More than three decades after his death, Kumar Gandharva’s music is still popular. His voice is heard in mobile phone ringtones in unlikely places—railway stations, airports, public meetings. In-caller tunes were downloaded by people who weren’t even born when he died on January 12, 1992. Programmes held across the country over the past year to celebrate his birth centenary have been well-attended.
His popularity across generations and geographies emerged in the face of impossible odds. This child prodigy’s body was underdeveloped due to his family’s misfortunes and poverty. His childhood was stifled by the life of a travelling performer; at the age of nine, he was his family’s sole breadwinner. By the age of 11, he had left his family and his hometown in northern Karnataka for good, moving to Mumbai to learn classical music. By 23 years of age, he was being hailed as the next sensation in Hindustani classical music. Yet he was deeply dissatisfied, falling out with his guru, the versatile musicologist BR Deodhar.
Just as he began to make a name for himself as a classical singer, falling in love and getting married to a fellow musician, he contracted tuberculosis in his left lung. On his doctor’s advice, he moved away from Mumbai’s humidity. In 1948, the young couple moved to the dry climate of Dewas, Madhya Pradesh. For nearly five years, he was forced to keep lying down to rest his body. Practising singing was out of the question; it was difficult for him to speak. His wife worked in a school to make ends meet. New antibiotics gradually helped him recover, although three-fourths of his left lung had collapsed due to TB and the effect of its medicines.
It was obvious he was not going to fulfil the promise of his prodigal talent. Even as he faced death and despair, he began to rethink music and its cultural roots. While he lay recovering, he heard ordinary village folk, especially women, singing in bullock carts that passed by their rented house. His wife and he began to research folk music in 1952.
Having grown up speaking only in Kannada, he had learned Marathi in Mumbai; he now began to train himself in Hindi, Malwi, Awadhi and Brajbhasha. The boy who had quit school after four days had now become a scholar researching poets and writers of northern India.
His outstanding bravery in the face of a life-threatening disease, his easy manner, his sense of humour, his powers to observe the beautiful in the ordinary, and his capacity to research and assimilate these combined to make him a leader of all manner of artists. He cultivated deep friendships with a wide range of talented artists and litterateurs. There were poets, novelists, journalists, painters and, of course, musicians. He became a beacon of cultural excellence in Dewas, Indore and the Malwa region.
It was during his recovery that he noticed the mendicant singers, especially jogis of the Nath sect, who sang verses composed by the great poets of the Bhakti traditions. His estrangement with his guru had not taken away the diversity of influences. Deodhar was a disciple of Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, who had opened new paths for Indian classical music, making it popular and establishing its presence outside of temples and princely courts. But Deodhar was the only disciple of Paluskar who had also completed a formal education, going on to train himself in western classical music. He was open to all the gharanas that otherwise could not stand each other.
Kumar Gandharva had absorbed this openness, going on to lend it new dimensions. Deodhar had once taken the young man with him to the temple of the Vallabh sect in Mumbai; this was to prepare a special thematic programme for the spring festival. This was Kumar Gandharva’s introduction to the poetry and music of the classical traditions of the Bhakti movement. This exposure came in handy when he noticed the poetry and music in the singing of folk mendicants. In particular, he was moved by a sadhu singing “Sunta hai guru gyani” and “Raghubar ki sudh aayi”.
When he began to sing again in 1954, his music had changed. The way he imagined music itself had changed. As he got back to singing in public concerts, he also began to put together new ideas for presenting folk and Bhakti music. For the first time in his life, he became financially secure, finding the joys of family life. It did not last, however. His wife and partner in music died in childbirth.
He had to start from scratch. Again. Just that he now had the added responsibility of two children. He remarried and got down to music with a renewed dedication and a new partner. He began devising thematic programmes of the kind nobody had imagined earlier. Programmes around seasonal festivals; around Malwa’s folk music; around the great Bhakti poets. This gave him connections with groups outside of the Hindustani classical music circuit. It also saved him from becoming a tragic victim of varied misfortunes.
Kumar Gandharva’s immense popularity is a reflection of the kind of deep connections he made among worlds that were seemingly unconnected. He used his classical training to take music to its roots in folk culture. He became a cultural bridge, an extension of our freedom struggle. His art broke barriers of language, region, culture and much more. That’s worth remembering today because he was born a century ago, on April 8, 1924.
Sopan Joshi is the author of An Improbable Life, an illustrated biography of Kumar Gandharva. The views expressed are personal
Classical in core, champion of folk
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07.04.2024
More than three decades after his death, Kumar Gandharva’s music is still popular. His voice is heard in mobile phone ringtones in unlikely places—railway stations, airports, public meetings. In-caller tunes were downloaded by people who weren’t even born when he died on January 12, 1992. Programmes held across the country over the past year to celebrate his birth centenary have been well-attended.
His popularity across generations and geographies emerged in the face of impossible odds. This child prodigy’s body was underdeveloped due to his family’s misfortunes and poverty. His childhood was stifled by the life of a travelling performer; at the age of nine, he was his family’s sole breadwinner. By the age of 11, he had left his family and his hometown in northern Karnataka for good, moving to Mumbai to learn classical music. By 23 years of age, he was being hailed as the next sensation in Hindustani classical music. Yet he was deeply dissatisfied, falling out with his guru, the versatile musicologist BR Deodhar.
Just as he began to make a name for himself as a classical singer, falling in love and getting married to a fellow musician, he contracted tuberculosis in his left lung. On his doctor’s advice, he moved away from Mumbai’s humidity. In 1948, the young couple moved to the dry climate of Dewas, Madhya Pradesh. For nearly five years, he was forced to........
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