From: gangolli@frobenius.math.washington.edu (Ramesh Gangolli)
Subject: Bhatkhande
Followup-To: Queries re: Bhatkhande 
Keywords:  Bhatkhande; musicology
Organization: University of Washington, Mathematics, Seattle
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 20:25:28 GMT





Dear Fellow Netters,

I am posting the Bhatkhande article as promised. It appeared originally in
Bansuri, a journal published by Ragamala Performing Arts of Canada, some
years ago. It has been reprinted by a couple of  literary/musical review
magazines in India since its first appearance. I would welcome comments and
or corrections.


Ramesh Gangolli.

P.S. the footnotes are segregated at the end of the article.
**************************************************************************** 



             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 (gangolli@math.washington.edu)
Dept. of Mathematics GN-50
University of Washington
Seattle WA 98195.
Newsgroups: rec.music.indian.classical