CHATURA PANDIT : V.N.

BHATKHANDE {Footnote 1}

BY

RAMESH GANGOLLI

India's cultural diversity is so phenomenal that one might well postulate that
benign anarchy is one of the guiding principles of her cultural institutions. The
variety of her languages, practices of worship, celebrations of joy and
observances of grief, her arts and crafts etc. is bewildering. So it is also with her
music. Not only are there several contexts in which music might be performed, (
e.g. rituals ; observances of vital events such as birth, death, marriage etc.;
concerts and recitals, and so on ), there is also a tremendous variety of themes,
interpretations, styles and traditions, not to mention regional or microlocal
differences. In the present article, I am concerned with Hindustani Classical
Music, which is a term that I shall use interchangeably with the term " Art Music
". Even within this genus, one finds a great variety of traditions and styles of
performance, of compositions, of Ragas and their renderings, making a
systematic study of this subject a challenging task.

Certainly there have been attempts to systematize Hindustani Classical Music -

the Indian passion for taxonomy could scarcely be expected to waste such an
opportunity. Nevertheless, traditional works on this subject are not as numerous
as one might expect on a priori grounds, considering the long history of the
subject. For example, in her detailed study of the history of Indian
music,{Footnote 2}. Emmy te Nijenhuis lists only 30 - 32 specifically
musicological works spanning the period between the 3rd and the 19th centuries
A.D., not counting multiple annotated editions of the same treatise. The majority
are in Sanskrit, and are relatively inaccessible to the average reader.

With the steady growth of interest in Hindustani Classical Music which has
taken place over the last thirty years in North America, one can expect an
increased interest in its musicology as well. Even if one shares the disdain of the
Performer for the non-practising theorist, it would be difficult to deny that some
systematization provides a common language and syntax for musical study and
discussion and thereby helps to reduce the ambiguities inherent in the give and
take of musical life.
Among twentieth century attempts to study Hindustani Classical Music
systematically, I believe that the work of Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande occupies a
special place. His efforts at systematization were the first modern ones
undertaken with a scientific spirit, and they have had so much influence that his
ideas provide much of the vocabulary of musical discussion today. Moreover,
the work that he did brought about profound changes in the socio-cultural and
educational context in which Hindustani Classical Music was performed in his
day, and these changes have had an enormous influence on the way Hindustani
Classical Music is practised today. It is my aim in this article to discuss briefly
Bhatkhande's life and work.

HIS LIFE.{Footnote 3}.

Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande was born on August 10, 1860, on Janmashthami,

the day which marks the festival celebrating the birth of Lord Krishna according
to the Hindu lunar calendar. His family was a middle class Brahmin family of
modest means. The family had its roots in Ratnagiri district, not far south of
Bombay on the west coast of India. His father had a high school education and
was employed as an overseer/accountant of temple properties at a well
endowed temple in Bombay.

The second of five children, Vishnu seems to have had a healthy, uneventful
childhood. He showed some aptitude and liking for music, being sporadically
interested in the flute. In any event, he was certainly exposed to a certain amount
of music, due to his father's association with the temple, which served as a venue
for ritual musical performance. At the age of 15, through the introduction
provided by a neighbour, Gopalgiribuwa by name, he started taking Sitar lessons
from a man by the name of Vallabhdas Damulji, an accomplished musician, who
in turn had been trained by a well regarded Been player of the time, Jeevanlal
Maharaj. It is a commentary on his milieu that he had to undertake this training
on the sly. It was not considered proper for members of high caste families to
study art music in a rigorous professional manner, although participation in
music in a religious context was common, and indeed would be a point of pride
in such families. The secret of his Sitar lessons could not long be concealed in a
well-knit family. Fortunately, his father, perhaps recognizing an unquenchable
musical passion, allowed him to continue the study of the Sitar, provided that
Vishnu undertook to do so as an amateur - he must never perform in public, and
he must promise not to allow music to interfere with his academic studies.
Young Vishnu, ( or Annasaheb as he was usually called by then ), continued the
study of music throughout his college days. He attended Elphinstone College,
Bombay, from which he graduated in 1885 with a Bachelor's degree, took a law
degree in 1887, and was admitted to the Bar the same year. He practised law at
the Bombay High Court ( 1887-89 ), and the Karachi High Court ( 1889-1910 ).
Early in the latter period, ( I cannot determine just when ), he was married, and
shortly thereafter, a daughter was born. But the marriage was ill-fated.
Annasaheb lost both his wife and daughter in 1900 and 1903 respectively after
short illnesses. These events had a profound effect on him. He never married
again, never gave further "hostages to fortune", and devoted an increasing
proportion of his mental life to the study and contemplation of music. True to his
promise to his father, he never sought to be a performer, although he was quite a
competent and sensitive one, judging from contemporary reports. His bent was
more for acute observation, analysis and synthesis. This naturally led him to the
study of musicology; and this meant the musicology of classical vocal music -
Indian tradition has always accorded primacy to vocal music above other media.
So much did this absorb him that he gradually withdrew from his law practice,
and essentially abandoned it in 1910. He had independent means by then, and
thereafter his practice of law was limited to acting out the role of executor to two
large estates until the legatees attained majority. For the rest of his time, he
undertook what can now be seen as an extraordinarily ambitious project : He set
out to understand thoroughly the musicology of Hindustani Classical Music of
his day, its relation to historical sources, and to catalogue as fully as he could the
vocal music then in practice, with respect to styles and compositions.

This task would absorb him for the rest of his life. He was ruthlessly single-
minded in the pursuit of his goal. He travelled the length and breadth of India.
On his travels he located and studied historical source works on music, almost all
in Sanskrit, a language in which he was fluent. He interviewed other scholars
and musicologists concerning their interpretations of the texts as well as their
opinions of the prevailing state of the art, and above all, spent countless hours
with some of the best performing musicians of the time, trying to understand the
relation between the system propounded in these classical texts and the actual
musical practices that these performers had imbibed from their respective oral-
aural traditions. The microscopic study of their music and musical lore,
including the study of precise points of similarity and difference in their
renderings of particular Ragas and compositions became the ruling passion of his
life.

A prodigious amount of work now began to appear from his pen. Over the next
26 years ( 1910-36 ), he produced four major works : (1)
"Shrimallakshyasangeetam", a collection of Sanskrit verses which summarise his
findings about the structure of various Ragas ; (2) "Hindustani Sangeeta
Paddhati", a four volume work in Marathi, later translated into Hindi, containing
a detailed exposition of his researches, written in the form of a Platonic dialogue;
(3) "Kramik Pustak Malika", a six volume work in Marathi, also translated later
into Hindi, which contains compositions that he had collected in his travels from
scores of performing musicians and their families. He invented his own system
of notation for this purpose. This work, with over 1850 compositions, including
over 300 of his own, is still in use as a standard source in the curricula of most
musical institutions in India today; (4) A longish scholarly article, " A
Comparative Study of the Music Systems of the 15th, 16th, and the 17th
Centuries ", which appeared in a quarterly publication entitled Sangeet,
published by the Marris College ( now known as Bhatkhande Sangeet
Vidyapeeth ), Lucknow.

Apart from these works, he supervised the publication of 26 other musicological

works by other authors. Some of these were old Sanskrit texts critically
annotated by him, others were editions of works by contemporary authors in
which he had participated substantially as a discussant. All of them involved a
sizable effort on Pandit Bhatkhande's part ( by now, he had come to be known as
" Pandit " - a learned man ). In addition to this there were, of course, a large
number of occasional essays, articles and so on, not easy to trace fully now. He
also kept a diary of his reflections and encounters. I believe that these amount to
some 2000 manuscript pages, and are archived at Khairagarh, Madhya Pradesh,
in India.

Pandit Bhatkhande sufferred a stroke in 1933, the effects of which more or less
confined him to bed for the next three years. He continued his activities from the
sickbed, writing and editing the final volumes of Kramik Pustak Malika. He died
on September 19, 1936, on Ganeshchaturthi, the day on which Hindus pray to the
elephant god Lord Ganesha.

HIS WORK.

In order to appreciate his work fully, one needs to understand the musical as
well as the social milieu in which he lived. It would be impossible to do this in a
short article. I can only hope to give the reader an inkling of the scope and
significance of his work, and thereby of his life.
It will be convenient to view Bhatkhande's work under several headings : (a)
Musicological research and Systematics; (b) Collection and Documentation of
musical compositions; (c) Original, creative work of musical composition; (d)
Scholarly and educational work, e.g. editing, didactic writing, organizing
institutions of musical instruction, planning of curricula etc.; I shall set down my
thoughts briefly under these headings.

(a) Musicological Research and Systematics.

Bhatkhande's Magnum Opus, " Hindustani Sangeet Paddhati ", is a four volume
work of over 2000 pages, cast in the form of a Platonic dialogue between teacher
and student. It is a work of great detail, and although its structure as a dialogue
sometimes tends to lure the argument into long digressions, it is a literate and on
the whole a comprehensible work with a consistent internal logic.

The main problem that he set out to tackle was to understand whether the
enormous variety of musical practices that he observed in the art music of his
day could have arisen by differentiation from a common systematic basis. Most
musicians saw ( then as now ) their training as being rooted in a system that
went back several hundred years. In order to understand what such a system
might be like, Bhatkhande first turned to the study of several Sanskrit works
which had traditionally been regarded as the sources of ancient systems.
Prominent among these were the Sangeeta Ratnakara ( The Ocean of Music ) of
Sharngadeva, the Sangeeta Parijata of Ahobala and the Raga Vibodha of
Somanatha. Somewhat to his consternation, he found that there were a large
number of inconsistencies between the systems propounded by these works.
Even when considered individually they sufferred from a certain flabbiness of
expression and occasionally of concept as well. The basic terminology of musical
scales was not the same in different sources, and the obvious difficulty of
communicating in writing a physical phenomenon such as sound made the
discussion of finer points of intonation all but inscrutable. After a detailed study
of the internal consistency as well as the interrelations between these texts,
Bhatkhande came to the conclusion that they could not be viewed as providing a
canonical basis for the art music that was then prevalent, whatever one might
claim about their having provided such a basis in the past. Bhatkhande's
researches into this question led him to do interesting experiments with certain
string instruments with fixed and movable frets which were designed for
experimental use - the Chala Veena and the Achala Veena - modelled after
descriptions in these classical works. These instruments made it possible to
compare different descriptions of musical intervals to some extent. His
conclusions, were detailed and definite, and the arguments by which he arrived
at them are fully set out in the first 135 pages of Hindustani Sangeeta Paddhati
Vol.2. In these pages Bhatkhande describes his experiments, ( which involved
understanding the relations between various theories of consonant sound which
had existed in the ancient and medieval world, e.g. Pythagoras' celebrated
progression of fifths, the various modes of Greek music such as the Aeolian,
Phrygian, Dorian etc. ), and seeks to arrive at a plausible guess as to what the
musical scale used by Indian musicians might have been. He found that one
could not accurately establish the relation between the terminology followed by
the various texts mentioned above. Naturally, without this information, it was
essentially impossible to try to reconcile the many inconsistencies between these
works in their conception of various Ragas. Although he came to some tentative
conclusions concerning an underlying protosystem, he found that they were too
shaky as a basis on which one could hope to support an edifice of
systematization. He therefore decided to proceed inductively, and set out to
arrive at a plausible guess at an underlying system, from voluminous
observation and documentation of existing art music, followed by an abstraction
of its common features. This was surely an ambitious task; to put it in
perspective, one can compare it to the task one would face if one tried to
reconstruct the system underlying western music by studying the classical
western music that is played today.

Fortunately for him, he was able to enlist several leading performing musicians
of his time to help him in this task. To be sure this was not done easily, but
involved patient - and sometimes servile - persuasion. But in the end, he
managed to get the help of several such musicians who had a vast knowledge of
traditional compositions often handed down orally from father to son over
several generations. Their method of transmission, which was by rote, at least
made it plausible that the basic tonal- structural features of a Raga might have
survived essentially intact over the years, although clearly both the phrasing and
the texts had probably changed. On the basis of extensive study of hundreds of
these compositions, as well as comparisons of the prevailing practices for
particular Ragas with descriptions of those Ragas in historical sources, he came
to certain conclusions both in respect of the scale that underlies Hindustani
music, as well as the structural conventions that govern various Ragas. This led
him eventually to propose a classification of some 180 Ragas which were then in
practice into 10 groups which he called Thaats, a classification which today forms
the basis of instruction in most musical schools. He ventured to place this
classification before his contemporaries as a " Paddhati " ( i.e. a System ) that
underlies Hindustani Classical Music.
Because it represents a very influential and concrete part of Bhatkhande's work, I
would like to discuss his classification briefly. His starting point was the Mela
system which had found general acceptance in South India. This system,
expounded circa 1640 A.D. by the musicologist Venkatamakhi, gave an
enumeration of "parent scales" or Melas, based on certain rules. Since the system
is basic to an understanding of almost any system of classification of Indian
music, I will describe it in a simplified way.{Footnote 4}. The reader who has no
taste for technical discussion may skip the next page or so without too much loss.

Let us recall that in Indian music the notes of the octave have the names

SA, RE, GA, MA, PA, DHA, NI, SA.

We shall denote these by

S, R, G, M, P, D, N, S^

In addition there are of course, certain notes which are flat or sharp versions of
some of these. They are : Komal ( flat ) RE, which will be denoted by r; Komal
GA, which we denote by g; Tivra ( sharp ) MA, denoted by M+; this is the
augmented fourth; Komal DHA, denoted by d; Komal NI, denoted by n. Thus
the full twelve- tone scale is labelled as :

S, r, R, g, G, M, M+, P, d, D, n, N, S.

However, unlike in western music, these names do not refer to notes of a fixed
absolute pitch. Rather, having decided the register and key in which the
performance is to take place, the performer selects the fundamental pitch,
designates it as the first note of the octave, and gives it the label SA, the
succeeding notes being named as above. Thus, for a performer who selects C as
the fundamental, the notes will be named as follows :{Footnote 5}.

S, r , R, g , G, M, M+ , P, d , D, n , N, S
C, C# , D, Eb , E, F, F# , G, Ab , A, Bb , B, C

Under the Mela system, each Raga is considered to have been derived from a
particular " parent scale ", which is called a Mela ( or more fully, a Swaramela -
literally : a compatible collection of Swaras or pitches ). For example, using C as
the fundamental, the scale

S, r , G, M, P, d , N, S^.

C, C# , E, F, G, Ab , B, c.

is a particular Mela, called Mayamalavagoula in South India, ( and as will be

seen below, called the Bhairav Thaat in Hindustani music ), from which Mela
spring several Ragas. In order for a scale to qualify as a Mela, Venkatmakhi
proposed certain rules : (a) A Mela must always contain S, P, and S^, (the initial
note of the next octave); (b) It shall contain one and only one of the two notes M
and M+; (c) Of the remaining four notes of the lower half of the full scale, namely
r, R, g, G, a Mela shall contain exactly two notes; (d) Of the remaining four notes
of the upper half of the full scale, namely d, D, n, N, a Mela shall contain exactly
two notes. Using these four rules it is easily determined that there can be exactly
72 Melas. However, Venkatamakhi realised that not all these Melas are musically
viable and pleasing, and he determined that 19 of them were in common use in
the Karnatak music of his time. Although compositions exist in Ragas using
material from the other Melas, some of them have a somewhat contrived air
about them, and the 19 Melas he noted as commonly prevalent form the basis of
Karnatak musical instruction to this day.

Bhatkhande realised that, as far as Hindustani Classical Music was concerned,

the parent scales apparently in use were far fewer in number. This was partly
due to differrent aesthetic conventions, which frowned upon the frequent
juxtaposition of pitches which were only a semitone apart. Thus the scale

S, r, R, M+, P, d, D, S
would be an allowable Mela, but Hindustani music does not use it because of the
preponderance of half-note intervals in it. Bhatkhande then considered
augmenting Venkatamakhi's rules with an additional rule that would deal with
this fact : namely that a parent scale shall have just one note from the following
pairs -( r, R ), ( g, G ), ( d, D ), and ( n, N ). Clearly this would eliminate many
half-tone intervals. With this additional rule, one gets 32 scales that are
allowable. Bhatkhande called each of these scales a Thaat ( literally : manner or
style ) and seriously thought of adopting this set of scales as a basis for his
classification of Hindustani Ragas. But he eventually decided to use a smaller
number, partly for pragmatic reasons, i.e. ease of recall. By using a well reasoned
inductive argument, he identified 10 such Thaats as being in common use, each
of which he named after an important Raga which would be the Doyen of that
Thaat. He then proceeded to ascribe the Ragas which were then performed (
some 170-190 in number ) to one or the other of these Thaats. As an example, we
may look at the Bhairav Thaat which is the scale

S, r , G, M, P, d , N, S^.

C, C# , E, F, G, Ab , B, c.

( Recall that this is also the Mela Mayamalavagoula ). It is named after the Raga
Bhairav which in a sense typifies Ragas of this Thaat. Several other Ragas use
material from this scale, for example the Raga Jogia which uses the material S, r,
M, P, d, N, S^.{Footnote 6}. Similarly there are 9 other Thaats e.g. Asavari,
Bhairavi, Bilawal, Kafi, Kalyan, Khamaj, Marwa, Poorvi and Todi, each named
after a principal Raga in that Thaat, which is supposed to be a prototype for
other Ragas of that Thaat in their use of the scale. To sum up, Bhatkhande
classified the then prevalent Ragas into 10 Thaats based on a precise set of
musical ideas.

Since the number of possible scales is a good deal larger than 10, it must be
expected that any classification that sets out with only 10 Thaats is bound to
suffer from some inadequacies and inconsistencies. Bhatkhande's attitude on this
point was far from dogmatic. He explicitly allowed in Hindustani Sangeeta
Paddhati the validity and logical appeal of a finer classification with more
Thaats, but settled on 10 Thaats because he felt that it led to an adequate system
which would not burden a student's memory unduly. Ambiguities which
inevitably arose were resolved by an ad hoc consideration, appealing to musical
performance practice and the internal dynamics of the Raga.{Footnote 7}.
Today, essentially all the institutions of Hindustani musical instruction use
Bhatkhande's classification ( in varying degrees of detail ) as a basis for their
curricula. Bhatkhande's system also forms the lexicon of discussion among
musicians and musicologists, although, for reasons mentioned just above, its
acceptance is not total. It is clear, however,that it is the only attempt at
classification that has found reasonably wide acceptance.

(b) Collection and Documentation of compositions.

In order to comprehend the system underlying the music practised in his day,
Bhatkhande travelled the length and breadth of India. During these travels, he
talked with musicians and musicologists, learning both their theoretical practical
ideas, and collected a large number of traditional compositions which had
typically been handed down in hereditary musical families, which at that time
formed the core of musical practitioners in North India. Most of these families
consisted of Muslim musicians, whose forebears had scattered to the small towns
and rural areas of North India after the disintegration of the Mogul empire. The
ancestors of these families had mostly been court musicians either at the Mogul
court or at smaller courts of the many vassals of the Moguls. With the advent of
British rule, which did not extend such patronage, most of the court musicians
scattered to smaller towns, and there formed the nucleii of musical traditions.
They were called Gharanas or Khandaans ( literally : households or families, i.e.
lineages ).

Over the next century these families maintained their musical traditions by oral
transmission within the family. However there were several harsh realities in
their musical life. They lived frugally, often under conditions of privation, and
were far removed from the general educational and cultural processes to which
they had access previously while at court. This led to the creation of a class of
highly specialized musicians, often very talented and well trained, who were
however generally uneducated, and certainly far removed from any scholarly
inclinations. Their method of study was by rote; the principle that the Ustad (
teacher ) was a canonical authority whose wishes were absolute law to the
Shagird ( disciple ), was actively cultivated and enforced. Even asking a question
or expressing a doubt was often regarded as an indication of incipient dissent,
and therefore as impertinent. Over time these families became highly inbred
musical lineages, who jealously guarded their lore, which was after all the means
of their precarious livelihood. Any effort towards systematizing that lore would
naturally be seen by them as a step towards making it more easily portable and
accessible to others outside the pale. Small wonder that they were
unsympathetic, and often actively inimical to any such efforts. Such Hindu
musicians as then existed were mostly trained by one of the Muslim Gharanas,
and were not always allowed to learn all that their Ustads might have had in
their possession. In turn, many of the Hindu musicians were also subject to
similar economic and societal pressures, and thus came to share the same
prejudices against efforts to systematize music, and indeed against scholarship
and analysis in general.

Stepping into this milieu, Bhatkhande sufferred two basic disabilities. He was far
removed from any Gharana; and he advocated an intellectual understanding of
musical practice by espousing the cause of systematization. Ever the rationalist,
he wanted to get to the root of every practice, and would go to great lengths to
get answers to his many questions. This ran counter to the established ethos of
acceptance of authority, so much so that he encountered active hostility from
many quarters. The story of how he succeeded in breaking down the resistance
of some of the best musicians and in obtaining access to many of their traditional
compositions is fascinating.{Footnote 8}. Here I have to content myself with
simply reporting the result - he was able to collect over 2000 compositions, some
dating back over two or three centuries. He carefully wrote them down, attended
to correcting obvious interpolations and corruptions, and notated them with a
notation system of his own devising. About 1500 of these, ( together with some
300 of his own compositions ) appear in the six volumes of the Kramik Pustak
Malika. The rest, some 500, are presumably with his papers and diaries at
Khairagarh.

The Kramik Pustak Malika, a six volume work, is a work of major archival
significance. It is basically a collection of notated compositions, grouped
according to the Ragas in which they are composed. It contains 1849
compositions in 189 Ragas. To this day there is no compendium of traditional
compositions which comes close to it for variety and accuracy. It contains many
Dhrupad compositions, some set to unusual Talas. Notwithstanding the well-
known inadequacies of notation as a guide to the performance of Hindustani
music, the collection has proved to be enormously useful, and is regularly used
by practising musicians, especially in Maharashtra state. Its use by musicians has
had another important effect : namely the idea that notation can play a role in
preserving, albeit sketchily, the musical intent of the composer has now come to
be accepted by performing Hindustani musicians in India. This is evidenced by
the appearance of published volumes of collected compositions of many
individual musicians. Several such volumes have emerged in recent years, and
this practice can now be regarded as well-established. Most of these volumes
follow the system of notation devised by Bhatkhande. This phenomenon is
surely due in large measure to the work of Bhatkhande. Clearly, the very
acceptance of the idea that notating compositions can have some utility ( long out
of favour with the majority of Hindustani musicians, and indeed not universally
accepted even today ), will have substantial impact on Hindustani music from
the archival point of view.

This article has already become longer than I intended. I shall have to be even
more casual about the other headings under which I set out to view
Bhatkhande's work.

(c) His compositions.

Bhatkhande's work as a composer is extremely interesting to a musician who

believes in the importance of literary and prosodic aspects of a composition for
the total enjoyment of music. A study of the compositions in the Kramik Pustak
Malika which can be ascribed to him reveals a nice command of these aspects.
This is a feature that many traditional compositions lack, ( perhaps having lost
this or that fine feature over the gulf of decades of oral transmission ). He also
pays great attention to the characteristic phrasings of the Raga, sometimes
incorporating the solfage cleverly in the text in such a way that the letters of the
solfage do double duty as a part of a meaningful word in the song, while
retaining their appropriate musical pitches. In this respect he follows the great
tradition of classical Sanskrit poetry, in which such complex devices were often
employed with great effect and skill. A fuller analysis of his compositions would
be a subject worthy of further study. It would not only illuminate his creative
genius more fully, but would also serve to illustrate well the devices and themes
that are common to many compositions in Hindustani music. A reader could
thus get a feeling for the cultural data with which a good audience is expected to
be equipped to fully enjoy a Hindustani musical performance.

(d) Scholarly and educational work.

Bhatkhande believed fervently that the age of mass musical education was just
dawning in India. Time and again he expresses in Hindustani Sangeeta Paddhati
his dismay at the fact that in his day the upper echelons of society regarded the
performance of art music as a decadent and degrading occupation associated
with prostitution and orgiastic excess. The sociological reasons for this attitude
are complex and numerous, and will not be dwelt upon here. Bhatkhande felt
strongly that a civilized society cannot regard the practice of music as degrading.
He had a vision that some musical training would in time become an essential
part of the formation of every person who could be regarded as educated. I
suppose that this noble vision ( shared as well by other visionaries, e.g. Jefferson
) will always be an unattained goal that inspires human effort. Bhatkhande
strove hard to propagate this point of view. He did so by various methods.
Editing and publishing musical and musicological work by other authors,
bringing it within reach of the middle class was one facet of this
activity.{Footnote 9}. He did a lot of it, having been involved in the publication of
over two dozen substantial works by other authors in one role or another, not to
mention more casual popular and journalistic writing. Lack of space does not
permit a fuller description here. Even more far-reaching in impact was his
founding of several institutions of musical instruction, in Baroda, Gwalior, and
Lucknow for example, and the adoption of a standard curriculum of musical
instruction by these institutions. Although these institutions are not in the
educational mainstream, being in this respect similar to conservatories in the
West, their existence has served to dispel the social prejudices against music as
an occupation. Today, musical skills are widely sought after by the upper
echelons of Indian society, and many professionals in India have adopted
musical performance as a secondary vocation, which in many case evolves into a
primary career if they get recognition and popularity. I feel that Bhatkhande's
writing and the example that he set by his own life had a major role in bringing
about this change of attitude, especially in Maharashtra. He was thus an
important participant in the process of cultural change to which other
contemporary figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, Sourindra Mohan Tagore,
and Vishnu Digambar Paluskar contributed. His dream of integrating music
education as an essential component of secondary education remains unfulfilled
and current educational trends in India do not allow one to hope that it will soon
be a reality. Perhaps the main function of such noble dreams is to provide the
spur to the efforts of visionaries like Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

I have benefitted from personal discussions with many musicians in the

preparation of this article. Among them are K.G.Ginde, Dinkar Kaikini, C.R.Vyas
and Yunus Hussein Khan. Conversations with them have helped me to refine my
understanding of the musical milieu of the past, and the nature of Pandit
Bhatkhande's contribution. While thanking them for their time, I want to
emphasize that the views expressed in this article, together with their
shortcomings, are my own. Finally, I would like to thank Ashok Ranade for
allowing me the use of the archives and the library of the National Centre for the
Performing Arts, Bombay.
FOOTNOTES

Footnote 1: Chatura Pandit ( literally : the Clever or Crafty Scholar ) was

Bhatkhande's pen-name.

Footnote 2: Emmy te Nijenhuis; Indian Music, History and Structure; Handbuch

der Orientalistik, Band 6; E.J.Brill, Leiden 1974.

Footnote 3: The reader who knows Marathi can find a detailed account of
Bhatkhande's life in S.N.Ratanjankar; Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande;
Maharashtra Government Publications, Bombay,1973.

Footnote 4: In order to keep the discussion manageable, I have simplified certain

points, concerning nomenclature of notes, which arise inevitably in an accurate
discussion of the Mela system which is in use in Karnatak music. Thus the
Karnatak names for certain notes have been replaced by their closest Hindustani
equivalents. I believe that this does not do too much damage in a non-technical
article. For a more careful discussion of Melas, see for example the article by
Harold Powers in The New Grove: Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. IX,
pp. 69-166; W. Macmillan & Sons, London, 1981.

Footnote 5: If the performer chooses a different fundamental note, say for

example Eb, the notes would be named with corresponding changes:

S , r , R, g , G, M , M+, P, d, D, n , N, S^

Eb , E , F, F# , G, Ab, A , Bb, B, C, C#, D, Eb

Footnote 6: The tonal material does not by itself specify the Raga of course. One
needs to describe many other characteristics, such as its ascent-descent structure,
sonant-consonant pair, and above all, its characteristic phrases.
Footnote 7: Indeed, the resolution of such ambiguities seems to have been a bit of
a cause celebre at certain times. It was a subject of heated debate among certain
factions of musicians in Maharashtra, as evidenced by contemporary writing,
and probably elsewhere as well. Between 1918 and 1922, Bhatkhande organized
three conferences during which considerable time was devoted to a discussion of
the phrasing and dynamics of certain major groups of Ragas, so that one could
attempt to ascribe ambiguous Ragas to appropriate Thaats in a reasonable
manner. Many of the best performers of that time attended these conferences,
and apparently they even produced some concensus on certain musical points, as
one can gather from references to this fact in the prefaces of two volumes of the
Kramik Pustak Malika.

Footnote 8: He spared no tactic; of the classic Indian formula of Sama, Dama,

Danda, Bheda, ( which is roughly equivalent to Beg, Buy, Borrow, Steal ), he tried
all except the last method!.

Footnote 9: He even played on the susceptibilities of the society of his day in

unexpected ways; for example, knowing that educated people in Maharashtra
had a great respect for Sanskrit, he wrote his work "Shrimallakshyasangeetam" in
Sanskrit, under the pseudonym Chatura Pandit, and cited it as a reference in his
other writings. Being a work in Sanskrit many people automatically thought that
it was an old work, and therefore worthy of the respect owed to canonical works.
Bhatkhande did nothing to dispel this misapprehension. To be fair to him, he
never lied about it either, emulating a famous incident in the Mahabharata. All of
this had a mischievous air about it, and I think he enjoyed the double entendre
implicit in his pseudonym; Chatura means clever, but it also means crafty.

Ramesh Gangolli ([email protected])

Dept. of Mathematics GN-50

University of Washington

Seattle WA 98195.