. Even
though both Arabic and Persian had been used as spoken and written lan-
guages far more recently than Sanskrit, Bhatkhande did not consider them
adequate for a history of music.39 They were translation languages, in his
view, not authorial ones. In such an understanding, he followed an estab-
lished colonial and elite pattern of prognosticating about India’s future by as-
serting the primacy of Sanskrit, and thereby a Brahmin understanding as
well, as the only authentic window into India’s past without which no compe-
tent history of her future was imaginable.40 Bhatkhande’s deference to San-

   ’ 


skrit was not unrelated to the authority conferred on it by European Orien-
talist scholarship. Many scholars have written on the role of colonialism in
rendering Sanskrit and the Vedas integral to an understanding of India as In-
dian.41 Yet Bhatkhande’s deference to Sanskrit was also tactical, strategic, and
slightly cynical. B. R. Deodhar, founder of a school of music in Bombay and
student of Bhatkhande’s rival, Pandit Paluskar, had asked Bhatkhande about
why he’d written in Sanskrit in a conversation with him. His response was
candid. “People do not accept anything unless it can be backed by Sanskrit
quotations . . . the only way the public can be persuaded . . . is by pro-
ducing a Sanskrit book which gives the new rules.”42
However, he also wrote a number of important texts in his mother
tongue, Marathi, including four volumes of explicatory texts, which he
named Hindustani Sangeet Padhati (hereafter HSP ). They were published be-
tween  and . Of all his writings, these volumes offer the clearest
glimpse into his politics. The first three were finished quickly, between 
and .43 The fourth volume took much longer, and although he com-
pleted it in , it was published only in . The conditions under which
he wrote it were not perfect, as he wrote to Rai Umanath Bali, explaining the
reason for his long silence: “I was busy finishing the fourth volume of my
Hindusthani Sangit Paddhati (the work on the theory of music ). Thank God,
I have been able to finish it somehow. The noises in the head still continue
but I do not worry on that account. I am trying to get accustomed to them
and hope to succeed in accomplishing it.”44 The years between the publi-
cation of the first three volumes and the last one were busy ones for Bhatk-
hande. He had organized five music conferences, established in  a school
of music in Gwalior, and in  cofounded the Marris College in Lucknow.
In these works, Bhatkhande wrote in colloquial (as opposed to literary)
Marathi, in the form of conversations between student(s) and teacher in a
music classroom. Each volume was one uninterrupted conversation. This for-
mat would have been available to him from a number of sources. His colonial
education would have introduced him to Plato’s Socratic dialogues. He would
have known the Pune Sanskritists, at least by reputation, and might have had
on hand the shastra/prayog distinction available from contemporary writings
on the Upanishads. He would also have had a sense of shastra that could be
translated as both science and classicism. Lastly, the dialogue format was
common as well to Persian and Arabic texts, familiar to many scholars.
The main objective of these volumes was to explicate Bhatkhande’s San-

   


skrit treatise, Shrimallakshyasangeet (SLS ), and Abhinava Raga Manjari.45 But
there seems to have been another objective, which was to offer SLS as the only
text that could satisfy a genuinely scholastic student. When Bhatkhande re-
ferred to SLS in these four volumes, which he did a great deal, he did so by
naming the author as one among the writers of the canon without revealing
that he was writing about himself. In other words, if one did not have advance
knowledge of the fact that Bhatkhande was the author of SLS, one would not
know by reading the four volumes of HSP. HSP, thus, was not only self-
explicating but also self-aggrandizing.
The four volumes were intended as pedagogical texts, emphasizing dia-
logue between teacher and student, but Bhatkhande used the first three to
write on a variety of subjects: Indian history and historiography, Sanskrit
texts, Muslim musicians, the Vedas and their relationship to music, colonial
writers, princely states, Westernization, colonialism, nationalism, the superi-
ority of dhrupad gayaki over khyal gayaki, and the need for notation. Distrust-
ful of all but a few musicians and skeptically respectful of all texts composed
in Sanskrit, he gave full voice to uncommonly strong criticisms of musicians,
princely rulers, ignorant audiences, intellectual charlatans, and half-baked
ideas. In other words, his criticism cast a wide net, unrestrained by hierarchy,
class, caste, or religion. Most of these criticisms were voiced through anec-
dotal caricatures, so there is no way of knowing if the events and people so
unflatteringly described were fictional or corresponded to actual meetings,
but the ghosts of Karamatullah Khan (the ignorant musician) and Ganeshilal
Chaube (the fake Pandit) hover over many of the narratives.
The main characters in these texts are the teacher and the student. The
teacher is cautious, humble, benign, and learned. The student is curious, quick,
skeptical, yet respectful. Both characters epitomize the virtues of their respec-
tive subject positions. The teacher is patient and slow to anger, even though in
all conversations with musicians, he is always at the receiving end of ignorant
and arrogant abuse. Insofar as they reveal the author’s interiority, these texts, as
much as the diaries, can be considered Bhatkhande’s autobiographies.
These chronicles criticized the dominant hagiographical tradition. Bhatk-
hande’s method of instruction could be seen as similar to that of the neo-
traditional exchange between student and teacher (guru-shishya parampara ),
but significant modernizing touches set it apart. In his narrative construc-
tions of a dialogue between the exemplary student and the wise teacher,
truth triumphed over ignorance, the first represented by the teacher in

   ’ 


the course of his travels, the second represented by musicians and charlatan
scholars.
The narrative advances through questions and clarifications, interspersed
throughout with anecdotes and reminiscences. The student expresses ignorance
through doubt, denunciations of texts or myths, or demands for additional ex-
planation. The teacher responds by proffering either an anecdote, a brief lecture
on history, or a first-person remembrance of an encounter. The narrations are so-
phisticated versions of Bhatkhande’s diary reports of conversations with Kara-
matullah Khan in Allahabad, Babu Chatterjee in Calcutta, or Ganeshilal Chaube
in Mathura. Each anecdote concludes with a moral, such as “beware those who
come bearing false knowledge.”46 In other instances, the teacher attends a per-
formance, at the end of which he asks the singer, with strategic humility, the rules
and textual foundations of the raga he has just sung. All through these accounts,
the teacher/narrator creates with his students a community of cognoscenti allied
in a battle against those who would mystify the pursuit of real knowledge.
While SLS is the metatext that presides over the volumes, it is revealed as
the final authority on music only after a whole range of texts in Sanskrit and
English are explained. Bhatkhande believed that students of Hindustani
music should master seventeen major texts,47 in addition to the two founda-
tional texts, Natyashastra and Sangit Ratnakara. In fact, he wrote of the two
authors as one, BharatSharangdeva. Each volume had lists of texts the student
was expected to read and memorize, along with the libraries in which they
were to be found throughout the country. He did not restrict his teachings to
Indian languages, referring to two watershed texts in English, C. R. Day’s The
Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan () and
Augustus Willard’s A Treatise on the Music of India, written originally in 
but published as a book only in . Other English writers, from Sir William
Jones to Raja S. M. Tagore, were also quoted at length, and the quotations
were followed by Bhatkhande’s critical opinions.

On Muslims and Colonial Beneficence

If Bhatkhande was an extraordinarily complex visionary in so many areas, he

was also a man of prejudice. When writing about the decline of music, he
suggested that colonial interest in texts was preferable to “Badshahi” (Mughal
rule) benevolence: “Some people assert that the condition of music is such

   


because our music fell into the hands of Musalman singers.”48 But for
Bhatkhande, it was the inattention to order and system that distinguished the
Badshahi. “There is nothing novel in the fact that under Musalman rule,
Musalman singers were encouraged [that is, patronized] and given impor-
tance. But who was going to teach those singers anything about the correct
way of singing and about Sanskrit granthas?” Added to that, a justifiable pride
in religious exclusivity interfered with learning. “Those people were also
proud of their religion, and there was no possibility that they would learn
from Hindu Sanskrit pandits. To say that that period was not a great one for
music would not be unusual.” From here, he moved on to the British:

Muslim rulers were not as interested in our ancient knowledge as our

present rulers are. Today it would not be unusual to find many West-
erners who have studied our religious texts very well. Those sorts of
examples are not frequent in the time of the Badshahi. I know of no
Musalman pandit who has written a Sanskrit grantha. I don’t even
know of one who understood a Sanskrit music grantha. Musalman
singers liked music, they were very creative, one can say this, but they
had no interest in learning the ancient texts, this too can be said. Even
singers like Tansen left no written texts behind. Even to prove that
they understood music granthas well would be extremely difficult.

Bhatkhande was willing to concede creativity to “Musalman” singers, but this

was all. These singers were ignorant of texts and neglectful of both the order
and the historical condition of the musical tradition.
Bhatkhande expressed no view that he did not almost immediately con-
travene or contradict in subsequent pages. The mode of expression for Bhat-
khande was to relay an opinion or judgment and then immediately qualify or
retract it. I cite here the most egregious passage about Muslims as one exam-
ple of many in his four volumes, so as not to evade the depth of his prejudice.
The teacher/narrator explains to his students the difference between the
four kinds of pitches associated with a raga—vadi, samvadi, anuvadi, and
vivadi. To do so, he uses the metaphor of a conservative middle-class Hindu
household:

The vadi swar is the father, the samvadi his first son, who had less sta-
tus than his father but more than anyone else in the house. The anu-
vadi swars are the servants, whose sole function is to facilitate the

   ’ 


 work of the father. Finally, the last category, vivadi, are not useful.
They are bhandkhor and tondaal [eager to pick a fight, aggressively
hostile, and loudmouthed]. There are those who believe that using a
vivadi swar in very small quantities is sometimes necessary, even de-
sirable; then one can perhaps see how to do this using a different
principle or analogy. Sometimes in Hindu households there are Mus-
lim servants, but it is necessary to affix limits on where they may
enter and how much freedom they should have. Of course, I am only
using this example flippantly, I don’t need to say that.49

Flippant or otherwise, the sense is clear. Discordant pitches ought best to be

discarded, but in a spirit of accommodation, the teacher grants that if they
are to be used at all they should be carefully monitored and controlled, much
like Muslims in a Hindu household.
When not being prejudiced Bhatkhande was often dismissive, pitying
“poor Muslims who were intimidated by ‘our’ Sanskrit texts and knowl-
edge.”50 He wrote of them as childlike, often using the adjective bechare, which
could literally mean poor or with bad luck, worthy of pity, beguiled, or un-
schooled.51 He ridiculed Muslim singers for their pretensions to granthi
knowledge52 and represented them as ever willing to pick a fight, abusive,
polemical—similar to the hypothetical servants in his earlier example. Having
written of Muslims as aggressive and in need of surveillance and control, he
went on to indict Hindus as well, arguing that they should bear a fair share of
blame for having let what was rightfully theirs fall into the wrong hands:
If our current music is not the same as that of the music writers’ pe-
riod, it is no fault of the writers. If our educated people did not value
music knowledge and knowingly let it pass into the control of the
Miansahabs [a term used for Muslims], and in their company our
music changed, then who should be held accountable for this? Now
however much we may repent this takeover it is not, in my opinion,
going to be very useful. It would not be wrong to state that just as it
would not be possible to have Manu’s views be dominant in society
today, in the same way it would not be possible to use ancient texts
on music. It is not my view that Muslim singers have ruined music.
Their only fault was that they did not write down all the changes
they made to the music. But there may have been many of them who
could not read or write.

   


This is an important passage. Bhatkhande condemns both Hindus and Mus-
lims, but the reasons are not clear. His irritation is directed at musicians,
singers, and instrumentalists—not because of their religious affiliation, but
because as performers they did not pay adequate attention to posterity nor,
for that matter, to the future. In this sense, Bhatkhande’s search for origins
was not simply nostalgic. Had it been so, he would not have so quickly dis-
missed the relevance of the Dharmashastras to contemporary life or the Vedas
to music. Indeed, his contemporaries like Paluskar embraced a nostalgic and
reconstructed ideal of Hindu life in accordance with Manu. Bhatkhande’s
project, however, accommodated an understanding of historical change.
Muslims might be blamed for their illiteracy, but not for their faith.
The passage continues in an ironic tone: “Our love and respect for Mus-
lim singers should be apparent in this, that within our community [amchyaat]
any Hindu singer however excellently he sings, if there is no Khansaheb
[Muslim musician] in his musical tradition, we consider him only a bhajani
haridas [a singer only of devotional music]!” He admits, in other words, that
devotional music is aesthetically inferior to that which is taught and authenti-
cated only by Muslim musicians. Moreover, “Where do we have the right
to think less of Muslim singers? We are truly in their debt. If we were to
tout the fact that Tansen’s guru was Swami Haridas, even so if someone
were to ask us which is the text he left behind, what could we say? Even if
this is the condition, don’t squander your respect for ancient texts. They are
not altogether useless. When you read them then you can decide, calmly,
what their value is.”53 Having denounced Muslims for being aggressive,
ignorant, and illiterate, he does not altogether reverse his opinion but
acknowledges that music’s aesthetics are indebted to its Muslim history. But is
its history not indebted as well? Thaat (grouping of ragas) was Hindu, and
there were two kinds of performances and ragas, Hindu and Muslim. “We
sing miyan-ki-malhar, miyan-ki-sarang, miyan-ki-todi, husaini todi, darbari
todi, bilaskhani todi, jaunpuri, sarparda, saazgiri, shahana, yamani, navroz,
. . . and if we were to say they are supported by ancient texts, would it do us
credit? Some might ask, what if we left aside these Musalman varieties, there
are other ragas that are in our granthas, are there not? Yes, but who even sings
those today?”54 This is not necessarily a lament but also an observation that
the focus on granthas misses the point. Contemporary music, however one
felt about it in the early twentieth century, was that which was sung by Mus-
lim musicians. He continues, “We break the rules given in the granthas and

   ’ 


mimic Musalman singers. In so many cases we do not even acknowledge the
thaats that are given in the granthas. Even in the singing of well known ragas
like bhairav, bhairavi, todi we follow none of the granthi rules, will it not
beg the question, then what is our shastra.”55 This is an important question
for a nationalist like Bhatkhande. He continues with an imperative: “Under-
stand my point correctly. I have no desire to criticize present day music or
musicians. I will go so far as to say that our Hindustani music is only just being
classicized. The texts on music that are being written today are all establishing
new rules for music’s classicism.”56 This statement can be read as Bhatkhande’s
most emphatic declaration that music needed to be classical in order to be
modern. It can also perhaps be read as his injunction to his students to stay
away from an uncritical nostalgia for the granthas. Bhatkhande was clearly
aware that in order for music to be called classical it needed established rules,
but he was also aware of the fact that particular rules were themselves an inex-
tricable part of the modern world in which he was firmly located, without
nostalgia.
Classicization, seen in this regard, was instrumental and went hand in
hand with nationalization. The gharanas could not fit the bill—not because
they were Muslim, but because they were disorderly. Moreover, they were not
public institutions. Access to them was restricted, there was no public arena
of discussion and debate, and instruction was selective. The reason Muslim
musicians had to be excluded was not simply because they were Muslim, but
because they, like the Kshetra Mohan Goswamis and Ganeshilal Chaubes,
did not possess the knowledge to create and sustain a modern academy of
classical music. The academy had to be built from scratch, which Bhatkhande
recognized in his comment that “Hindustani music is only just being classi-
cized.” The ustads and gharanas could not serve the academy’s needs, nor
could the bhajani haridas (a veiled reference to Paluskar), because in spite of
their creativity, they did not understand what the “classical” was in their
music. For Bhatkhande, classicization meant at least two things: system,
order, discipline, and theory, on the one hand, and antiquity of national ori-
gin, on the other. Of course, these requirements equally define the very char-
acter of modern music. The first set of elements he could not find in contem-
porary practice, and he had toured the country in search of them. He found
confusion, not order, and an emphasis on spontaneity rather than disciplined
performance. So he set out to impose order on contemporary music. His lib-
eral nationalism allowed him to include “Muslim” ragas, such as malkauns,

   


darbari, and miyan-ki-malhar. But they all had to be integrated into a body of
rules, constructed according to a national canon of musical theory.
The rules in his writings cautioned his readers against believing that mere
voice training (galyaachi taiyaari ) was all that was needed for good perform-
ances, insisting that performers needed to know the rules of music (sangee-
tache niyam) as well.57 In one of the lengthiest anecdotes of all five volumes,
he narrates a detailed story—in the nature of a panchatantra katha 5 8 or an
Aesopian fable—of a gifted but undisciplined singer who believes that with a
little bit of music education he can join the ranks of famous musicians. The
singer starts out with a traditional teacher (guru ) who demands of him all
that Bhatkhande would demand of his students, but tires quickly of such dis-
cipline, in which he is required to notate what he learns and focus on perfect
pitch (swar) and theory (raga agyan), rather than vocal acrobatics (tanabazi ).
Unhappy with the rigor of this training, he switches to a musician maestro
(an unnamed Khansaheb). The contrast between the two is clear. The Muslim
Khansaheb smokes tobacco (hookah), chews betel nut (paan supari ), dispar-
ages him publicly, teaches him very little, and tricks him out of his money.59
Bhatkhande’s disparagement was clear: without true knowledge, which is to
say rule-bound, bookish knowledge, students were liable to fall into the
hands of ignorant practitioners.
Along with his dismissal of ignorance, Bhatkhande advocated a healthy
skepticism concerning pandits and singers who believed that the texts in their
possession were written by the gods themselves.60 He took pains to dispel
popular myths about the power of ragas to influence climates and seasons.61
Society, he noted, was too ignorant and childlike at the time to understand
fables as mere fables. One should not try to dispel such ignorance, he cau-
tioned, but pity it instead.62 This was not real history, and students needed to
know that even ancient texts could be challenged.
This was difficult advice. He commented wryly that “it is a great crime
(mahapaap) in these days to state that writers of ancient granthas had made a
mistake in their theorizing or that music as it was performed is no longer pos-
sible to perform.”63 And indeed, criticism of his works came flying at him
from musicians and scholars. The first group believed his writings were sim-
ply irrelevant to their performance; the second, in unlikely sympathy with the
former, accused him both of trying to reduce music education to mere me-
chanical understanding and of denying its divine history. Bhatkhande ad-
dressed such criticisms directly. “Those writers who have abandoned the

   ’ 


muddle of murchana and grama and written their texts using contemporary
music as their foundation should be admired and applauded,”64 he wrote. Yet
he wrote in Sanskrit because he understood that, otherwise, he would not be
recognized as a classical writer.
Sanskrit had more than a merely instrumental function. Throughout the
volumes of the HSP texts, there is a tension between Bhatkhande’s desire to
make music modern and accessible and his unshakeable belief, despite his
erudition, that Urdu, Persian, and Hindi texts on music were not scholarly
enough for the task at hand.65 Here he shared the sentiments of Sir William
Jones, who admired the complexity of Sanskrit for its ability to tackle the first
principles of music. Unfortunately, such a classificatory logic had too great a
potential to take on a divisive character in its very formulation, given the his-
torical circumstances of the time: Hindu music was made essential, natural,
and ancient; Muslim music was thus made lacking in foundation, aberra-
tional, and new.66 Inasmuch as this may not have been the logic that
Bhatkhande was working with, it provided the ballast other lesser scholars
could use to put into practice a partitioning of the cultural sphere (and of
music) into Hindu and Muslim.
In addition to his other writings, Bhatkhande also compiled , com-
positions, collected during his travels from hereditary musicians, in six vol-
umes titled Kramik Pustak Malika. These were originally composed in
Marathi and later translated into Hindi. This was and remains an extraordi-
nary compilation. On the one hand, it brought together for the first time, in
one series of texts, virtually the entire corpus of popularly sung ragas and
compositions. This meant that students no longer needed to participate in
the elaborate rituals of admission into a guild in order to learn music. The
compilation was itself the culmination of a concentrated effort to make fa-
mous musical compositions accessible, notated, and easy to learn under the
supervision of a reasonably trained musician. It did not, in other words, re-
quire a maestro to teach ordinary, everyday people the rudiments of music.
Because of Bhatkhande’s unceasing efforts, the compilation could be consid-
ered part of the national canon of musical compositions—the property and
treasure of all. On the other hand, the compilation managed simultaneously
to detach the compositions from their Muslim gharanas. This meant that the
role of the gharanas in compositional authorship was erased from the newly
created record of music’s history in the pursuit of a neutral and nonreligious
corpus. What it did, therefore, was to write Muslims out of musical history as

   


authors. This move did not wipe them out of music’s history entirely, but it
did not allow their contribution to be considered as authorial or authentically
authoritative. And worse still, it paved the way for other, less secular Hindu
nationalist musicians and scholars to climb atop Bhatkhande’s foundational
work and claim that what was primarily sung by Muslims from within a fa-
milial tradition now needed to be installed in a primarily Hindu home. This
home, now guarded by new notions of Sanskrit knowledge, barred access to
“illiterate musicians” who happened mostly to be Muslim.67

Last Days

The fourth volume of HSP was Bhatkhande’s final writing project. His failing
health and the noises in his head grew burdensome, but his devotion to music
never flagged. In , he had been asked by the ruler of Indore, Tukoji Rao
Holkar, about the superiority of singers over instrumentalists. His response
had been careful and prompt: singers were superior, he claimed, and he had it
on good Sanskrit authority that this was so.68 In , the zeal to answer any
question about music, no matter where or how, had not diminished at all, as
one sees in his correspondence with his old friend, Rai Umanath Bali. This
time the issue at hand was not conferences but high-school music textbooks
for the schools of the United Provinces (UP). In what seems to have been a
somewhat tense correspondence, he wrote, “I am sorry to learn that the Alla-
habad people have successfully stolen a march over you in the matters of
School text books. It appears they worked secretly in the matter and managed
to get their books approved.”69 By Allahabad, he was referring to a rival
music institution. In Bhatkhande’s identification of the problem, Bali had
been tricked because the UP government had simply gone about producing
textbooks the wrong way. The Bengal provincial government, on the other
hand, had done it correctly. What was the difference? In the same letter,
Bhatkhande wrote “they appointed a committee of music knowing people to
consider the whole subject and then asked publicly writers to submit their
work. Even a man living in Bombay like myself was put on the committee.
My views on the Hindusthani System were accepted by that Govt. Rev. Pop-
ley will tell you all that happened in Calcutta. Prof. Mukerji of Lucknow
knows about it.70 My name was suggested to the Bengal Govt. by Dr. Ra-
bindranath Tagore himself. In his own institution at Shanti Niketan, songs

   ’ 


from my books were taught by his music teachers. Bhimrao Shastri and Dr.
Rabindra Nath Tagore know me personally and also know of my work” (em-
phasis mine). Boasts apart, Bhatkhande was once again bothered by the lack
of a nationalized system by which music curriculum was to be determined.
Obviously peeved at being passed over, Bhatkhande expressed restrained
annoyance to Bali:

I must state honestly here, that you never asked either myself or
Shrikrishna [his student, and principal of the Marris College, Shri-
krishna Ratanjankar] to prepare small textbooks for the schools of the
province. If you had done that we could have finished the thing in a
couple of weeks. . . . Our college textbooks are enough to supply
material for  books if necessary at a moment’s notice. The fact is that
you yourself did not know what was being done behind the Purdah in
Allahabad and failed to ask me to prepare the books. How can you
then blame either myself or Shrikrishna for negligence in the matter?

Putting aside his ire, he volunteered to help get the books published, suggest-
ing ways to popularize them quickly, but he was not pleased by his friend’s
suggestion that he needed to secure favorable opinions of his work.

You want me to go round to important people and obtain their fa-

vorable opinions on my books and notation! At this time of the day it
would look rather awkward on my part to make an attempt like that.
I used to receive hundreds of letters from people appreciating my
books but I have not preserved them. I always wanted to stand on my
own merits. I do not think I shall be able to approach big people now
after writing for  years for favorable opinions. I shall consider it
below me to do it. The very fact that our books are now taught in ()
The Benares Hindu University, () The Madhav Sangit College and
its branches (Gwalior), () The schools of Nagpur city, () The
Baroda School of Indian Music and its branches, () In the Hindu
Women’s University and its affiliated Schools in Surat, Ahmedabad
and Baroda, Satara, etc., () In all the  primary Schools of Bom-
bay in the control of the Bombay municipality, will be enough rec-
ommendation for the books and the Notation in them. For me to
now approach big men who understand nothing about the subject,
soliciting favorable opinions would look a bit ridiculous.

   


Finally, putting an end to this part of the conversation, he declaimed, “[my]
books are looked upon as standard authorities on the subject.” Not even his
competitor Pandit Paluskar had been quite as rigorous in the imposition of
standards. “None of Digambar’s pupils has cut a good figure before our
Gwalior boys trained in our system which speaks for itself.” He was arrogant,
no doubt, but also upright. “We do not work underground for success,” he
wrote to Umanath Bali, apropos of Allahabad’s secretiveness, “but work in the
open and leave the public to judge. Even if Allahabad books hold the field for
a time, be sure the success will be short lived. . . . Have faith in God and
try your honest best and leave the rest to him.”
Bhatkande had spent most of his life after the death of his wife and
daughter roaming around the country conducting music examinations and
inspecting music schools. His travels came to an abrupt end in , when he
suffered an attack of paralysis that left him bedridden for almost three
years.71 In February , he wrote to his student Shrikrishna Ratanjankar,
“Life has reached the end of its journey. . . . I have done whatever I deemed
my duty. Whatever material I could collect I have recorded and protected it. I
have full faith that in future, there will be worthy people to use it suitably.
While writing sometimes with over enthusiasm I have used sharp words in
discussing the theory of music. But believe me, it was not intended to hurt
anybody’s feelings.”72 On September , , at the age of seventy-six,
Bhatkhande died in Bombay.

Conclusion

Bhatkhande had cofounded the Marris College with Rai Umanath Bali in
. He was neither robust nor healthy at that point. He had begun to suffer
from high blood pressure and, as a result, heard “singing noises” in his head
all day and night.73 He had also suffered a severe hip injury and needed
sedatives to tackle his unrelieved insomnia. His physical discomforts not-
withstanding, he remained involved in the administrative affairs of the
Marris College and embroiled in a power struggle with an old friend,
Nawab Ali, over the hiring of a music teacher and the firing of an unpopular
principal.
Bhatkhande had lived for the previous twenty-five years without either
the comfort or the financial and emotional responsibilities of married life. He

   ’ 


traveled incessantly even when his health did not permit it, but as he wrote to
Rai Umanath Bali,
You need not worry about my health. My chief complaint is loud
head noises which prevent sleep. . . . They have increased my deaf-
ness considerably. . . . I shall never allow my health to come be-
tween me and my duty to the College. I would rather die in the
College than in a sick bed here. I eat well, take fair exercise, and with
one grain of Luminol get enough sleep. An old and deaf man has
necessarily to go through these difficulties and I have no reason to
complain.74

Had he been given a choice, he would have chosen one of two sacred sites in
which to die, sites that he had kept apart—either Kashi (Benares) or the Luc-
know Music College. As it happened, he died in Bombay, the city of his
birth, ten years after the founding of his college.
With Bhatkhande’s death, a newly formed practice of music scholasticism
seems to have died as well. Not only had he laid out a theory and history for
Hindustani music that musicologists, musicians, and historians would need
to contend with seriously in any further study of the subject (more than any
other musicologist of his time or since), he had set the terms for rigorous,
erudite scholarship on music. Bhatkhande not only documented all he wrote,
he made his sources public. In so doing, he established a standard for music
scholarship that, regrettably, has not followed his example. Instead, letters,
diaries, original compositions, and rare books have been kept hidden for
decades, rarely shown even to research scholars, and mostly made available
only to a deeply entrenched insider community that accepts hagiography as
the sole acceptable mode of historical writing. On occasion, fragments of pri-
mary sources are published but no citations are given; this makes it impossi-
ble for anyone else to have firsthand access to them. Such secrecy would have
been anathema to Bhatkhande.
Bhatkhande was by no means alone in his desire to bring some order to
the performance and pedagogy of music, but his genius lay in the curious mix
of his approach. He blended high-minded scholasticism with rigorous at-
tention to citation, documentation, and proof, always driven by a desire to
make music more accessible to a larger public. Bhatkhande’s textbooks facili-
tated the teaching of music out of as many homes as there were teachers
and in as many homes as there were students. The early decades of the twen-

   


tieth century witnessed a large middle-class expansion of music appreciation
and learning. Given the growing respectability of music—already set in mo-
tion by other music reformers, music appreciation societies, and public
performances—musical learning became not only acceptable but a required
component of a certain middle-class education, particularly for young
women, as we shall see in a later chapter. Lastly, Bhatkhande’s sense of the
nation extended beyond the boundaries of his native region.
Bhatkhande argued this cause in impassioned prose: “The leaders of the
Nation who are for the present engrossed in saving the political future of the
country should lend some portion of their energies to the regeneration of this
art, so as to bring it within the vision of the nation and to rescue it from the
decay which ends in death. The New India must be a full blown entity, and it
would never do to omit the regeneration of our music from the programme
of our workers.”75 Music, he claimed, had “metabolic value” and would be
“the best tonic for reviving the energies of our hard-worked nation-builders,
some of whom have themselves remarked to me that they would have been
much better equipped for their exhausting work if they had this natural tonic
and restorative to fall back upon.” For Bhatkhande, music was both medicine
and magic.
Bhatkhande’s commitment to music allowed for a random practice to be
disciplined by a connected history, a stern typology, and a documented musi-
cology. These are not mean achievements, but they are predicated on the as-
sumption that musicians qua musicians had destroyed music. The same per-
forming artists who had organic and embodied knowledge of their art (and its
craft) and in whose families music had resided and flourished for generations
were the main problem confronting music. Perhaps it had been caused by
their Muslimness, perhaps not. Bhatkhande alludes to this possibility but
leaves overt assertions about Islam unsaid. He is clear, however, about the so-
lution to the problem: namely, to impose on these practices a nationalized
and textual solution. The solution was as incongruous and ill-fitting as the
initial claim was preposterous. Despite his desire for an “Indian” music, it is
precisely Bhatkhande’s connected history that might have given people like
Paluskar the needed weight to turn classical music into Hindu music.
What then, can we make of this complex man? For all his egalitarianism
and high-minded secular approach to musical pedagogy and performance, we
cannot ignore the fact that his politics included overt and disquieting preju-
dice toward musicians as a group and Muslims as a community. Hundreds of

   ’ 


Muslim musicians thronged the halls of the All-India Music Conferences, but
within twenty years of the last All-India Music Conference in Lucknow in
, the numbers of Muslim musicians declined sharply. Bhatkhande had
himself bemoaned the fact that all “first class musicians were rapidly dying
out,”76 but what, if anything, had he done to maintain their claim to music’s
historical heritage? Instead, the narrative history of music is couched in evolu-
tionary terms as the inevitable “transfer of power” from feudal Muslims to na-
tional Hindus. What responsibility might we place at Bhatkhande’s doorstep
for the decline in the number of Muslim musicians? And how might we assess
the cost of the rebirth of national music in the terms he laid out for modern
India?
In the course of conducting research for this book, I posed the question of
the possible decline in the number of practicing Muslim musicians to a few
musicians and musicologists. My interlocutors consistently gave me one of
three answers, all of which placed the blame on Muslim musicians. The first
was couched in terms of inadequacy and insecurity: “Muslim musicians were
uneducated and secretive; once the music was made available to everyone,
they could no longer maintain their self-importance.” The second answer fo-
cused on the deficiencies of Islam and the community of Muslims: “They
have always been fanatical and backward. It is because of them that music al-
most came to an end in this country.” The third response was simply to dis-
agree about the decline in numbers by listing the names of Muslim musicians
in India; proponents of this line of thought advised me not to overread “com-
munalism” in my historical analysis.
All these answers, including the so-called liberal one stressing that Mus-
lims were by no means absent from the current field of musical performance,
can be drawn from Bhatkhande’s corpus, yet he never made any one of these
claims with such absoluteness. Still, one does see repeated iterations of the
idea of something he identified as “our” music in his work to which Muslim
musicians had, at best, contributed. If the practitioners of music were seen as
so ill suited to dealing with the forces of modernization, why then were they
not better protected by music’s self-proclaimed saviors? Instead of blaming
musicians for their poverty and illiteracy, why did Bhatkhande and others not
lavish attention on their recuperation? Had there been as many Hindu musi-
cians as there were Muslim musicians, would Bhatkhande and others have ap-
proached their demise with such indifference? Instead of paying attention to
these questions, music’s reformers sought rather to liberate music from the

   


musicians. Such a violent transformative separation could hardly have been
inevitable or natural.
In the very deliberate particularity of Bhatkhande’s choices lie some of the
troubling answers as to why, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary,
his historical narrative of music developed as it did. Had he been able to in-
corporate, in some fashion, the legacy of the gharana system without appro-
priating it, he might have had greater success. His many exclusions, not just
of Muslims but of women, South Indian music, and musicians, except in the
most instrumental terms, can be seen as the inevitable and unintended conse-
quence of a flawed project that could not relinquish the desire for a single ori-
gin of music. In theory, Bhatkhande’s academy would belong to all Indians ir-
respective of religion or caste or gender. But while he could claim that his
work was known by stalwarts of India’s rapidly expanding nationalist move-
ment, the national academy never took shape except in bits and pieces. In
that light, if one were to read Bhatkhande generously, one can see his most vi-
tuperative statements as prescient expressions of frustration at being thwarted
in his desire precisely by the gharanas that survived the onslaught of modern-
ization and classicization.
Bhatkhande was unpopular during his lifetime, and his writings were
criticized immediately upon publication. A certain kind of failure was a
very large and intrinsic part of his success. In , at the age of seventy-one,
in another letter to Rai Umanath Bali, he could claim countrywide fame
without sounding boastful.77 In , Bhatkhande had met and advised
Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore on how to teach music in their respec-
tive institutions.78 In , Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, a leading Hindu
nationalist, had invited him to inspect the music teaching at Benares Hindu
University.79 Having secured the respect of such prominent nationalist
leaders as Gandhi, Tagore, and Malaviya, Bhatkhande could state matter-
of-factly and with good reason that Hindustani music scholars and patrons
from Bengal to Gujarat, the United Provinces to Maharashtra, recognized
him.
For all his fame, musicians disliked him intensely for presuming to in-
struct them on the rules of music when he himself was not a performer.80
Scholars such as K. B. Deval and E. Clements, whom he criticized—whether
about the appropriateness of the harmonium as an accompanying instrument
for vocal performances, or about the accuracy of their scientific calculations
about microtones—were not well disposed toward him.81 Pandit Paluskar,

   ’ 


his rival, dismissed his notation system and pedagogy and kept his distance
from him. And this is precisely where the question of failure and success and
the attendant politics of both men need to come into dialogue. The funda-
mental distinction between the two men lay in the actual countrywide suc-
cess of Paluskar’s agenda, a success markedly different from Bhatkhande’s.
Bhatkhande had dispelled spiritualism, religious rituals, superstition, and
sacralization from his agenda. With Paluskar the exact opposite prevailed.
The culture of sacrality was everywhere in his schools. The musician was
transformed into a spiritual teacher, and the students were incorporated into
a reworked gurukul. Women had been harnessed to play the roles of the “in-
side” proselytizers.
It is ironic—against Bhatkhande’s wishes but not without resonance in his
method and manner—that Hindu music was further turned back into what
he most disliked, namely, a music linked to spiritualism and divinity. He
claimed he was not averse to Hindu music being changed, merely to the
change not being recorded for posterity. The ostensible issue at hand for him
was history, not religion or politics per se. Nonetheless, the distinction be-
tween the performers and national owners that had been allowed to fall into
the wrong hands creates a separation between a Hindu “us” and a Muslim
“them.” When one adds Bhatkhande’s many other assertions about Muslims,
one is presented with a politics that appears far more contradictory, troubling,
and narrow than has been conceded so far.
Given the many prejudiced assertions made by Bhatkhande, can one rest
on the tired cliché that some of his best friends were Muslim, and that he had
nothing against Islam qua Islam but merely against musicians who merely
happened to be Muslim and who expressed their Muslimness in antiprogres-
sive ways? Can one justify Bhatkhande by saying that he merely reflected the
politics of elite Hindu Brahmin males of his time? Alternatively, should one
agree with Vinayak Purohit, who lambastes Bhatkhande for being a colonial
collaborator and an arch communalist?82 None of these claims combines an
in-depth critical examination of Bhatkhande’s enormous contributions with
his opinions. How does one put his writings on Muslims in a historical per-
spective that is neither presentist nor apologist? If this is a difficult question to
ask, it is all the more difficult to avoid. And yet, with the exception of
Vinayak Purohit, whose diatribe is so sweeping that it cannot be seen as a
serious attempt to understand the man or his music, not one of the commen-
tators on Bhatkhande writing in English, Hindi, or Marathi has brought to

   


public attention any of the passages cited in this chapter. If nothing else,
I hope to bring to the fore undeniable evidence of Bhatkhande’s own anti-
Muslim sentiment without making this the only part of the story.
Bhatkhande was not popular in his native state and believed he had been
misunderstood, mistreated, and unjustly criticized by his fellow Maharash-
trians.83 In the years between  and , when Bhatkhande had acquired
a name for himself, the Marathi nationalist newspaper Kesari reported only
that Professor Krishnarao Mule, author of a book on Hindustani music, had
noted that Bhatkhande’s system of thaats was without a solid foundation.84
Pandit Paluskar, on the other hand, could count on the paper to report his
every activity, act of nationalist defiance, conference, and dispute with an-
other musician.
In addition to his unpopularity, the college Bhatkhande founded never
lived up to his ideals. In fact, three years after its founding, the college con-
fronted virtual bankruptcy, and Bali, who ran its day-to-day affairs, considered
handing it over to the university.85 And in retrospect, if by some stroke of pre-
science Bhatkhande could have witnessed his future students and supporters
paying homage to his memory by garlanding his photograph with flowers and
laying beside it a stand of agarbatti (incense) before doing namaskar to his
painting, his lament about the direction and future of music might have been
even more intense. Bhatkhande believed that all the ghosts and spirits that were
part of music’s performative culture needed to be exorcised. The future of
music lay in order, systematic pedagogy, archival depth, and classical learning.
The accolades Bhatkhande received posthumously also might have trou-
bled him greatly. The Marris College was renamed the Bhatkhande Sangeet
Vidyapeeth in , the year of India’s independence from British colonial
rule.86 That might not have bothered him, but two years later, in , a
leading Hindi journal of the arts, Sangeet Kala Vihar, published his horoscope
and reproduced a letter written by him in English to a noted scholar of music,
Professor G. H. Ranade, under the heading, “The late Pandit V. N. Bhat-
khande’s handwriting.”87 The letter was reproduced with no apparent intent
other than to provide a sample of his handwriting. In , the government
of India issued a postage stamp in his name. At last, he had received nation-
wide recognition, even though most of his projects would have disappointed
him had he lived to see them through the next few decades.
The spotlight of this chapter has been Bhatkhande’s many Pyrrhic suc-
cesses. However, we need to remember that he was and remains a figure of

   ’ 


enormous national importance to the fortunes of Indian classical music,
seen as the icon of music’s theoretical modernity. In a fundamental sense,
Bhatkhande believed he was affirming music, and in the process he would
make it available to all Indians, regardless of caste, religion, and gender.
Bhatkhande’s supporters rightly tell us that he did what he did for the larger
glory of Indian music, and without him, India would have lost part of its
cultural heritage. That would not be untrue. All the same, to highlight
Bhatkhande as a failed visionary, we need to turn to his competitor and con-
temporary, who oversaw the unqualified successful completion of the Hindu
agenda for music. We turn now to another musician who shared a first name
with Bhatkhande but was frequently a thorn in his side: Vishnu Digambar
Paluskar.

   


 the s, with his most famous stage adaptations of Brecht’s Three Penny
Opera called Teen Paishyacha Tamasha, and his most radical critique of Peshwai
Brahminism in Ghashiram Kotwal in .
. Ranade, Stage Music in Maharashtra, .
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., , , , .
. See Kapileshwari, Abdul Karim Khan, and chapter .
. Abdul Karim Khan recorded “Chandrika hi janu”; Dev Gandhar,  rpm.

Chapter 3

. Letter to Rai Umanath Bali, May , . Property of Rai Swareshwar Bali,
Lucknow. Published in Bhatkhande Smruti Grantha (Hindi and English), Indira
Kala Sangeet Vishwavidyalaya, Khairagarh, .
. Bhatkhande’s musicological contributions were as follows: ( ) he established ten
thaats, or groups, into which he placed all of the  ragas most commonly
sung or played. These were kalyan, kafi, khamaj, bhairav, bhairavi, bilaval, todi,
marwa, purvi, and asavari. Each of the ragas belonging to a group followed a set
of rules about the combination and order of pitches that both distinguished it
from other ragas within the same thaat but also from other thaats themselves. ()
Bhatkhande also explained the “theory of time,” which was fundamentally im-
portant for the performance of ragas. Every raga according to this classically de-
rived system has a stipulated time for its performance, so designated as to maxi-
mize the force of its affective qualities. Ragas typically convey a mood, an affect
or emotion, and there are suggested rules for the appropriate time of day or night
when they should be performed. There are early morning ragas, afternoon ragas,
early evening ragas, night ragas, and late-night ragas. () In addition to formulat-
ing a notation system, partly borrowed from a Western high art music, he wrote
down the basic definition of a raga: five pitches are minimally necessary in both
the ascension and descension of the raga, without which its character can not be
gauged; sa (the fixed first pitch of any scale) can never be discarded and both ma
(the fourth pitch) and pa (the fifth) cannot be discarded, so all ragas have either
sa and ma (the interval of a fourth) or sa and pa (the interval of a fifth); ragas can
be broadly classified under three categories, audava, five pitches; shadava, six
pitches; and sampurna, which means complete, and thus seven pitches.
In other words, for a raga to be classified as such, it must minimally contain
five pitches and an interval of either a fourth or a fifth; Bhatkhande’s most eso-
teric contribution related to microtones and pitches. In Bharata’s Natyashastra
(from the second century .. to the second century ..), a Sanskrit treatise on

             ‒  

 the performing arts, the author gives us the gamut of twenty-two shrutis (micro-
tones) that we can hear. In order to arrive at a fixed scale, the seven principal
notes, or pitches, were placed along this spectrum. The pitches are shadja (sa ),
rishabh (re), gandhara (ga ), madhyama (ma ), pancham (pa ), dhaivata (dha), and
nishad (ni ). According to the couplet in the Natyashastra, the formula for the
number of microtones contained within each successive pitch is as follows: ---
---. In effect, the number of microtones denoted the range within which the
pitch could be located. We are told that in ancient times the fixed scale was de-
rived by fixing the pitches on the last microtone in the range of microtones con-
tained within each pitch. By this definition, the first pitch, shadja, would be lo-
cated on the fourth shruti, rishabh on the seventh shruti, gandhar on the ninth
shruti, madhyam on the thirteenth shruti, pancham on the seventeenth shruti,
dhaivat on the twentieth shruti, and nishad on the twenty-second shruti. To de-
termine the actual measurement of a microtone, the text tells us that two veenas
(an ancient instrument that predates the sitar) were used. The first one was tuned
according to the microtonal formula; the second one was lowered by one micro-
tone on one pitch. Pancham (the fifth scale degree) was lowered by one micro-
tone, and the difference between the pancham of the first and second veena was
considered the sound gap between two shrutis. Bhatkhande found this scale in-
adequate as the basis for contemporary music performances and arrived at
a slightly different formula, which had one difference: he located the pitches
on the first shrutis, as opposed to the last. The new ascription was shadja—
first shruti, rishabh—fifth shruti, gandhara—eighth shruti, madhyama—tenth
shruti, pancham—fourteenth shruti, dhaivata—eighteenth shruti, and Nishadh—
twenty-first Shruti. This new configuration coincided with the pitches belonging
to what is known as the bilaval saptak (saptak means seven notes, as opposed to
an octave; in Hindustani music the high sa is the first note of the next saptak ).
This scale is widely used as the foundational scale of modern Hindustani music
by Bhatkhande’s students.
. See Sobhana Nayar, Bhatkhande’s Contribution to Music (Bombay, ), –.
. Ibid., . Nayar defines dhrupad as “a type of classical song set in a raga having
intricate rhythmic patterns which flourished in the th and th centuries” and
khayal as “the highest form of classical art in North India. It allows melodic vari-
ation and improvisation within the framework of a raga and is more free and
flowery compared to Dhrupad.”
. All biographical information is taken from the preface to Hindusthani Sangeet
Padhdhati (HSP ), vol.  (in Marathi; Bombay, ); Nayar, Bhatkhande’s Con-
tribution to Music; Shrikrishna Ratanjankar, Sangeet Acharya Pandit V. N. Bhatk-
hande (Bombay, ); Gokhale, Vishrabdha Sharada, vols. –; and articles from
the Marathi journal Sangeet Kala Vihar. All translations are mine.

             ‒   

 . See Nayar, Bhatkhande’s Contribution to Music, . Also see prefatory remarks to
all volumes of his diaries.
. The five volumes of diaries are the property of Ramdas Bhatkal, Popular
Prakashan, Bombay. I shall refer to the diaries hereafter as BD, vols. –. Volume
and page numbers are here cited as they are given in the unpublished manu-
scripts. All translations mine.
. BD, :.
. See, for example, his conversation with Mr. Tirumallya Naidu, November ,
BD, :, and November , , :.
. The Sangit Ratnakara is a thirteenth-century text that was partially reprinted in
Calcutta in . In , the first complete edition in two volumes was pub-
lished in Poona, edited by Mangesh Ramakrishna Telang, with some critical
notes in Marathi. The best-known critical edition was published by the Adyar
Library and Research Center, Madras, in . It included the entire text in San-
skrit, with two commentaries by Kallinatha and Simhabhupala. For my pur-
poses, I am using an English translation of the Adyar edition of the Sanskrit text,
by R. K. Shringy and Prem Lata Sharma (Delhi, ).
. BD, :, and November , , :.
. Ibid., .
. See B. R. Deodhar, “Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande: Vyaktitva tatha Karya”
(Hindi), Sangeet Kala Vihar  (): –.
. In the diaries, Bhatkhande spells Dikshitar’s name incorrectly, and throughout
the chapter I have chosen to use the correct spelling. In her review of the Hindi
translation of his Southern Tour Diary, Sakuntala Narasinhan notes that “like
most lay north Indians, Bhatkhande too mis-spells south Indian names. Sub-
barama Dikshitar is given as Subram Dikshit. . . . Most long and short vowels
are messed up.” Narasinhan goes on to ask a most pertinent question: “One
wonders how he missed the correct names of those he sought meetings with”
(book reviews, Journal of the Indian Musicological Society . []: –).
. BD, :.
. BD, :–.
. BD, :.
. BD, :.
. “I had heard that Southern music was systematic. In one sense, this is absolutely
true. . . . they even have some knowledge of Swaras . . . However, it would
be wrong to claim that there is knowledge of Sanskrit granthas here or that San-
skritic music is performed here” (BD, :).
. BD, :.
. BD, :.
. In Ranade’s Hindustani Music, n. , S. M. Tagore is listed as having written the

              ‒   

 following books: Jatiya Sangeetvishayak Prastav (), Yantra Kshetra Deepika:
Sitar Shiksha Vishayak Grantha (), Mridangmanjari (), Harmonium
Sootra (), English Verses Set to Hindu Music (), Yantrakosha (), Six
Principal Raga-s-with a Brief View of the Hindu Music (), A Few Lyrics of
Owen Meredith Set to Hindu Music (), Hindu Music from Various Authors
(), Sangeetsara Sangraha (), and Nrityankura (). Complete citations
for these titles are absent. A few pages after giving the list of Tagore’s publica-
tions, Dr. Ranade gives a chronological list of publications on music, in which
the date of publication of one of Tagore’s works is different than that given ear-
lier. Balkrishnabua Ichalkaranjikar is listed as having authored a book in , yet
his biographers claim he could not read or write. Yet Dr. Ranade’s work is a bea-
con of light and I am deeply grateful to him for his help.
. BD, My Eastern Travels, :. Conversation with Gaurihar Tagore.
. BD, :.
. BD, :.
. In Ashok Ranade’s Hindustani Music (), Tohfat-ul-Hind is given as a text writ-
ten in the early eighteenth century for the son of the last powerful Mughal em-
peror, Aurangzeb (–).
. BD, :–.
. BD, :.
. BD, :.
. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism (London, ).
. See Anupa Pande, A Historical and Cultural Study of the Natyasastra of Bharata
(Jodhpur, ), chapter .
. This assertion is made even more forcefully in contemporary India, where musi-
cians will claim that there is no need for proof since it is all given in the shastras.
Personal communications with musicians, February .
. HSP, :.
. HSP, :. In the most recent translation of the Natyashastra, the most precise
dating of its origination remains unclear and the most that scholars can claim is
that it was probably published between  .. and  .. Not merely is the
dating of the text a problem, it remains a thorny and contested issue whether
there was actually someone named Bharata who wrote the text or whether it was
a pseudonym. See Pande, A Historical and Cultural Study of the Natyasastra of
Bharata.
. HSP, :.
. HSP, :.
. BD, :.
. BD, : , .

              ‒   

. See HSP, : –, in which Bhatkhande wrote, “Remember that because a few
Muslim musicians have succeeded in capturing our music, it doesn’t stand to rea-
son that there is a Yavanick text that can do the same.” He went on to cite as nec-
essary milestones the same authors he had earlier mentioned, Bharat, Sha-
rangdeva, Lochan, and Ahobal. Also see  and , in which he narrated an
encounter with a “Khansaheb” that sounds very much like his meeting with
Karamatullah Khan in Allahabad.
. See Jones, On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos.
. For a literary history of the debate between Anglicists and Orientalists, see Gauri
Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New
York, ), and Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Prince-
ton, N.J., ).
. B. R. Deodhar, Pillars of Hindustani Music, trans. Ram Deshmukh (Bombay,
), .
. The first volume did not have a table of contents, unlike the other three. HSP
was translated into Hindi and Gujarati, but the second Marathi edition of these
texts was published only in . In the new edition, a few changes were made,
but the attempt was to keep the text in the original as untouched as possible. In a
few places the Marathi has been copyedited, but most of it has been left un-
changed. Editorial changes to the original text are in the form of introductory
prefaces, lists of texts referred to in the original, an annotated chronology of
Bhatkhande’s life, select quotations from his diaries and explicatory glosses of his
theory, all written by his student Prabhakar Chinchore. The actual text of the
original HSP has been left basically unchanged. Finally, a new table of contents,
in conformity with the style of the original volumes , , and , was also com-
posed for the new edition of volume , and volume  was divided into two.
. Letter to Rai Umanath Bali, May , . Property of Rai Swareshwar Bali,
Lucknow.
. Nayar, Bhatkhande’s Contribution to Music, .
. HSP :.
. These were Raga Tarangini, Hridaya Kautuk, Hridaya Prakash, Sangeet Parijat,
Raga Tattva Vibodha, Sadraga Chandrodaya, Raga Manjari, Raga Mala, Anupa
Sangeet Ratnakar, Anupa Sangeet Vilas, Anupankush, Rasa Kaumudi, Swarame-
lakalanidhi, Raga Vibodha, Chaturdandi Prakashika, Sangeet Saramrit, and Raga
Lakshana. For more on these books, see Nayar, Bhatkhande’s Contribution to
Music, –.
. HSP, :.
. HSP, :.
. HSP, :.
. HSP, :.

              ‒   

. HSP, :.
. HSP, :–.
. These are all names of ragas that clearly bespeak their Muslim origin, or as
Bhatkhande might say, derivation.
. Shastra is one of those words, common now to a few modern Indo-Aryan lan-
guages derived from Sanskrit, which is impossible to translate accurately. The ac-
ceptable translation would be “science” but also “classicism” and “rules.”
. HSP, :; emphasis mine.
. HSP, :.
. The Panchatantra was a collection of Puranic fables that had hortatory morals at
the conclusion of each tale.
. HSP, :–.
. See, for example, HSP, :.
. It was a common myth that in Akbar’s time, the singer Tansen was able to light
fires by singing the raga Deepak—which means light—and needed to immerse
himself in water before doing so in order to avoid being burned to death by the
power of the raga.
. HSP, :.
. HSP, :.
. HSP, :.
. HSP, :.
. By , when Bhatkhande published his fourth and final volume, he had left
much of his anger behind. By now, he had countrywide fame and had less to prove
than in the earlier volumes, written soon after his tours. In the last volume, he con-
centrated on the explication of the differences between the various Sanskrit and
Persian texts, on more esoteric matters such as the theory of affect related to music
(rasa ), and on the mathematics of microtones (shruti ). There are fewer polemical
utterances in this last volume than in the first three. He even provided a genealog-
ical list of Muslim musicians going as far back as the early twelfth century. The
tone is not angry, sarcastic, or denigrating, as in the other volumes. His most ex-
pansive anecdote in this volume points to the ignorance of princely state rulers
about music. The moral of this story for his students was simple and even gracious,
advising his students against demanding the performance of rare ragas by musi-
cians in public forums so as not to needlessly humiliate them. From a man who
spent a great deal of his life finding ways to provoke and dismiss musicians, this is
a rare change. Bhatkhande expresses genuine sympathy for the plight of a musi-
cian subjected to the whimsical and ignorant demands of rich princes (HSP :).
It is not that there are no dismissive paragraphs on musicians at all to be found in
this volume, but there is a marked difference in both the number and quality of his
comments compared to those in earlier volumes. In this one, they are still ignorant

              ‒   

 but not arrogant and willing to concede their lack of knowledge in Bhatkhande’s
presence. When confronted with a question they could not answer, they deferred
to Bhatkhande’s superior knowledge of the subject and freely confessed that their
education was not bookish or systematic. Of course, Bhatkhande does here what
he did in his tours, which is to show off his excellence. But in , he was seventy-
two years old, and perhaps he had mellowed a little.
. In addition to these publications, his speech at the first All-India Music Confer-
ence in , “A Short Historical Survey of Hindustani Music and The Means to
Place it on a Scientific Foundation with a View to Make its Study as Easy as Pos-
sible,” was published as a short book. In it, he summarized what he had observed
in his tours, written in his Marathi volumes, and believed about music’s history.
In his grandiosely titled Music Systems in India: A Comparative Study of Some of
the Music Systems of the th, th, th, and th Centuries, he evaluated a number
of Sanskrit texts for their musicological contributions to the study of music.
Both booklets are condensed and shortened versions of his writings in Marathi,
so I will not dwell on them here. He also collected “popular” songs in Gujarati
and Marathi and wrote some journal articles. At the time of his death, he had
published sixteen music-related works, and two additional ones were released
posthumously.
. See Gokhale, Vishrabdh Sharada, :–, in particular, Gokhale’s comment
about Bhatkhande’s constant willingness to clear up a misunderstanding about
music.
. Letter to Rai Umanath Bali, May , . Property of Rai Swareshwar Bali,
Lucknow.
. Popley was the author of Music of India (Calcutta, ) and a key member of the
music conferences.
. Nayar, Bhatkhande’s Contribution to Music.
. As cited in ibid., , from Bhatkhande Smriti Grantha, ed. N. Chinchore
(Khairagarh, ).
. Unpublished letter to Rai Umanath Bali, February , .
. Letter to Rai Umanath Bali, July , . Published in Bhatkhande Smruti
Grantha (in Hindi and English; Khairagarh,  ).
. V. N. Bhatkhande, “Propoganda for the betterment of the present condition of
Hindusthani Music” (Delhi, ).
. Unpublished letter to Rai Umanath Bali, May , . Property of Rai Swaresh-
war Bali, Kaisar Bagh, Lucknow.
. Unpublished letter to Rai Umanath Bali, May , . Property of Rai Swaresh-
war Bali, Kaisar Bagh, Lucknow.
. See Prabhakar Chinchore, “Ullekhaneeya Ghatnakram,” preface to new edition
of Hindusthani Sangeet Paddhati, vol.  (in Marathi; Bombay, ).

              ‒   

. Letter to Rai Umanath Bali, May , . “I may have to go to Benares to see
what they are doing in the H. University. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya came
to me yesterday and requested me to spend a week in Benares.” Property of Rai
Swareshwar Bali, Lucknow.
. See B. R. Deodhar, Thor Sangeetkar, trans. Ram Deshmukh (in Marathi; Bom-
bay, ), –.
. See K. B. Deval, Music East and West Compared (Poona, ), The Hindu Musi-
cal Scale and the  Shrutis (Poona, ); and Theory of Indian Music as Ex-
pounded by Somnatha (Poona, ); E. Clements, A Note on the Use of European
Musical Instruments in India (Bombay,  ). Deval and Clements founded the
Philharmonic Society of Western India at Satara in . Clements was a retired
district judge and Deval was a retired deputy collector. Both came from the dis-
trict of Satara, in western India. Deval had published the first “scientific” work
on microtones and constructed a harmonium in accordance with his findings.
He had presented it at the first All-India Music Conference, where it was
soundly rejected by Bhatkhande and others.
. See Vinayak Purohit, The Arts in Transitional India, vols.  and  (Bombay, ).
. See Deodhar, Thor Sangeetkar, –.
. Kesari, June , . The article reported a talk given by Professor Krishnarao
Mule at the house of one of Poona’s most respected music patrons, Abbasaheb
Muzumdar, on the subject of music and musicology.
. Unpublished letter to Rai Umanath Bali, May , . “D. K. from Poona
wrote to me asking if it was true that you are trying to hand over the college to
the University on the ground that you were unable to go on with it. . . . The
only difficulty with me is that I have never asked anybody to give me money for
any of my activities and find it awkward to begin to do it now.” Property of Rai
Swareshwar Bali, Lucknow.
. See Acharya Shrikrishna Ratanjankar “Sujaan”: Jeevani tatha Smritisanchay (in
Hindi, Bombay, ), .
. Sangeet Kala Vihar  (): –.

Chapter 4

. For a festschrift on Paluskar, see Akhil Bharatiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya

Mandal, Vishnu Digambar Paluskar Smriti Granth (Miraj,  ).
. See Gurandittamal Khanna, Gayanacharya Shriman Pandit Vishnu Digambarji
Paluskar ka Sankshipt Jeevan-Vritaant (Lahore, ). All translations from the
Hindi are mine.

              ‒   
