'Musicology' in Hindustani Music Education

Home , Music of India, Omkarnath Thakur, Religious music, Shree (Hindustani raga), Vishnu Digambar Paluskar

UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM

Exploring ‘Musicology’ in Hindustani Music Education: a 20th century case of problematic contextualization

Sanjeevani Jain 8/8/2018

Thesis presented for the degree

Master of Arts in Music Studies

11313048 Supervisor: Oliver Seibt Second Reader: Barbara Titus

ABSTRACT

Hindustani music, the classical music of North India, has been known not only for its musical characteristics, but also for the educational traditions and values associated with it. The following study is an investigation of music education in North India for a specific purpose to explore the position of ‘musicology’ as an academic discipline. It is grounded in the belief that education of music should not be limited to the teaching and learning of performance skills and that it carries a wide scope of academic studies which should be leveraged and given fair attention. While the current system of music education in North India focuses mostly on the practical aspect only, continuous efforts were made in the past to mainstream scholarly aspects. This thesis provides an examination of those efforts and a possible analysis of why they were short-lived, so as to measure the future possibilities in similar direction. The findings could also be helpful in understanding the implications of colonial interactions on Indian music education and how they unfold in the postcolonial era i.e. mid-20th century onwards.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The course of writing this master’s thesis has been truly enriching where the involvement of numerous people in my research pursuit has played an integral role. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my advisor, Dr.Wim van der Meer, for encouraging me to perform this research and enabling its completion with required resources. Next I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Oliver Seibt, for guiding me with detailed feedbacks and allowing me the space to think differently, make mistakes, and learn from them, while being extremely trustworthy and patient throughout. I am also grateful to Professor Barbara Titus for being supportive and willing to help anytime, and the Department of Music Studies, UvA for funding my research at the Fondazione Georgio Cini, Venice and to the Intercultural Institute for Comparative Music Studies of the Fondazione Georgio Cini for giving me the opportunity to access Daniélou’s archives. My sincere thanks to Nicola Biondi, the person in-charge of these archives for sharing her insights that acted as a valuable contribution to my project. I would also like to thank all the participants of the small survey I conducted during the research. Last but not the least I am deeply grateful for all the consistent support I have received from my family despite being thousands of miles apart.

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 4 Chapter 1: Institutions for music learning ...... 10 a. The foundation: guru-śiṣya paramparā ...... 10 b. Continuing tradition: gharānā ...... 14 c. Colonial addition: English scholarship and music schools for mass education ...... 18 Chapter 2: The pioneers of musicological thinking ...... 25 Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860-1936) ...... 26 Alain Daniélou (1907-1994) ...... 31 Chapter 3: Sangīt śāstra: the Indian take of Musicology educators ...... 39 Omkarnath Thakur (1897-1967) ...... 40 Prem Lata Sharma (1927-1998) ...... 43 Conclusion ...... 55 References ...... 60 Appendix ...... 64 Photographs ...... 64 Chronology ...... 66 Questionnaire ...... 67

Introduction

Twelve years ago, when I was introduced to Hindustani Music, I was told that the knowledge of Indian classical music was essential for a general understanding of music as an art form. As a child, I saw classical music as the foundation of every other musical form. Learning the seven notes- Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni, meant mastering the skill to decipher, for example, a film song into a notation, which could later on be played on a harmonium. As exciting and as tempting the promised outcomes were, I used to dread going for the private music classes I was enrolled to. I never understood what was being taught in those classes. In class, my teacher would first make me copy down the lyrics and notation of a composition of a raga. Then she would sit with a harmonium and sing that raga, stopping after every line and asking me to repeat. It was a method of learning by copying and imitating. Nobody told me the meaning of the compositions or answered questions like why there were so many ragas, why they had to be sung at a particular hour of the day, or what the names of the notes really meant. In short, there were no classes on theory. But, there used to be examinations on it - written examinations that constituted thirty per cent of the overall assessment.

The idea was to pass the exam by memorizing, two days before the day of exam, some mundane definitions of ragas and biographies of some musicians whose music I had never heard. I was told to focus on the practical part of the exam because that is what mattered the most. Even though I would end up scoring good marks, I had no idea of what I was learning and singing. Because I was learning only by rote (mechanical repetition), my conceptual comprehension of the music was zero. I could have blamed it on that particular teacher or the institution but this style of transmission was representative of a reality for most of the institutions.

Broadly, there are three kinds of institutions for Hindustani music education: First: universities. For example, most of the state government universities, like University of Delhi or

University of Bombay, have a Department of Music under the Faculty of Arts.1 They offer graduation and post-graduation degrees, such as a Bachelor or Master of Arts in Music. The learning and assessment is based on practice and theory in seventy to thirty per cent ratio (in some cases an even half) and classes are held separately for both. Second: private institutions for performing arts.

For example, Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra (Delhi), Gandharva Mahavidyalaya (Pune, Mumbai,

Delhi), etc.2 These institutes mainly offer practical training in Hindustani music. The maximum duration of training varies from eight to ten years, divided into courses of one to two years each.

The assessment is based on performance skills and in some schools there are examinations on theory as well. Usually, there is no separate provision of classes on theory but major schools, like the ones mentioned here, have set up libraries that a student is free to visit anytime. Finally, the third type is more like an undefined network of musicians or teachers belonging to different music communities or schools called gharānā that offer private lessons. None of the institutions have individual programs that are dedicated to practice and theory separately.

As an undergraduate, I studied Philosophy as my main subject and learnt music by side. I was afraid if higher education in music would be enough to feed my intellectual capacity as there was nothing to read, write, or think about intellectually. Even when there was a section for theory, I suspected if it was given equal attention. In short, I was not ready to indulge solely in a non- academic pursuit. Hence, I tried to strike a balance between academic education in Philosophy and practical training in music. I went for Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra, the private institution in

Delhi, which I knew was different for me as it did not have any examinations on theory. The focus was entirely on practice and the message was clear that one does not necessarily need to learn theory to be a great musician. By this point, I was convinced that classical music requires a great

1 “Department of Music”, University of Delhi. http://www.du.ac.in/du/index.php?page=music “Department of Music”, University of Mumbai. http://mu.ac.in/portal/department-of-music/ 2 Akhil Bhartiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal. http://abgmvm.org/ Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra. https://www.thekendra.com/

level of commitment and dedication and my mind became occupied with practice of the skills I had newly picked up so there was no time to think of theory. If at all I had any theoretical questions, the teacher would answer them during the regular classes. I was unaware of the possibilities of writing about music until one day, when I started thinking about the abstract existence of music with regard to an academic paper I had to write for one of my philosophy courses. I decided to make my first visit to the library of the music institution and got exposed to different sorts of literature on music. This was my first encounter with the possibility of academically engaging with music. But sadly, there was no official platform where this possibility could be harnessed.

The situation was not just disappointing but also perplexing. If there was never a system of writing or reading about music, then where did all the books in the library come from? To find out, I had to dig into the past of Indian music education. The following paper, questions, and sub- questions are a result of this curiosity and primary investigation. To begin with, I rolled out a brief questionnaire (see Appendix) aimed at surveying the current status of music education in some of the institutions mentioned above. The participants’ responses reflected a similarity with my personal observation and experience that there is an imbalance between practical and theoretical teaching or that theory is implied in the pedagogy for practice. A common mindset is that music is a performance-centered art and therefore, non-performance aspects do not need to be given much importance. The optional use of libraries in the music institutions indicates a common expectation that the student himself would gather the motivation and take the initiative to explore the literature. If a student was so extraordinarily talented that he wrote a book or two, or contributed to the intellectual development of his music while being a successful performer, his biography will describe him as both musician and musicologist. But at the time of providing education, there is no such distinction made between music and musicology.

The question is why. Why is musicology considered a by-product of music education? A classical music, by definition, represents a standardized style that follows “long-established principles”3. To what extent is it possible to maintain this standard via performance only? How important is verbal theorization and an education that furnishes it? While pursuing my research, I realized these questions have been asked by scholars in the past. Not only have they raised these problems, some of them have produced literature at their own independent level without having a well-established musicological platform to support them. Fortunately, there have been a number of self-motivated individuals who researched and theorized Hindustani Music, making it possible for other self-motivated students to make some productive use of the libraries. But, how long can this casual attitude sustain a long-established tradition of Hindustani music in the world of growing musicology? With the only department of musicology closing down (more about it in the paper) and the only organized Indian musicological journal being practically inactive for many years, in which direction is the musicology of India heading?

This thesis is a small attempt to answer some of the above questions. Transmission plays the most important role in ensuring continuity of arts, and for a classical art, the role of education becomes even more crucial in order to ensure the preservation of an old tradition. The following study presents information on the history of music education in India with specific focus on educational initiatives and interventions made by reformers to encourage theoretical and academic study of Hindustani music. It takes into account the interplay of traditional and modern education systems and the influence of colonial interaction between India and Britain. The process of formal institutionalization of music education began in the 1870’s as a part of the Indian nationalist movement against British rule. The first quarter of the 20th century witnessed an on-going intellectual debate on classicization of Hindustani music when serious attempts were made to

3 Oxford online dictionary. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/classical_music

situate theory as an important component in music education. Finally, starting from mid-20th century i.e. the post-colonial era, musicology as an academic practice entered the curriculum of higher music education at the university level. The following study intends to closely examine these events of change by giving an idea of the key players, their work, motivations, successes, failures, and future implications. The Department of Musicology, which was launched in 1966 and withdrawn in 2016, at Banaras Hindu University, acts as the centerpiece of the main discussion about musicology as an academic discipline in the sphere of Indian education.

The main body of the paper is divided into three chapters set more or less in a chronological sequence. To set the historical background, the first chapter presents a very short overview of the journey of Indian music from the time of its inception starting roughly from 1500 BCE until 1900 C when the history of music was being written as an outcome of colonial power relations and modernization. This journey is classified into three broad periods: the Hindu (1500 BCE – 1200 C), the Muslim (1200 C – 1700 C), and the English (1700 C – 1900 C) to get an idea of the three main transmission traditions that act as the pillars of today’s music education system. The discussion is intertwined with that on music scholarship in these three periods in order to inspect the relationship between the two. It will answer the questions “what did the process of transmission look like in those music cultures?” and “what role, if at all, did writings on music play in that process?”

The second chapter zooms into the first half of the twentieth century when a modern system of mass education that started in the late 1800’s had grown increasingly widespread and

Hindustani Music was gaining its rank as a classical art form. A lot of activities took place during this period, and they act as a possible explanation for the currently prevailing mindset towards music education. The aspirations and ideologies of two scholars namely, Vishnu Narayan

Bhatkhande (1860-1936) and Alain Daniélou (1907-1994), will be analyzed in detail here.

The third chapter is about musicology officially entering the landscape of Indian education at the beginning of the second half of twentieth century. It contains information on the vision, mission, and contribution of two central figures in the field of Indian musicology: Omkarnath

Thakur (1897-1967) and his disciple and successor Prem Lata Sharma (1927-1998). Along with the factual details, there is a critical assessment of their work as educators and musicologists. In

1998, the seminar called “Teaching of Indian Music” brought musicians, the so-called musicologists, educators and music enthusiasts together who addressed questions that are pertinent to today’s discussion on music education and hence, its details are covered in this chapter too.

Finally, in the conclusion, the most important ideas and information from the three chapters will be summarized, analyzed, and reiterated. This will also be the section that explores possibilities for future research and plausible resolutions for the very practical challenge of giving musicology the status it deserves in the sphere of education.

Before moving further, it is important to make two important clarifications. First, the classical music of India is divided into North Indian and South Indian music. For my research, I have focused only on the former, which is called Hindustani Music and hence every time I refer to the current education system, I do not take into account the education system of South Indian music or

South India in general. Second, Indian music, by definition, refers to an amalgamation of song, instrument, and dance. But, due to personal knowledge and interest, and the limited scope of the paper, my denotation of the term ‘music’ has been narrowed down to song i.e. vocal music only.

Lastly, for reader’s accessibility, the Indian language terms have been italicized and transliterated with diacritical marks wherever applicable, except for proper names. The diacritical marks are to be read as follows:

Mark To be read as ā “a” as in “raft” ī “ee” as in “week”

ū “oo” as in “noon” ś, ṣ “sh” as in “shelter”

Chapter 1: Institutions for music learning

The music of India, in general, is said to have carried with it really old traditions and values.

If this is true, it is worthwhile travelling back in time to catch a glimpse of what those old values and traditions looked like. The most common term that comes up in any conversation about Indian music education is guru-śiṣya paramparā (preceptor-pupil tradition). It, indeed, is a really old tradition dating back to the times of early Aryan civilization (1500 BCE–500 BCE) and has gained immense popularity among music historians. The second term that appears often in literature on

Indian music traditions is gharānā. This chapter focuses on these two traditions and the Western concept of music schools that were applied in the name of educational reforms during the colonial period.

a. The foundation: guru-śiṣya paramparā

The genesis of Indian music is directly intertwined with the Hindu mythology and religion.

As a part of the religious belief, Hindu worshippers carried out customary rituals which were meant to either please their “gods” or attain a “transcendental state of unison” with them.4 These worship rituals entailed recitation of chants derived from the scriptures called Vedas. Vedas are a collection of four volumes of texts that were composed and orally transmitted over a period of 1500 BCE–500

BCE.5 The first volume called Rigveda consists of verses, and the second one called Sāmaveda has

4 Goswami 1957:3 5 Jamison and Witzel 1992:3

chants, referred to as “saman” (loosely translated as ‘melodies’).6 Verses extracted from the Rigveda were sung to the melodies given in the Sāmaveda. Notably, these texts were said to have been

“revealed” to the “primordial seers” and hence the value of śruti (sound or “hearing”) is underscored indefinitely.7 The transmission and preservation of these texts became a need when the hymns had to be uttered by a large group of people.8 Hence, the oral-aural tradition became remarkably incidental to the teaching-learning of the exact syllables in the exact prescribed accents without a deviation from the original.9 As the manifestation of the texts grew more complex, “the care and discipline of particular religious, or better, priestly schools”10 came into place. Here on, the role of the priests as guru (the teacher) and as experts specializing in their religious practice became more systematized, and the traditional setup got its name as “guru-kula”.11

Guru-kula or gurukul means home or dynasty of the teacher. There is no specific date given to the formation of such a system but there are a number of ancient Sanskrit texts written by the so- called “seers” in roughly first to fifth centuries that delineate the term and position of guru not only in the process of transmission but also in the society.12 These texts list different types and virtues of gurus. For example, one who imparted knowledge by giving lectures or the one who made their disciple undertake pilgrimage or follow a particular lifestyle. And there are some texts that define guru as a “metaphysical father of a disciple who is ranked higher than the biological parents.”13

Because of the authority given to the gurus, they are always the dominant partners in their relationship with the students. Similar to the case of gurus, the ancient Sanskrit texts define the virtue of śiṣya, the students. They are understood as the ones who live under the guidance and

6 Jamison and Witzel 1992:7-8 7 Ibid., 5 8 Ranade 1998:8 9 Jamison and Witzel 1992:25 10 Ibid., 3 11 Ranade 1998:8 12 Ibid., 10-16 13 Ibid., 10-11

protection of the guru. They devote their lives to their gurus and hence there was no question of doubting the knowledge received in any form. However, some texts give the liberty to students to talk to the guru or deny obeying the commands if they noticed incorrect behavior.14

The gurus taught everything they knew and aimed for their students to do better than themselves. Conversely, an ideal pupil never thought of himself as higher than the guru.

Traditionally, the students lived with the gurus and were treated as one of the family members. A thread-tying ceremony symbolized the initiation of the student into the formal learning of the

Vedas for the duration of twelve years.15 After the end of the learning period, the students were free to join their gurus in the performance of religious rituals. There was no system of any payment contracts and the gurus did not usually ask for fees but the disciples were expected to return the favor by either fulfilling other demands of the guru or by supporting them with food and general materials needed for survival.16 This entire value system of the gurukul later came to be known as the famous guru-śiṣya paramparā. Thus, guru-śiṣya paramparā has its roots in the religious tradition where the guru was venerated and idolized by the śiṣya and the learning was spiritually motivated.

Apart from gurukul or guru-śiṣya paramparā, the earliest form of education is attributed to vidyāpīth – an educational model that ran like today’s model of universities. Between 800 BC to

1300 CE, there were about nineteen vidyāpīth(s) which worked as centers for higher education in various subjects. Takshashila Vidyapeeth (800 BCE) - the very first and the oldest vidyāpīth - identified music as a subject in its own individual capacity separate from the Vedas. Unfortunately, there is hardly any literature on what was taught there as music and how. But, one thing that can be

14 Ranade 1998:13 15 Ibid., 12 16 Ibid.

ascertained is the idea of music as an art and a subject of study gained shape from this time onwards and helped moving away from it the necessarily religious or rather Vedic connotation.17

In terms of written scholarship, the first ever text that talked about performing arts was called Nātyaśāstra (100 BCE–100 CE) by Bharat.18 It “treated music along with the art of acting and dancing” and not as a part of the recitation of Vedic chants, although, it had a chapter dedicated to religious verses or laudatory songs for the gods. 19 There were many chapters on the application of those songs, ragas and meters, in which they were to be sung, and also rasa – the emotional or the aesthetic intent behind the songs.20 It is possible that this treatise was used as a reference for music education in the vidyāpīth that came into being only after the treatise’s compilation. Over two hundred manuscripts have been identified dating from 1st century onwards, which entailed either collections of songs or theories on music.21 The status of performance of music in those times is not given clearly. Drama and music presentations were a part of the religious practices held at temples.

It is not known whether the scholars who theorized music were themselves the performing musicians or not.

The largest treatise written solely on the subject of music was Sangītratnākara (1200 CE).

Its author, Sarangdeva, was a court accountant. This work became the standard theory of Indian music for a long time.22 The fact that the theory designed by a non-performer became a work of authority for future performers is quite interesting and puts the general argument that only a performer can theorize a performing art into question. By the end of the 13th century, the corpus of music theory had grown large and with the vidyāpīth(s) running simultaneously until this time, I assume that these works formed a part of learning and discussion of musical knowledge by the

17 Ranade 1998:16 18 The compilation is said to have taken place sometime during this period, Nijenhuis 1977:5 19 Ibid., 5 20 Ibid., 6 21 Nijenhuis 1977 22 Ibid., 12

students. Since only little biographical data is known of these scholars, another assumption is that they received their education from the vidyāpīth(s) that perhaps encouraged written intellectualization of music. Moreover, the application of theory to the real time practice in those days is uncertain and unverified. There is no evidence, which could testify that theory and practice of those days were really aligned to each other and that the practitioners or, for that matter the theoreticians, were conscious of the developments in each other’s domains. Based on what has been passed down to the present generation in the name of Hindustani Music, the theory was never redundant, but its transmission did not take place in a continuous direction. The next period in history explains why. b. Continuing tradition: gharānā

The pure Hindu music derived from the Vedas later on became hybrid due to the developments that took place between 13th through 16th centuries, also called the medieval period.

Due to the invasion by the Sultanate and the Mughal empires, the music of North Indian subcontinent became subject to many changes. Not only were new musical styles introduced, the orientation and purpose of performance shifted from temples to courts, from emancipation of the self to the pleasure of public. The growing complexity of music tradition would have had implications on the transmission process but, again, little has been documented about education during those centuries. Scarcity of independent literature on music from this period might indicate that there weren’t many written developments in the music theory and different singing styles such as khyāl have been passed down only orally. Invented in the mid-15th century23, khyāl is the most prominent style used by musicians nowadays to sing any raga.

The transmission method in a gurukul was oral too but it was more formal. The oral transmission of khyāl and other such styles during the court culture where musicians thrived on

23 Grove Music Online

rulers’ patronage seems to be informal and close knitted among families that eventually developed their own collective musical identity. Such a system is known by the name of gharānā. For anyone studying Hindustani Music, this term, despite having Sanskrit roots, immediately paints a peculiar picture of a Muslim tradition. However, unlike guru-śiṣya paramparā, music historians have not been able to trace it back to a definite beginning point and hence, its association with the Persian-

Muslim period i.e. 13th century to the beginning of 18th century broadly is more of a supposition.24

Notwithstanding the ambiguous origin, this concept gained popularity in the mid-19th century and therefore, can be called rather modern.25 Several English and Hindi books on music try to define gharānā but the following description, given in Oxford’s Grove Music Online, acts as a comprehensive and fruitful illustration to begin with:

(Hindi: ‘household, lineage’). In North Indian art-music, a community of musicians, linked by ties of family and discipleship and identified by a distinctive musical style. In general use the term may be applied to a tightly-knit family (khāndān) of Muslim hereditary musicians, together with their disciples (often Hindu); or to a larger network of interrelated families, Muslim or Hindu, with a common place of origin; or more casually, to any group of musicians tracing their tradition from a common teacher or place of origin. To be recognized as an established and significant gharānā the community must have a distinct vocal or instrumental style (gāyakī, bāj), attributed to a respected founder and maintained by at least two further generations after him. Many gharānā cultivate a particular musical specialization: either one of the classical vocal styles (dhrupad, khyālāl, ṭhumrī), or an instrument, melodic (sitār, sarod, bīṇ etc.) or percussion (tablā, pakhāvaj). Other gharānā may combine a variety of vocal and instrumental specializations. The musical repertory of a gharānā often includes special techniques, compositions or rāg known only to its members.

Evidently, there are a lot of dimensions across which a gharānā extends but the common features that collectively come to define it can be listed as: a distinct style of music, a reference point- who or where that style emerged, and lastly the duration through which that style has been passed on i.e. at least three generations. All three features suggest that the purpose of this system was not to educate the masses but to ensure the continuity of a distinct identity: “Gharānās, however, are not

24 Meer 1980:69 25 Ibid., 128

‘schools’. Gharānās are more sectarian in their attitude and on the whole more akin to families of blood-relations because of the rather marked ‘family-pride’ that they exhibit.”26 At the same time, the musical identity outweighs the family-name because if the son of a famous singer did not sing the same style of music, he was not considered the “rightful heir” to the gharānā.27 So, to maintain the standard, the deserving non-family members as disciples were given rigorous training: “Each

Gharānā was a virtual University [sic]. It was considered very important in these gharānās to supervise the pupils for all twenty-four hours of the day and give him personal training. It is because of this rigorous discipline that these quasi-Universities produced many able artists who made their mark in the world of music.”28

The use of the words “quasi-university” and “discipline” surface the idea that equates the education of music to tireless training of practical skills and that the goal of such an education is to produce “artists” who can sing up to the mark set by their masters. The method of teaching and learning within a gharānā was informed by discreet practices. For example, a very famous musician named Balkrishnabuwa Ichalkaranji (1849–1926), also the continuer of the very famous Gwalior gharānā, taught his students without telling the name of the raga and the underlying rules. Students were not supposed to ask questions, raise concerns, or make written notes; the learning was based on repetition and depended entirely on memory.29 It can be assumed that he himself had learnt from his teacher in this manner and that such a method had also become a part of the legacy.

Moreover, the gharānā were insecure entities that feared the flow of their special techniques etc. into communities they did not identify with.30 Such a trait, indeed, restricts musical knowledge, access to which becomes a matter of privilege.

26 Deshpande 1973:8 27 Deodhar 1973:ix 28 Ibid., xi 29 Bakhle 2005:141 30 Meer 1980:129

The gharānā(s) also lay a lot of emphasis on voice culture: “the swara is the ‘singing voice’ as distinct from the ‘speaking voice’. This swara in the disciple’s voice has to be trained and cultivated by the guru with care and patience for years on end. This is called tālīm (training) in music parlance.”31 In another account on gharānā and its pedagogy, it is given that the masters told their students to sing without worrying about nomenclature and matters of theory. They professed that the talent of a student “lay in their throats and not in their heads.”32 If such a mindset is at the root of a gharānā system that is the closest to an institution of music knowledge then the question of music theory or any dialogue on music in those times was completely out of the picture. With a more complex music, one might have expected the transmission process to have become robust with more structural theory but it based itself deeper on ideas like ‘riyāz’ and ‘mehnat’: Urdu words which mean incessant practice and hard work.

There is a certain similarity between guru-śiṣya paramparā and gharānā but the intent and the values of both the systems seem to be radically different from each other. While in a gurukul or guru-śiṣya paramparā, the scriptures forbid the guru for hiding any knowledge from the student, the members of a gharānā are selective of what is to be taught and to whom. Despite ‘orality’ and

‘aurality’ being the only two correlates of the transmission plane, there was a fixed span of learning in the ancient guru-śiṣya paramparā. The teaching concept of gharānā does not have a definite time limit and cannot really be called a system due to the very unsystematic and purely subjective nature of its transmission.

Nevertheless, these two traditions qua transmission methods passed down a great variety of music. The history of Hindustani Music, however, took an interesting turn from these trends to a

31 Deshpande 1973:9 32 Bakhle 2005:233

systemic institutionalization of music education starting from the late 19th century. The following section briefly captures the essence of such an activity. c. Colonial addition: English scholarship and music schools for mass education

Music of India received a lot of attention from the West even before the official period of colonization (1858 onwards) began. William Jones (1746-1794), an English oriental scholar and a philologist, studied Indian history and culture. In 1786, he discovered vast literature in Sanskrit language and its connection with European languages. As a part of this research, he also found out hundreds of manuscripts written on music. The scholarly interest of other Westerners also grew in these findings because it resonated with the intellectual literatures of the Greek and Latin cultures.33 Subsequently, Jones wrote about scales, pitches, time and interval, and other features of music given in the Sanskrit theoretical accounts, in his text called On the Musical Modes of the

Hindus (1792). The Western scholars examined and researched these accounts from the early centuries to understand how Indian music was in the past.

Mainly two reasons can be assigned to such an investigation. Firstly, they were unable to understand the contemporary Indo-Islamic performance-practices as it was difficult to fit them into the existing paradigms of Western music such as staff notations. Secondly, as a part of a larger political reason, they were on a constant search for “Hindu antiquity” to be able to deem the

Mughals corrupt and to overthrow their empire (and to later replace it with theirs). By 1870’s the

British colonial rule had been established and music became one of the mediums through which colonizers sought modernization of the colonized. Due to the changed power relations, “Indian music was now to be collected not for curiosity’s sake or as a symbol of cultural inter-course . . . but as a scientific, ethnographic, bureaucratic enterprise, a facet of the scientific spectacle of Empire.”34

33 Farrell 1997:19 34 Ibid., 21, 48

The project was now driven by “ideas of control and representation through theories of notation”.35

In the discourse that developed over examinations on music, the subject of notations gained more popularity and importance:

Notation, as a means of reproducing or representing sounds on paper, was the only way by which Indian music could be apprehended and placed in conceptual display cases alongside other artefacts [sic]. Western musicology in the nineteenth century was not only about the collection and comparative analysis of non-Western musics [sic], but also about the conceptual means through which the unfamiliar could be captured as scientific fact and made coherent to the Western eye and ear.36

Now such an enquiry was hegemonic in character. Indian music was not as easy to translate into

Western conceptualization as the colonizers might have expected. They still could not gather all the

“actual facts” related to ancient music theory and thus, needed help of the natives.37 They fostered similar “intellectual” interests within the newly forming political and social groupings within the native Indian community through education. With the enactment of the English Education Act

(1835), English education had become compulsory in Indian schools. Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his Minute on Education (1835) proclaimed:

“. . . of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects. The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own, whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, wherever they differ from those of Europe differ for the worse . . .”38

In Oxford’s Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2003), it is pointed out that:

35 Farrell 1997:48 36 Ibid., 49 37 Ibid., 50 38 Macaulay 1835 http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html

When an original culture is superimposed with a colonial or dominant culture through education, it produces a nervous condition of ambivalence, uncertainty, a blurring of cultural boundaries, inside and outside, and an otherness within.39

In the case of Indian music, the produced conditions can be perceived as ambivalent. The rapidly growing English-educated Indian bourgeoisie saw the revival of old texts and the music pertaining to that, as a potential symbol of nationalism. However, to propagate the nationalist agenda, they came forward with educational reforms such as music schools, which reflected a Western model of mass education in music. They wrote about Sanskrit theories and published several books to guide music instruction. Beginning from 1870’s, what also eventually arose was an intellectual discourse on the music of India, written by Indian scholars in English language, which marked the very foundation of a modern period in the history of Indian music and education.

The first ever music school based on a European model was Bengal Music School (1871), opened by Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1840-1914) in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Tagore was an activist during the colonial period, who wrote prolifically about and worked relentlessly for Indian music throughout his life. Having received English education, he was the first Indian writer to produce literature on Indian music in English.40 In addition to his main education, Tagore took lessons on piano from a German teacher (name unknown) and his collections of Indian and European books and ancient manuscripts on music showed his particular interest in music theory.41 Much like the opinions endorsed by colonial writers from the West, Tagore believed that music of India had a

Hindu origin and that the interaction with Muslims led to its downfall.42 In order to strengthen and validate this belief, he researched existing Sanskrit literature to revive concepts and information that was best understood as scientific. Simultaneously, he also identified and highlighted the

39 Young 2003:23 40 Bor and Miner 1997:14 41 Capwell 1997:288, Bhattacharyya 2016 42 Farrell 1997:50, Bor and Miner 1997:14

elements of Indian music which could easily fit into the relatively new but already existing

“scientific” framework used by the Westerners to understand music in general:

Sourindro Mohun Tagore’s works represent a unique confluence of theory along with compositional and pedagogic work. It is only during his era that the modern musical consciousness began to assume an ideologically coherent form in India— one that was placed within a framework of scientific knowledge, supported by a body of theoretical terms for disciplinary needs.43

Based on the theory of music found in the old Sanskrit literature, Tagore and his Indian music teacher Kshetra Mohun Goswami (1813-1893), developed and promoted a unique system of notation that could be considered equivalent to the Western staff notation.44 In fact, they claimed that the notations could be found in the ancient texts and it was not something new. So, instead of fitting their music in the Western framework, they worked on the old Indian framework and brought it to the notice of interested scholars:

Goaded by the awareness of how the English saw the ease with which European music could be represented graphically as a mark of its rationalized and scientific basis, they desired to demonstrate that Indian music was capable of the same mark of distinction. But rather than taking the Macaulayite road and adopting European notation, they chose an Orientalist approach by trying to recover and revitalize early forms of Indian notation.45

The use of these notations as a tool of instruction became a salient feature of Bengal Music School.

Kshetra Mohun’s pedagogical treatise Sangītsāra (1869) shaped the curriculum of the school, which constituted raga based compositions, their notations, and even English songs like “God Save the

Queen”.46 Initially, the main subject of teaching was gāyan (singing) and each year the faculty grew increasingly to teach instruments like sitār, mridang, and harmonium. It is important to note that harmonium was not an Indian instrument and there were on-going debates on its compatibility with the tonal system of Indian music.

43 Bhattacharyya 2016 44 Ibid., Capwell 1997 45 Capwell 1997:293 46 Ibid., 294

During his own educational years, Tagore also attended classes of western choral singing that were a compulsory part of the college curriculum. Having been familiarized with that and directly associated with piano at an early age, he had perhaps sufficient knowledge of the Western tradition which led him to the formation of a hybrid music system using his school as a medium. He formed an Indian-European orchestra, which comprised of Indian musicians. Important to note is that orchestra was an essentially foreign tradition, but to consistently integrate two different traditions of music and to not necessarily outdo one over another, he merged the two styles. For the same purpose, he made new and hybrid designs of instruments. (See Appendix- Fig. 1) These instruments can now be found in the museums of Kolkata, Brussels, Tokyo, and New York.

In 1886, based on a similar concept, another music school was founded in Baroda – a state on the western region of the subcontinent – with the name Chokrāni Gāyanshālā (also known as

‘Children’s Music School’ in English).47 Maula Baksh (1833-1896), the founder of the school and a famous musician of those times, is said to have derived inspiration from Tagore with whom he spent several years in Bengal.48 However, the curriculum of this school was different in that it integrated elements of South Indian music with Hindustani Music. Baksh was a Muslim born in a small northern state, who learnt music in a typical gharānā style and sang professionally in courts.

On one of his music tours to South India, he got his first exposure to music practice outside courts.

He then realized that music as an art had a long history and theory and that it was also practiced for purposes other than public entertainment. In 1870, a year before Tagore started his school, Baksh had started his venture to bring the art of music out from the boundaries of courts. He published the first ever known music magazine in India by the name of Gayan-abdi-Setu (date unspecified), which literally means “a bridge across the ocean of music”. It was a six-page long booklet that gave information on “singing and playing”. Here, he wanted to span a common platform between the

47 Kippen 2007:152 48 Ibid.

North and South Indian music traditions particularly.49 Keen to make music education accessible to public, he published instruction guides, books containing rhythm notations and compositions in different languages, and manuals on how to play the harmonium.50 He also managed to get some of the old Sanskrit treatises on music translated to Hindi.51 By 1905, there was also a provision of diplomas and certificates given to those who attended the courses. Admission to the school was based on a selection process.

In the same vein, Vishnu Digambar Paluskar (1872-1931) founded a music school in the

North region in 1901. He strongly believed Indian music to be a Hindu entity and a symbol of the nation.52 Naming his institute as Gandharva Mahavidyalaya was his first and foremost step towards reinforcing Hindu identity of music- Gandharva means “the mythological singing and dancing of celestial beings in the heavenly court of the god Indra in Vedic mythology”.53 The practices of the school were informed by the feeling of strict devotion to the Hindu gods. Every morning the school would have a communal prayer and end the days with the singing of devotional songs.54 Moreover, a music magazine was launched, which was in Hindi language.55 There was a picture of a Hindu goddess that symbolized music’s religious connection. Paluskar was a disciple of Ichalkaranji

(mentioned earlier in the discussion of gharānā) and so, he learnt music in an environment that did not allow him to inquire or annotate. In contrast to this method, he devised and introduced his own system of notation, published handbooks on harmonium and magazines to make learning of music easy.56 The school was open to all, but its overtly (Hindu) religious character reflected his aversion

49 Bakhle 2005:38 50 Ibid., 42 51 Ibid., 43 52 Ibid., 138 53 Ibid., 145 54 Ibid., 154 55 Name and date of the magazine is unspecified. Bakhle 2005 reports that none of the copies have survived so far. 56 Ibid., 138

towards Muslims. And even though he defied the concept of gharānā, the functioning of his school resembled the strict nature of his teacher’s pedagogy:

No student in Paluskar’s school could take musical instruction lightly. Students were repeatedly told that they were involved in a process of tapasyā in service to the goddess of music. This was no laughing matter, and even silly pranks that students engaged in, no doubt to enliven the overwhelmingly ponderous atmosphere of religiosity, were swiftly cut short and the students castigated.57

The additional feature of his school was the focus given on development of teaching skills in music learners for an alternate career. The students were consistently made to perform in public spaces to raise funds for the institute. Even though there was no formation of an orchestra, the use of harmonium was dominant as an accompanying instrument. This particularly raised a question on the pedagogy and the effectiveness of the outcome. Many students preferred learning the harmonium as it was easier to learn. Within a span of three months, they could start earning money by playing tunes on it in weddings, etc.58

The contribution of all the three personalities in institutionalizing music against the backdrop of two long drawn traditions – guru-śiṣya paramparā and gharānā, is immense. Bringing music education to the masses was a big step, the inspiration of which emerged out of the Western curiosity to rationalize Indian music. These educational reforms and notational forms of music were new imports from the West. However, there was no academic framework that could allow students to develop and eventually apply intellectual ideas pertaining to their music. Even though music schools acquired a position in the field of education, the popular belief of oral transmission being the authentic method could never really be shadowed. As music started entering the sphere of more academic discussion in the 20th century, the resistance of musicians grew stronger. The next chapter will investigate whether this response turned into an interface or a conflict.

57 Bakhle 2005:15 58 Coomaraswamy 2010, Linden 2013:23

Chapter 2: The pioneers of musicological thinking

At the cusp of 19th and the 20th century, the European style Indian music schools were flourishing and growing in number. The idea of teaching music in such a school setup was new and systematic but the method of transmission still rested upon the concept of imitation. Tagore’s schools introduced notations and considered Sanskrit texts as the theoretical basis of Indian music.

Baksh’s school intended to bridge the gap between Hindustani Music and Carnatic (South Indian) music, where, the influence of old Sanskrit tradition was sustained. And Paluskar’s school rested entirely on the premise that music was a religious practice. That music was an art with a long historical story which should be written in connection with contemporary performance practice of the time was an idea introduced by Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860-1936). Bhatkhande’s ideology and work is significant to our discussion of musicology in the sphere of education for two reasons. First, he worked towards classicization of Hindustani Music; the standard theory which is followed today in many institutions is the one written by him. Second, his ideas were scholastic and displayed an approach that, in my opinion, is needed today for the inclusion of musicology in education.

Bhatkhande, in the longer run, envisioned a higher education of music that was informed by theoretical rules and description written by him. However, it was only by mid-20th century that music was introduced at the level of higher education. Alain Daniélou (1907-1994), commonly known as an ‘Indologist’, addressed the situation of music education with a slightly different yet scholastically similar approach. He directed a music research project at Banaras Hindu University.

Although he did not spend longer than three years at the university and his name is rarely included in the available discourse on Indian music education, the implications of his work cannot be overlooked. The current chapter will provide information on the work done by these two scholars in starting an intellectual dialogue and bringing a new dimension to the study of Hindustani music.

Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860-1936)

In 1920, Ernest Clements, an English civil servant and a scholar of Indian music, wrote in one of his books The Ragas of Tanjore: “There are only a few competent teachers in the whole of

India; they are mostly illiterate . . . as each singer dies, the danger to Indian music becomes more imminent. Theory is practically non-existent . . . Correct intonation is only to be found practiced by a few professionals and they cannot impart their secrets, except by example.”59 Bhatkhande, holding a similar opinion, dedicated almost the last three decades of his life in order to promote music literacy by reconciling the long history of Hindustani Music and establishing a theoretical system intelligible to anyone who wanted to learn music. Known today as an Indian musicologist of great prominence or the “Father of Renaissance of Hindustani Music”60 or the great personality behind modernization of Hindustani Music, Bhatkhande, however, received his higher education in law from an English university in Bombay. He practiced as a lawyer for about fifteen years before embarking on his ambitious venture of sensitizing music enthusiasts to textual authority.61 His learning of sitar and singing from his early years remained with him and the study of theoretical

Sanskrit treatises became his obsession for the rest of his life.

Starting roughly from 1907, he traveled extensively across the country interviewing musicians about their knowledge of music theory and collecting notations of over a thousand compositions. Completely dismissing the idea of a “living archive” and “secrecy” within the gharānā, he published these compositions so that anybody could learn them. Between 1910 and 1914, he published his magnum opus Hindustani Sangeet Paddhati, a collection of four volumes on theory and history of Hindustani music. The fourth volume, however, came out in 1934. All of these works

59 Quoted in Farrell 1997:52 60 Nayar 1989 61 Bakhle 2005:99

contained a list of libraries and corresponding texts that were meant to benefit every student of music if they read and “memorized” it.62 His rather unidirectional goal was to sketch a consistent history of music from the Vedic times to the 20th century and in doing so, he wanted to formulate a theory that had its roots in the historical account yet explained the techniques and principles of contemporary performance practice: “Classical music is well-known to the public. But the rules and regulations, i.e. scientific knowledge is nowhere near, as it should be. My desire in music is that the present day ragas and raginis should be classified nicely and the rules they observe should be clearly indicated.”63 After delving into a number of Sanskrit treatises, Hindi translations of Urdu-

Persian treatises, and listening and talking to famous musicians of the time, he studied the many scattered theoretical accounts that had developed over a long period of time in the country. He compressed and simplified all of it into one theory of music that could be understood with respect to performance practice. For example, he reorganized seventy two modes into ten parent modes and classified all the ragas under them.64

Furthermore, his main aim behind such illustrious compilations was to educate those interested in learning Hindustani music by making translation of theory into practice easy and seamless: “His method of teaching was unique. In the beginning, he would explain all the peculiarities of a raga according to the Shastras [scientific literature]. Then he would explain the characteristics of the allied ragas in such minute detail that the students grasped it intellectually and consequently felt confident.”65 This was the kind of engagement he desired in the methods of music education. In contrast to the traditional belief (also mentioned in the discussion of gharānā in the previous chapter) that good music was a product of voice training only, he emphasized the knowledge of rules of music as a decisive factor of good performance. He also founded music

62 Ibid.,120 63 Quoted in Nayar 1989:64 64 Bhatkhande 1916:39 65 Ibid., 55

academies in cities like Baroda, Gwalior, Bombay, and Nagpur between 1920 and 1925.66 Another academy opened by him - Marris College of Music in Lucknow (1926), now known as Bhatkhande

Music Institute Deemed University, is the only one that has survived till today.

Another major step taken by Bhatkhande towards bringing music in a scholarly debate was the commencement of a series of four All India Music Conferences between 1916 and 1925 in

Baroda, Delhi, Banaras, and Lucknow.67 These conferences did the work of bringing musicians, music scholars, critics, writers, and connoisseurs together at the same platform. The objective of these conferences was to discuss and debate upon all matters related to music like comparison of pitches and scales between practice and ancient theory, or the development of “national music”.68

This was also a platform where a lot of disagreement emerged between the participants and mostly between the musicians and the so-called musicologists. The major speakers at the first conference were scholars or theoreticians; musicians were mostly treated as “practical artists”69 or segregated from the “respectable classes”70. Conversely, musicians deemed these scholars as having only

“bookish knowledge” and no real skills of performance.71

By demystifying music rules and constructing a consistent theory, Bhatkhande took the risk of making the understanding of Hindustani Music accessible to all and thus affecting the role that masters or gurus played in music education. Although he never undermined their position in educational landscape, his interrogative approach towards gauging their theoretical understanding became one of the reasons why gurus became hostile towards him. Besides, his habit of writing and documenting all his music-related encounters with them, even brief conversations, was absolutely

66 Alter 1994:161, names unspecified 67 Trasoff 1997:338 68 Bakhle 2005:181 69 Ibid., 85 70 Trasoff 1997:337 71 Bakhle 2005:110

new and perceived as annoying.72 Musicians were, hence, reluctant to collaborate with him: In

1914, upon his encounter with Abdul Karim Khan (1872-1937), a prominent Indian musician of the time, he sought answers to some of his questions related to a raga. Khan was ready to demonstrate the answers by singing, while Bhatkhande wanted to record them in written theoretical terms, a practice Khan neither appreciated nor tolerated.73 The two skills of writing and singing did not necessarily have to play out mutually exclusive but perhaps they did. And, in fact, a concordance between the two was what Bhatkhande himself dreamt of: “Had Abdul Karim cast his lot with him,

Bhatkhande said, the two of them could have changed the face of Indian classical music together.”74

In addition, he risked offending the many nationalists, who were convinced that Hindustani music practices were strictly religious and symbolized Hindu tradition, by constantly attempting to keep music and religion separate from each other. He disregarded the belief that the ancient Hindu texts were a divine creation and the anecdotes that some musicians with the power of their ragas could influence seasons and climates.75 Instead, he stated, “times of the night and day are associated to particular ragas, according to a design which might suggest a psycho-physiological basis”76 – a hypothesis that has triggered many research projects in the field of recent psychology.77

Throughout his journey, he was in a duel with Vishnu Digambar Paluskar (discussed in the previous chapter), the Hindu nationalist founder of the very religious music schools, and could never come to terms with him.78 Paluskar convened his own set of music conferences, which were fundamentally

72Bakhle 2005:239 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 125 It was (and still is, by some people) believed that accurate singing of some ragas at a prescribed time of the day could stimulate external changes. Like, raga Deepak could light fire, or raga Malhar could bring monsoon. 76 Bhatkhande 1916:35 77 See for example, Chordia P., Rae A. (2008) “Understanding emotion in raag: an empirical study of listener responses”, Wieczorkowska A. A., Datta A. K., Sengupta R. (2010) “On search for emotion in hindusthani vocal music”, Mathur, Avantika et al. (2015) “Emotional Responses to Hindustani raga Music: The Role of Musical Structure” 78 Bakhle 2005:179

different from the conferences organized by Bhatkhande. The aim of these conferences was focused on reviving Hindu culture by having Hindi as the formal language, singing congregational prayers at both beginning and end of the conference, promoting a different system of notation, and discussing only Sanskrit texts as the authoritative treatises.79 In short, these conferences were the exact opposite of what Bhatkhande wanted a united and national discussion on music to look like.

He may have faced several challenges and his successors may not have continued his legacy the same way he would have expected:

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 . . . such secrecy would have been anathema to Bhatkhande.80

But, in my opinion, he certainly raised the standard of music education and widened the scope for what it could look like in addition to merely copying and singing the ragas: “He blended high- minded scholasticism with rigorous attention to citation, documentation, and proof, always driven by a desire to make music more accessible to a larger public . . . Bhatkhande’s commitment to music allowed for a random practice to be disciplined by a connected history, a stern typology, and a documented musicology.”81

Moreover, even though many musicians and traditional thinkers found Bhatkhande’s ideology unconventional and his approach unpleasing, by resisting and opposing the change, they did, as a matter of fact, indulge in the conversation started by him. They may not have agreed with some of his assertions about Hindustani Music, but the fact that they began thinking within a theoretical framework and began using common terminology, indicated a certain change in the sphere of music education and awareness. In his first All India Music Conference (1916) itself,

79 Bakhle 2005:209 80 Ibid., 130 81 Ibid., 130-131

Bhatkhande expressed a sense of hope that his work would trigger a better sense of music education:

The first step then in the revival of our Northern music has been attempted by me and my labours have so far resulted in a fair measure of success. I feel happy at the thought that I have been able to mould a model for my successors to improve upon and to perfect; and I cannot but hope that in a few years more there will be an easy system for the instruction of our music, which will lend itself to mass education. Then will the ambition of India be fulfilled, for then the Indians will have music in the curricula of their universities and music instruction will be common and universal . . . once there is a system of music, the gates of instruction will be thrown open and compulsory music education will immediately follow almost as a natural consequence. Writing easy text books and gradual manuals will be accomplished in a trice. Indeed, optimism in these matters is permissible, for I have very high hopes that the new Hindu University which has been recently established in Benaras will have a faculty of music and thus the work of imparting education in music will travel fast.82

The Hindu University of Benaras or Banaras Hindu University that he mentioned in his speech was founded in 1916 by an Indian politician Madan Mohan Malviya with a vision “to blend the best of

Indian education called from the ancient centers of learning - Takshashila and Nalanda and other hallowed institutions, with the best tradition of modern universities of the west.”83 It was only after thirty years i.e. in 1946, the ideas to start a college of music were put together and in 1950, an institution named Shree Kala Sangit Bharati (English name- College of Music and Fine arts) was born. The post of director and assistant director was given to Omkarnath Thakur and Alain

Daniélou, respectively.

Alain Daniélou (1907-1994)

Daniélou was a scholar of music, culture, philosophy, and religion, with a specific focus on ancient India. He belonged to an influential French family and received education in diverse fields of arts. Having acquainted himself with dancing, painting, singing, playing instruments, his love for the arts was unmistakable. On an adventurous journey to the East, driven by curious motivation

82 Bhatkhande 1916:43 83 Banaras Hindu University. http://www.bhu.ac.in/aboutus/history.php

and a desire to explore the world, he first visited India in the year 1935. In his autobiography The

Way to the Labyrinth: Memories of East and West (1987), he described the relationship he developed with the subcontinent from then on and how it eventually became the center of focus for all the work he did the rest of his life. Out of some fifty books authored by him, thirteen of them are based specifically on India, covering mostly cultural aspects from history, yoga, religion, to the nitty-gritty of Indian music. His first encounter in India was with the native province of Bengal, which was the British capital of the time. There, he visited a university called Vishwa-bharati, which primarily began as a small school set up by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), an Indian poet who received the 1913 Nobel Prize in literature. In Daniélou’s words, Tagore was an educator and economist, who “started the school as what was then a bold experiment in making the education of children as closely parallel as possible to the course of their natural development.”84 Here, Daniélou was asked to direct the school of music but he did not like its “international and intercultural flavor”85. Children were taught only “basic principles of classical music” and mainly songs that were considered “modern music”, in which he was least interested.86 Daniélou wanted to experience the

“true culture” of India and hence, he left for Banaras.87 This city was (and still is) popular for its

Hindu heritage constituting old temples and Ganga river that is considered holy. He decided to live there with his partner and got an Indian citizenship in the year 1939.

Like other European travellers, Daniélou was keen to dig into Hindu culture but what probably set him apart was his approach. He converted into a Hindu and spent most of his time studying Hindu schools of philosophical thought and practice. He also learnt Hindi language and

84 During his stay at Rabindranath Tagore’s place, Daniélou was requested to get funds for the school from his European contacts. This description is from the budget proposal prepared by him to promote Tagore’s work and collect sponsorship. 85 Daniélou 1987:97 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 98

wrote articles for a Hindu magazine called Siddhanta.88 He translated those Hindi articles to English in order to educate Western readers about Hindu religion.89 He did not appreciate internationalization and hybridization of old practices. Especially at the juncture where old Indian tradition met the modern Western thought, Daniélou chose to distance himself from the latter. In the autobiographical account, he talked about two different worlds of education in India that, according to him, did not have a contact: one that belonged to the British-educated administrative post holders “who knew nothing of true Hindu culture” and the other that of Hindu scholars,

Hindustani musicans, etc., who tried to preserve the ancient tradition and philosophy of India.90 In this context, he mentioned guru-śiṣya paramparā and maintained the opinion that this tradition developed ideologies distinct from the modern universities of India and that those ideologies were important to gain real insights of the Indian arts like music.91 For his own learning of Hindustani music, he requested a respectable vīnā (Indian stringed instrument) player to teach him and he recollected his learning process like one similar to a guru-śiṣya paramparā:

In the beginning, all I was supposed to do was listen to the ragas and recognize them. After a while, he allowed me to take notes on the different modes and the emotional qualities of the intervals. With wonderful patience, he demonstrated the subtleties of the ornaments and the exact pitch of the notes, which differs according to the ragas. He gifted me a small vinā so that I could practice the music and verify my notations, but forbade me to play in front of him. “You would ruin my ears” he said. “I could not bear it.” I would go to his house each day for two or three hours to listen and take notes. I was also supposed to perform some of the small services to which a master is entitled: light his opium pipe, bring flowers and incense to honor his instruments. Working with Shantu babu was very demanding for he only played ragas at certain fixed hours. I had to be there at six in the morning for sunrise ragas and at ten in the evening for ragas of the night.92

In 1950, when he was appointed as the assistant director and professor at the College of Music and

Fine Arts under Banaras Hindu University, he created a research center for music related

88 Daniélou 1987:139 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 143 91 Ibid., 144 92 Ibid., 147

documents. His own motivation to learn the music theory through old texts combined with the reputation he had gained as a scholar until this point, made him initiate the project. It was aimed to create a “glossary of technical terms found in ancient and modern works on music, a catalogue of works on Indian music written in Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, and English, an index of authors of music in these languages and both ancient and modern musicians”93 ranging from 500

BCE to 16th century. He hired a team of pandit(s) (Hindu scholars) in creating this compilation:

“instead of working on a few texts and preparing an imperfect edition, which even then would have made my reputation shine, we assembled documents on more than eight hundred works.”94

They also prepared 300,000 index cards that outlined the textual editions i.e. manuscripts on Indian music. But, as Daniélou puts it, the project had to be later abandoned. He left Banaras for personal reasons and shifted to Adyar where he had been appointed as a research director of the

Theosophical society. He continued his research and also wrote several articles for the music journal. In one of them, namely, Some Problems facing Research on Indian Literatures on Music

(1952), he stated the problems of preserving manuscripts due to the lack of resources. This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why he brought all the copies, original cards, and a Manual to the Study of a Sanskrit Manuscript on Music to Europe. These, along with his personal library, are safely kept in the Daniélou’s collection at the Georgio Cini Foundazione, Venice, Italy. (See Appendix- Fig. 2)

Daniélou did not receive a formal education in musicology and what he wrote on Indian music was not initially considered “musicological” enough. Before leaving for Adyar, he had an encounter with a Dutch scholar-musician who taught Oriental Musicology in England. This professor (name unknown) had visited Daniélou to collect information on Indian music but had to leave feeling disappointed and unsuccessful. “His only defense was to declare in all the musicology

93 Shringy 1961:208 94 Daniélou 1987:150

circles that my studies and writings were lacking in ‘scientific value’; he was quite vicious about it”95, Daniélou remarked. Although there is no further explanation of the ‘scientific value’ given in this account, but if it is to be understood as the same old Western conception of notations, then

Daniélou never attributed paramount importance to it. In 1971, he wrote a book titled The Situation of Music and Musicians in Countries of the Orient, where he pointed out the problems of depending entirely on notations or written music. He claimed that notations only provided limited comprehension of the music of the countries which practice oral tradition and rely mainly on

“unlettered but cultured artists”:

The origin of musical standardization which has made it possible for music to be made an article of commerce was notation . . . It isn’t that notation in itself is not useful for an aide-memoire. In one form or another it has always existed everywhere. But the substitution of the printed product for the oral tradition and for its artistic performances caused the first de-personalization of creative communities.96

And,

Writing leads to the development of structural elements in music to the detriment of expressive and imaginative elements. One should remember in this connection that theoretically very small differences can differentiate fundamentally between musical styles and families. Real analysis of musical styles can only be made on the basis of musical semantics in which sound is isolated from its content, its meaning, its place in the theory of communication.97

Yet, he also never denied the usefulness of theory and written component of music and claimed that every music has its own “musical language” and that it should be understood in its own linguistic capacity rather than fitting it in a different ideological framework. That is also, probably, one of the reasons why he was convinced by the “demanding” method opted by his guru to teach him Indian

95 Daniélou 1987:169; 96 Daniélou 1971:4-5 97 Ibid., 49

music and did not really question the guru-śiṣya paramparā.98 Moreover, it explains why he was an ardent researcher and collector of the Sanskrit texts:

There is an almost absolute interdependence between the nature of the voices, the style, the technique and the musical theory, which makes it necessary to preserve these different elements if we wish to save the whole of the systems. And it is precisely because it is a matter of really different systems that the preservation of the diverse musical languages is so important.99

In one of the articles he wrote for the Journal of the Music Academy, Madras, namely “Research on

Indian Music” (1952), he pointed towards the importance of a comprehensive study of Indian music in addition to its general practice:

Even in the case of an art like music the Indian thinkers have evolved a theory that touches the most difficult problems of psychology, of symbolism, of religion, of mathematics, of acoustics. The true student of Indian music has to be conversant with all these sciences. One can easily understand why so few have had the daring to start work on such an inspiring but arduous path.100

In the same article, he expressed his concern for what he saw as a gap between theory and practice.

According to him, some branches of music had suffered “decadence” because practice and science of music had parted ways. He believed that practical musicians could carry the tradition of music only for a limited period of time because of their inability to adapt to new situations. So, he suggested the unification of practice and theory as a means to preserve the art: “There still remain many great performers who are the direct disciples of the musicians of the past and there remains also a large literature which can allow us to rebuild the basic theory of Indian music. The problem to-day is to bring back the unity of the two.”101 In retrospect, the same problem was identified by Bhatkhande almost 45 years before Daniélou penned down these thoughts. Whether or not it was a failure of

Bhatkhande’s solutions of writing a modern history, for Daniélou, the problem still persisted and he

98 Daniélou 1971:89 99 Ibid., 74 100 Danielou 1953:58 101 Ibid., 62

had a quite distinct and specific solution to propose towards it, which is worthy of being presented here in full:

This unity however cannot be re-created through a mere scholarly approach of the ancient books. It requires a true understanding of the principles underlying the whole system of music. And this understanding can only be the fruit of a very profound study. This study, if it is to produce quick results, will have to be carried into three main branches of research which must be co-ordinated and which we might call scriptural, archaeological and ethnological. They will refer to manuscripts and books, then to monuments, paintings and other remnants of the ancient ages and finally to the popular tradition of the various peoples, castes and tribes all over India. It is generally very difficult to arrive at a proper interpretation of available texts without the other sources of information being explored. For example, we have representations of musical instruments in the sculpture of temples, we have their description in ancient books, and often find that they have survived almost unaltered in some tribe of the Nilgiris or in some people of the Himalayas; and it is only when we can co-ordinate these three images - the description, the picture and the actual use - that we can come to a proper interpretation of the texts. Similarly, the notations of ancient ragas and talas can only be understood by reference to still existing forms found somewhere in the country. Until these are properly studied, the interpretation of ancient notations will remain uncertain.102

But, it is difficult to say if he had any particular inclination towards integrating such an approach of inquiry into the existing system of Indian education. As an assistant director of the music department, he did not introduce any such study. He personally worked passionately in doing the research and gathering all the data to, as can be assumed, make it available for students to delve into. But, he again failed to successfully culminate the project into its desired outcome.

He definitely believed in the role of education as a tool to understand various music cultures. “Culture will not survive in any country without considerable effort being made to support education”103, he believed. Moreover, he was cognizant of “the fact that such efforts have been made for almost two centuries on a musical basis uniquely in favour of Occidental culture”.104 In 1960, he supervised UNESCO's International Music Council and went on to set up study centers for comparative musicology, like International Institute for Comparative Music Studies and

102 Ibid. 103 Daniélou 1971:119 104 Ibid.

Documentation in West Berlin in 1966, and directed the Instituto Internazionale di Musica

Comparata in Venice from 1969 to 1982. There, he ensured an extended learning of theories of various systems, their conceptions of musical relationships and of the semiology of music.105 In the process, his published works like Traité de musicologie comparée (1959) and La musique et sa

Communication (1971) brought him the recognition of a musicologist. In such works, he promoted the idea that music serves as a connection between the metaphysical and the physical world. For example, he explained that certain cosmic laws are represented by numbers and hence the role of numbers in musical intervals and pitches is not random and meaningless.106

In a similar way, he tried to explain the esoteric old Sanskrit texts.107 Readers in the West became beneficiaries of his contribution in bringing new perspectives to look at the music of the

Orient but nothing much can be said about his contribution in the Indian domain of education.

Unfortunately, his efforts to put together a massive encyclopedic work have remained unrecognized. In fact, a similar project was later taken up by a Tabla (Indian drums) maestro Pandit

Nikhil Ghosh (1918-1995) in the year 1961 and it culminated into The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the

Music of India (2010).108 Some of the entries in this three-volume collection correspond exactly to

Daniélou’s catalogue cards.109 Yet, there is no credit given to him or his work.110

He may not have succeeded in establishing his own method as a systematic disciplinary model but his ideology seemed to have penetrated its roots into the mindsets of the people who worked after him. There is a possibility that Daniélou’s colleague Omkarnath Thakur – the director of the College of Music and Fine Arts– did not corroborate his mission because there’s no such

105 Daniélou 1971:99 106 Daniélou 1959:1-11 107 See for example, his two volumes of Northern Indian Music: the main Ragas (1943) and Introduction to the Study of Musical Scales (1954) 108 Sukthankar in The Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Music of India 2010: preface viii 109 Biondi 2017:12

110 Point highlighted by Biondi in a conversation with her.

mention in either of their accounts. But the work done by Thakur and her disciple Prem Lata

Sharma was similar to Daniélou’s. They did not particularly continue his project but their continuous emphasis on research does reflect an implicit influence of Daniélou’s work. The following chapter unfolds details on what can be called an official launch of musicology in the field of Indian academics.

Chapter 3: Sangīt śāstra: the Indian take of Musicology educators

In January 1961, on the occasion of its decennial anniversary, the College of Music and Fine

Arts, Banaras Hindu University, published its first edition of the music journal named Nāda Rūpa

(waves of sound and rays of light). Prem Lata Sharma (1927-1998), the chief and managing editor of the journal wrote:

The periodicals that are being published in the present times are either guided by a parochial spirit, or they are islanded in some regional system of music or again they are unable to attain the required standards because of being ill-equipped in absence of the caliber essential for real research of truth. Hence, the indispensable need for a non-parochial journal inspired by a spirit of the re-instatement of truth and opening (an) avenue for the proper publication of the attainments of pure research was felt since long in the field of Indian music.111

She added that the College of Music and Fine Arts was the most suitable body of institution to initiate such a publication because it held a respectable position among other music institutions of

Indian universities and it had an exclusive “Research Section”. Apparently, by this time, there were other publications of similar sorts issued by other music institutions that were providing higher education in music but the quality of scholarship was not up to the mark or the research was not

“pure” enough, according to Sharma.112 Aligned with the observation stated by her, one of the main aims and objectives of this journal was: “the clarification and re-instatement of the eternal and true principles enunciated by Bharata [sic] and a critical appreciation of the substance of the writing of

111 Sharma 1961:ii 112 Ibid.

subsequent authors giving an estimate of the extent to which they have adhered to those principles and also the extent to which they have deviated from them.”113 The goal was to act as a guide to an inquiry for “truth”, which, she and the whole team behind this endeavor believed, could be found in one of the oldest Sanskrit treatises on performing arts, Nātyasāstra written by Bharat. Along with the similar goals of presenting the outcomes of investigation performed on ancient Sanskrit texts,

“consideration of the problems of teaching of music and fine arts and an attempt at establishing a scientific system of the teaching of these subjects”114 was also a major objective of the journal.

The cover page of the journal had a picture of Saraswati, a Hindu goddess, who is considered a symbol of vidyā (knowledge) and kala (arts). Once again, Hindustani music was seen under the light of old religious school of thought. Learning music would mean joining the quest for spiritual emancipation that required the learners to completely surrender themselves on the path laid by their guru. The only new addition to the existing ideology was the belief that the knowledge of truth needed for a complete enlightenment was hidden in Sanskrit texts, and hence, delving into those texts should also be a part of the learning process. Prem Lata Sharma was a disciple of

Omkarnath Thakur who was a disciple of Vishnu Digambar Paluskar - the same musician who sacralized music education in the beginning of the 20th century by starting music schools that were highly religious in character (discussed in the first chapter). The legacy of the religious connotation was being carried forward by his disciple, which was now reflected in the area of higher education.

Omkarnath Thakur (1897-1967)

Born to a father who was a staunch believer of Hindu religion, Omkarnath Thakur had a very early exposure to the Vedic concept of sound. His father believed in the meditation of sound

113 Sharma 1961:ii 114 Ibid.

and so, as a child, he was surrounded with the utterances of Vedic syllables.115 Then, in 1909, he was sent to Paluskar’s school Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in Bombay, where he received a formal education in music for six years. Impressed by his selfless dedication towards music, Paluskar appointed him as the principal of the Lahore branch of Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in 1916. By 1930,

Thakur got deeply involved in music education and founded his own school Gandharva Niketan in

Bharouch. By this time, he was also actively participating in India’s national movement for freedom and inspired by the idea that knowledge of “pure” music was to be found in the past, he set forth his research on Sanskrit texts. Alongside, he also became one of the first Indian musicians to perform

Hindustani music internationally and went on multiple tours to Europe until 1954.116 In 1950, when he was assigned the responsibility to direct the College of Music and Fine Arts of Banaras Hindu

University, he believed that with the advent of modern education, the relationship between the preceptor and the disciple was getting nominal. Thus, to avoid the “imminent decay”, “the theory of

Indian music enshrined in the monumental ancient works available in Sanskrit manuscripts, indiscriminately scattered over the length and breadth of the country and some libraries abroad” had to be restored.117 This is the point where a firm belief in the inclusion of theoretical study of music in the education system had been re-established, again with a different approach.

Thakur wanted to reconcile the old theory for two reasons. Firstly, he believed that musical notes and scales followed an underlying principle highlighted by different thinkers and it never changed through time: “It is constant and everlasting, may it be propounded by Bharat, Pythagoras or Helmholtz; it matters little whether we express the consonance of notes in Bharat’s language as

‘nine and thirteen śruti interval’ or through arithmetical fractions 4/3, 3/2 in accordance with

115 Misra 1981 116 Wade 2001 in Grove Music Online 117 Shringy 1961:206

Pythagoras.”118 He wanted to establish that practice of music had an indisputable scientific basis and it should be known completely like that, to any performer of music. Secondly, he observed that the students of music were being exposed to “erroneous notions” by those who had insufficient knowledge of “subtle concepts like svara (tone), śruti (semitone) and grāma (pitch)” and the knowledge of how to locate them on the frets of vinā, the Indian stringed instrument: “Thus the successive line of wrong notions that came into existence in medieval times gains strength instead of meeting its rightful end.”119 By “medieval times”, he meant the period when music was in the hands of Muslim musicians. Like his mentor Paluskar, Thakur completely denounced the association between Muslims and Hindustani music. Therefore, he worked towards uprooting, what he believed were erroneous notions, by reinstating Bharat’s system of notes and scales. Regarding music education, he wrote:

The field of music education needs a radical change. The system and style which has continued so far is in a dire need of a revolution. It is not sufficient that the students in this field only sing or play instruments and entertain the public. At university level education, the enrichment of performance aspect should go hand in hand with the knowledge of the physics of sound; it’s psychological and spiritual aspect, science of ragas, aesthetics, etc. On the other hand, the various writings and publications done by many musicologists from the medieval period till today, lack the very heart of abovementioned elements, because of which the series of both artistic and scientific components of music has suffered severance. It is of paramount importance to erase this disjunction and bring both art and science of music together.120

To serve the purpose of conjoining both art and science, Thakur produced a series of six volumes of

Sangitānjali over a period of twenty-one years from 1938 to 1959. It contains a detailed guide to

Hindustani music training for teachers and students. The aim behind these works, as he stated in the first edition of the first volume of Sangitānjali, was to contribute to making music education easier and more accessible. He acknowledged that the foundation laid by his guru Paluskar in the

118 Thakur in Nāda Rūpa 1961:143 119 Ibid. 120 Thakur 1960:10. Translation mine, except for the term “musicologists”. The author himself translated “sangit-granthkar” as “musicologists” within parenthesis in the original text.

field of music education was a strong one and that he wished to follow his path by constantly striving for further improvements. In the second part, he mentioned the shift of musical learning from oral tradition to modern education and the difficulties around that:

Keeping its nuanced character in mind, it is nearly impossible to capture Hindustani music in a notational form. Based on my experience, I can ascertain that any music, which frequently uses grace notes, is difficult to notate completely. However, my respected guru Vishnu Digambar Paluskar tried to notate in his own way as much as possible and some people made it possible through staff notations as well. But, what I have proposed in this book is a notation that covers both macro and micro elements of Hindustani music.121

Thakur, here, completely overlooked the notation system introduced by Bhatkhande. Although both of them had similar goals, their methodologies stood in total contrast to each other. While

Bhatkhande wanted to write a concise and coherent history of Hindustani music claiming that the theories found in the old treatises were no longer relevant to contemporary practice, Thakur wanted to dismantle Bhatkhande’s modern history and re-establish the old theory as the constant principle which, according to him, lay at the very root of music. But, by and large, both of them believed and worked for an education that did not restrict the learning of music to performance practice only and integrated it into academic research. The work of really designing this academic study and fitting it into a formal discipline was done by Thakur’s student, Prem Lata Sharma, who acted as his right hand in all matters of academic translation and even administration.

Prem Lata Sharma (1927-1998)

Prem Lata Sharma, who is widely and primarily known as an Indian musicologist, received her early education at home under the supervision of her Hindu family that imbibed pious values in her. At an unusual age of eleven years, she passed her high school examinations and then spent seven years studying religious texts with her father, who had relocated with his family to Mathura, a North Indian city known for its historical connection with Hindu religion. She also regularly

121 Thakur 1955: foreword. Translation mine.

received training in music and took exams from different institutions including Bhatkhande’s music academy in Lucknow and Paluskar’s Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in 1949 and 1950, respectively. In

1950, she joined the College of Music and Fine Arts and became one of the first students to graduate with a “Sangitalankar” (English name- Bachelor of Music) degree in 1955. Simultaneously, she studied and received master’s degrees in Hindi literature and Sanskrit in 1950 and 1951 respectively. By 1954, she wrote a research thesis on Indian aesthetics and Hindu philosophy and was consequently awarded a PhD degree.

In short, within a span of five years, she studied different disciplines and received one graduate and three post graduate degrees. What made her different from her fellow music students at the university was her ability to read and write Sanskrit. One of the main objectives set by

Thakur for the college was to reconcile old Sanskrit theory. His student, Sharma acted as the most competent person to help him finish the task. Hence, under his supervision, she started the work of critically studying and translating Sanskrit treatises on music to Hindi and English.122 After

Daniélou’s departure, the research department of the institute was temporarily looked after by

Thakur with the help of Sharma. In 1957, she was officially declared as the “Head of the Research

Section”.123 It was now when the mission of the department was redefined and a new system of higher education in music was given structure. The project started by Daniélou was abandoned by the department for the following reason given in the first music journal published by the department in 1961, which was also the last time Daniélou’s name appeared in any official document produced by the department: “The compilation of a Dictionary of Music is not only a difficult task in so far as there is no such existing work on the same subject but it also requires a huge establishment which is not possible within the allocated budget of the section. Therefore, after

122 Sharma 2000:xiii 123 Ibid., xii

his departure this project was rightly abandoned in view of the aims and objectives of the Section set before it by Pt. Omkarnath Thakur.”124

As opposed to previously discussed Daniélou’s mission to create an archive of all the available treatises and compile a glossary of all technical terms found in them, the goals set by

Sharma were stated as:

1. Deciphering and collating ancient Sanskrit manuscripts on music,

2. Editing those manuscripts for publication,

3. Preparing Hindi and English translations of classical treatises on musicology available in

Sanskrit and modern Indian languages,

4. Doing the necessary groundwork of indexing and collecting basic material for research

work and,

5. Assisting the research students of the college in making available the required data of the

source materials of the theory of music enshrined in Sanskrit works.

The term ‘musicology’ was brought to an official use in Indian education by Sharma. However, it is not quite clear what was actually implied by it because of its usage in various contexts. For example, in one of the goals “preparing Hindi and English translations of classical treatises on musicology available in Sanskrit and modern Indian languages”, ‘classical treatises on musicology’ would mean those treating music as a subject or had some content related to music, whereas Department of

Musicology that offered “degrees of PhD, M.Phil and Master of Musicology”125 would imply treatment of musicology as a discipline.

She used the term interchangeably with “Sangīt Śāstra” where sangīt means an amalgamation of song, dance, and instruments according to the accepted definition given in

124 Shringy 208 125 Sharma 2000:xiii

Bharat’s Nātyasāstra, and śāstra means “a work of sacred scriptures in Hinduism and some forms of Buddhism”, according to the Oxford dictionary. The connotation of this term is equally ambiguous. The following two quotes serve as an apt example. In the first one, sangīt śāstra is seen as a study of practical music and in the second quote, it is seen as literature on music:

Even as a study of practical music, the potentiality of Indian Sangīt Śāstra for providing guiding principles is very great. In fact, such a study has yet to be undertaken. Very little has yet been done to bring out the practical implications of the Śāstra, much less to study its aesthetics and spiritual aspects.126

Indian Musicology with its unique and stupendous literature in Sanskrit offers a vast field for study and research. The approach and methods of Indian Musicology are religio-philosophical. Its perspective is not merely utilitarian or practical, but it aims at the realization of the highest and eternal good of man, not the psycho-physical being with which we are familiar, but an eternal spiritual entity constituted of pure- consciousness, requiring for its sustenance spiritual substance and environment. The teaching of the Sangīt Śāstra is that since Sangīt is not the work of physical nature but of man, its study is fruitful only when it proceeds from a proper appreciation of the true nature of man. By implication the methods suitable for study of nature are not suitable for the study of Sangīt.127

The term “Indian Musicology” can be scrutinized further. It could mean a discipline where the subject of study is simply Indian music but as Sharma points out, the study itself follows a specific

“religio-philosophical” approach, which is what is probably implied by “Indian”. Examination of such approach and methods is also very important for the main discussion of musicology in Indian education. According to Sharma, similar to the practice of music, the study of music is also considered a religious activity. This ideology is reflective of her upbringing in a religious environment and her contact with the Hindu scriptures from very early on. One of her disciples released a book called Indian Aesthetics and Musicology (2000), which has a compilation of all her unpublished works and memoirs written by her colleagues, in which her personality has been described as “essentially spiritual”128. Her actions and choices have been described as always driven

126 Sharma 2000:x 127 Sharma 1966 in Sharma 2000:viii 128 Sharma 2000:xxi

by her deeply rooted beliefs in “divine law”.129 She saw her university education as a learning received in a gurukul and followed all the instructions given by her gurus out of complete reverence towards them.

Her corpus of work comprises of articles and monographs on Indian music and Sanskrit literature on music, written mostly in both English and Hindi languages. Apart from translating

Sanskrit texts to make them accessible to a variety of readers, one of her main goals was also to provide an outlook with which the actual comprehension of Indian art of music could be made possible. Much like Daniélou, she wanted to explain the aesthetic and scientific values of Indian music from a strictly Indian point of view:

Indian philosophy of existence accepts a consciousness of double aspect of the material world and of the human being. In one aspect there is a force of Knowledge (occult) and in the other that of Ignorance. Consequently, Indian culture, including literature and arts, accepts a double standard of values, one esoteric and the other exoteric. Unless this basic characteristic of Indian culture is recognized, the significance of Indian art is most likely to be missed.130

In this context, Sharma wrote a long essay named European Aesthetics of Music and Traditional

Indian Sangīt Śāstra (1963), wherein she categorized Indian music into esoteric and exoteric.

According to her, all the Sanskrit literature discussed music that has transcendental implications and the understanding of this “esoteric” music is beyond an “ordinary mind”.131 : “we have a plethora of literature on the theory and philosophy of music which is possessed of esoteric transcendental aspects in its fundamental nature.”132 She defined an “esoteric tone” as “self- delighting or self-luminous independent of any aid or support, physical (pulsations in the air) or psychological (sensations).”133 Basically, her treatment of sound is abstract, where sound is seen in isolation from any “form or content”. In doing so, she went back to the very roots of Indian music i.e.

129 Sharma 2000:x 130Ibid., 3 131 Ibid., 25 132 Ibid., 27 133 Ibid., 34

the Vedic period where sound was perceived as something that provides an “ever-increasing experience of joy” through “the association with God.”134 On the other hand, she claimed that “in

India we do not have any systematic literature on the aesthetics of exclusively exoteric music comparable to similar literature in west.”135 She did not clarify what she meant with “exclusively exoteric music”. However, the distinction seems to be based on epistemology and she used the argument to establish a fundamental difference between Indian and European epistemological thoughts.

In another essay titled Unique and Unrivalled Characteristics of the Art and Science of Indian

Music (1963), she addressed the problems created by these characteristics for a “modern student” and offered “suggestions for effort which may result in an eventual solution of those problems.”136

She criticized Western education for its approach and methodology of seeking scientific explanations to testify any knowledge. According to the Indian thought, she professed; the oral testimony of a “man of divine knowledge” (the ‘sage’ or the ‘seer’) is completely trustful and does not require any external validation.137 She believed that if Indian music was to be understood in the light of the Sanskrit treatises, then one could get the explanation for why their authors did not design a system of notation: a notation is a material ‘form’ and thus, it did not have to be preserved.

New forms and styles developed through the ages but “the quest for the Eternal and Extra-mundane

[sic]” underlay Indian music and has followed “an unbroken tradition”.138 What she suggested was that “conclusions based exclusively on exoteric art” could not be derived from the Sanskrit texts, thereby creating a problem for an educator in the modern world. Thus, a “musicologist or a university teacher or a student” could develop a “special kind of literature” that is both pertinent to

134 Sharma 2000:28 135 Ibid., 26 136 Nāda Rūpa 1963:1 137 Ibid., 2 138 Ibid., 3

the contemporary music and capable of “reviving faith in the possibility of musical experience on the transcendental plane and in the validity of classical sangīt sāstra”.139

One of her biggest motivation, like Thakur, was to do away with the misunderstanding of

Indian music that, according to her, had emerged out of “wrong notions” put forward by preceding scholars:

Prof. Bhatkhande would appear to have permitted himself to pass some most uncharitable and unmerited strictures against Indian musical treatises and their authors. Having missed to take note of the eternal verities on which the theory of classical Indian music is founded, this gentleman attempted to formulate theory designed to suit the needs of contemporary mediocre and illiterate musicians whose art he would seem to have accepted as the norm or standard classical music. Traditional authors always tried to bring contemporary practice to conform to fundamental verities accepted in their application to relevant Indian arts or literature. Prof. Bhatkhande, in breaking away from this tradition, broke to pieces the very ideal and foundation of Indian music.140

Her criticism for Bhatkhande was absolutely unequivocal. However, the claims she made here about his approach are contradictory to the detailed account of his methodology given in other sources mentioned in the previous chapters. Bhatkhande neither explicitly denied the Sanskrit theories nor did he entirely base the new theory on the music of contemporary musicians. In general, her statement raises an important question whether in the relationship between practice and theory, theory has to be a dominant partner.

Despite her strong beliefs in the abstract philosophical theory she attempted to revive, in distinguishing sound from music, she did underscore the importance of practical training: “music is not representational, because it has no direct model in nature. The sounds are there in nature; their structuring is done only by the human being. This again explains the importance of training.”141 In one of her papers named “The Music Teacher” (1972), she provided a counter-argument to the

139 Nāda Rūpa 1963:5 140 Ibid., 4 141 Sharma 2000:387

mindset - that only those music students who fail at performance, pay attention to research and go to the libraries – by claiming that research is not just about reading old texts, it is a “continuous examination of our positions in the field of practice and theory.”142 Aware of the breadth and depth of the many dimensions of Indian music, Sharma acknowledged and promoted the idea that study of music should be given the same position of academic discipline as others in the field of humanities. She believed that research and extensive study of Indian music could expose students to the same scope of competition and opportunities as provided to the students of social sciences, for example.143 She curated an extensive syllabus for the program of Master’s degree in Musicology that entailed courses such as, Musical Pedagogy, Advanced study of ‘Rasa’, Acoustics of Music,

Physiology and Psychology of music, Philosophy and sources of music history and, Problems and methods of historical research in music.144 Her proposal was accepted finally and in 1966, the research section of Banaras Hindu University was raised as a “Department of Musicology” under the

Faculty of Music and Fine Arts.145

Even though majority of her scholarly work was concentrated on Sanskrit doctrines and various schools of Indian philosophy, on a bigger level, her activities encompassed stimulating new changes and transformations in the music community. By introducing and using the term

‘musicology’, she indeed evoked an academic discussion around Indian music and aroused interest for ‘musicology’ as a separate discipline among fellow scholars and musicians. For example, in the second volume of Nāda Rūpa (1963), the editorial read:

It appears that science of Musicology has a special fascination for certain scholars, but few seem to have any definite notion about what Musicology is and what actually its scope is. Some seem to have a very strange notion that research done in respect of old Sanskrit treatises only constitutes Musicology. But actually what

142 Sharma 2000:377 143 Ibid., 82 144 Ibid., 81 145 Ibid., xiii

constitutes Musicology is, any methodical research done in any branch or subject connected with music.146

Almost all the content in this volume was in English as opposed to the first one which had mostly

Hindi content and its English translation. This was to ensure international readership as copies were being sent out to libraries abroad. Prem Lata Sharma helped the newly built Indian platform for Musicology get international recognition by participating in international events such as the

Centenary Celebrations of the Moscow Conservatoire (1966), conferences of the International

Musicological Society held in Berkeley (1970) and in California (1977), the World Sanskrit

Conference, Leiden (1987), and the Seminar on Tradition and Modernity, Moscow (1987). She also taught courses related to Indian Music and aesthetics at the University of Rochester, New York

(1970) and the University of North Carolina (1978). After her retirement from Banaras Hindu

University in 1987, she set up a trust named “Bharatnidhi” that started its work of promoting research in arts from 1989 onwards. The aim was to adopt a multi-disciplinary approach that included studies of, for example, music, from historical and philosophical points of view and to develop an indigenous style “making departure from the ideas and models borrowed from the

West.”147

It can be interpreted as post-colonial empowerment where the “translated” themselves became the “translators.”148 The music education culture of North India that essentially mediated between modern school teaching and guru-śiṣya paramparā, Sharma brought a discipline that was based on the western ideology and translated it to Indian terms like sangīt sāstra. Perhaps, it was the first time in the history of Hindustani music education that a western import was made by an

Indian scholar rather than a Westerner. This import was contextualized in the Indian traditions and differed from the colonial process of translating Hindi or Sanskrit terms into English. Furthermore,

146 Deodhar in Nāda Rūpa 1963:editorial 147 Sharma 2002:xvii 148 Young 2003:146

she intended to give musicology in India an international status by organizing seminars involving an international panel of musicologists that discussed works of ancient scholars like Sarangdeva

(1994) and Matanga (1996), and the topic of Rasa (1997).149

Despite all her efforts to enhance education of music by bringing in disciplines like musicology, she was not entirely satisfied with the state of music education in India. In a particular seminar on “Teaching of Indian Music” organized in 1998, she delivered the key-note where she reflected on and briefly recapitulated the history of music education in the country:

“Institutionalization of music education started slowly from 1880 onwards . . . in the first quarter of the 20th century much happened and then in the post-independence era, the biggest thing that took place was that music was introduced on a big scale in Indian universities . . . there were provisions for research as well.”150 It could be counted as a great achievement but Sharma identified a few problems that came along with the historical change; and various speakers of the seminar addressed them. The introduction of text-books and examinations and the shift from one-to-one relationship in a guru-śiṣya paramparā to group teaching, according to her, brought a dramatic imbalance in the field of music education. She expressed her dissatisfaction that “we are neither in the guru-śiṣya paramparā nor are we really able to develop an approach to music education which would befit the university system totally.”151 She also compared the conservatory system of the west with guru-śiṣya paramparā claiming that these two models are very similar to each other, and speculated on the possibility or consequences of having such a system in Indian education.

In the seminar, while evaluating the guru-śiṣya paramparā, an important question was raised: whether this old tradition recognizes the new equations between culture-studies and music- studies and “does it encourage, enable, and enrich non-performing music-related disciplines like

149 Sharma 2002:xx 150 Sharma 1998:1 151 Ibid., 2

music therapy or is (it) to continue as performance-teaching alone?”152 Participants of this seminar discussed topics like the role of media, research, and technology in music education. The main purpose was to analyze how education of Hindustani music could be reorganized with respect to these advents without curbing the traditional relationship of guru and śiṣya. A list of suggestive measures was proposed in this direction, which was based on one uniform idea- having separate practical and academic studies. There should be a system of education that provides teaching of research or theory and practice separately; separate teaching staff should be appointed for musicology in universities, and practice-oriented instruction could be given in “conservatory or gurukul system.” One of the speakers - the then vice-chancellor of Indira Kala Sangeet

Vishwavidyalaya music university - also mentioned that seven decades ago, Omkarnath Thakur had already “visualized the situation and had initiated certain steps to deal with it effectively . . . but regrettably, his vision was not maintained by his successors.” 153 With this statement, she outright denied all the work done by Prem Lata Sharma towards fulfilling the objectives set by Thakur, which is striking because Sharma seemed to have devoted her lifetime in doing just that and even more. The entire work of establishing musicology as an academic platform and a discipline in the education system is duly accredited to her.

Sharma died the same year as the proceeding of the seminar i.e. in 1998. The next year, a core group was formed consisting of some speakers from the seminar, to set precise objectives yet to be achieved in music education across the nation. They agreed that it was important to first decide the nature of desired product and then design how that production could be made possible.

Different institutions could separately produce music teachers, music performers, and music researchers. Hence, the teaching goals would be aligned accordingly. It was decided that a pilot project for the production of music performers, in the form of a conservatory, be run. But, this plan

152 Ranade 1998:24 153 Chakravarty 1998:68

was never executed. For music teaching and music research, universities were to have exclusive departments for each but, unfortunately, this plan could never materialize either.

The publication of Nāda Rūpa did not continue after its second edition in 1963 for reasons unknown. The Musicology department at Banaras Hindu University could however sustain the zeal with which it was started for a longer period of time. Until two years ago i.e. 2016, it functioned as the same individual department that offered post-graduation degrees specifically in musicology.

Once again, the reasons of its shutdown remain unknown. Between 1963 and 2016, no further publication of any journal or magazine has been reported. The most probable reason could be bureaucratic hurdles, like extracting financial aid from the higher authorities. It might have been difficult to convince them to invest in a non-practical pursuit of music that did not fit in the conventional framework of music teaching. Another reason could have been the prevailing mindset that music is essentially a practical subject, which is clear in the following excerpt from the description of the music curriculum by the College of Music and Arts, Banaras Hindu University:

Although elaborate syllabi have been prescribed for theory, yet the importance of practice in the essentially practical subject of music has been kept up by maintaining a ratio of 2:1 in the full marks allotted to practice and theory in the various examinations in music. A deviation from this ratio which is finding place in many institutions is fatal to the importance of practical music.154

Even though a separate Department of Musicology came into being a few years ahead of this publication, I think the line between music theory as guiding tool in the teaching of music, and musicology as an individual discipline has not been clearly distinguished in the Indian context. A scholar like Sharma and others who were a part of the seminar did advocate establishment of musicology as a distinct academic discipline like that of Humanities, but they were not successful in promoting the idea enough so that it could be continued in the future.

154 Nāda Rūpa 1961 supplement: 51

Conclusion

This study discussed the interventions related to academics of music in the history of

Hindustani music to understand the position of musicology as an academic discipline in North

Indian education. The first chapter described the historical background of Indian music and its education categorized into three broad traditions namely gurukul or guru-śiṣya paramparā, gharānā, and music schools based on Western models of music teaching. The advent of the third type of music education is directly attributed to the hegemonic influence of the colonial interventions and scholarship. The second chapter introduced two figures Vishnu Narayan

Bhatkhande and Alain Daniélou to deliberate on how they contributed to Hindustani music education in their individual capacities. Bhatkhande stirred an intellectual discussion and brought forth the importance of theoretical study of music. He invented a theoretical system based on the music practices he observed. In 1916, the first of the four annual music conferences held by him, he announced his desire to have an academic study of music continued at the university level.

After a span of thirty years, a college of music was introduced at the Banaras Hindu

University. Here, a new dimension of music studies was introduced in the name of academic research. This was done by Daniélou, who envisioned an encyclopedic collection of all the musical terms found in the old Sanskrit doctrines. By doing this, he was unfolding the Sanskrit texts that

Bhatkhande once had proposed to abandon for their lack of relevance to everyday music practices.

But he never criticized or even mentioned Bhatkhande in his work, so it cannot be assumed if his endeavor was a response to Bhatkhande’s vision in any which way.

However, Omkarnath Thakur and his student and Daniélou’s successor at the university,

Premlata Sharma, explicitly criticized Bhatkhande for his work. The third chapter contained details of their work which was focused on bringing the theories given in Sanskrit texts back and establishing them as the standard base of Hindustani music. While Thakur wrote books advocating

the importance of Sanskrit theory, Sharma designed the research curriculum of the music department with the same vision. This chapter also provided information on the official advent of the term musicology, its translated nomenclature: sangīt śāstra, its disciplinary design for the master’s program, and all the related scholarly and educational activities that took place until 1998 i.e. when Sharma died. The journal publication of the music department, called Nāda Rūpa, was an important initiative to promote the academic writings on music. The conference on “Teaching of

Indian Music” (1998) served as an interesting discussion on the confluence of two cultures like conservatory system of the west and guru-śisya paramparā and how musicology should be taught as a research discipline in universities.

All the previous chapters covered information on the interventions made by prominent personalities who are now commonly identified as Indian musicologists. Time and again, their endeavors were either overlooked or criticized, rendering them unsuccessful for the long run. It is difficult to ascribe definite reasons to such failures. Based on the given factual knowledge, certain assumptions can still be made. In all the cases i.e. Bhatkhande, Daniélou, Thakur, and Sharma, the motivation to design an academic framework around music was personal and their visions were seldom collectively shared.

Bhatkhande believed that an education of music without its theoretical component was incomplete. He tried to incorporate a new understanding of Hindustani music by writing a comprehensive theory that was not entirely based on the Sanskrit texts. It was connected to the contemporary performance practices and hence, differed from the theories given in old Sanskrit doctrines. He himself taught Hindustani music with his new method that gave more importance to scientific and psychophysiological explanations rather than the mythological and the devotional ones. He started several schools and academies and also led the annual conferences on music but his condescending approach towards musicians who lacked theoretical knowledge attracted less

support and more opposition. An interesting fact is that today his theory is widely accepted as the standard theory based on which Hindustani music is taught but his focus on bibliographical research and its importance in the study of music has been conveniently ignored. His own school

Marris College of Music, Lucknow (1926), which now runs on his name - Bhatkhande Music

Institute Deemed University – does not follow the same inclusive curriculum that he proposed. It is hard to figure out exactly why.

Daniélou, on the other hand, seemed to be unaware of Bhatkhande’s work as he never acknowledged it in his texts. When he was given the responsibility to assist direction of the College of Music and Arts (1959), Banaras Hindu University, he took up the project of compiling all the theoretical terms from the old Sanskrit texts to enable research. His focus was hardly on changing the method of teaching or explicitly bringing a new discipline. His idea behind the compilation project seemed to be driven more by his personal interest in the Sanskrit language and texts. Based on all the books he wrote later on, his emphasis on the need to understand the “musical languages” for understanding different music cultures indicates his perception of music education, a part of which was rooted in the ancient texts. It explains why as a professor and assistant director of the college, his attention was solely on this project. But he did not seem to have had enough local support to back his work. When he left the role and the college, he did not hand over his unfinished tasks to his successor, probably because until then there was none. But his relation with the director of the college – Omkarnath Thakur, seemed troubled too. None of them mention each other in any of their works.

Thakur’s goals were specifically centered on reviving the old Sanskrit texts, which he believed were the basis of all Hindustani music practices. He was a disciple of Bhatkhande’s most prominent criticizers, Vishnu Digambar Paluskar. Thus, he condemned his newly written theories and spent time replenishing the old theories that had been shown as irrelevant for their current

times. For the long run, Thakur was able to generate the same sense of condemnation and the urgency of old texts’ revival in his student Prem Lata Sharma. Sharma, being an ardent disciple, dedicated a large amount of her time in translating the Sanskrit texts to Hindi and English to meet the goals laid by her guru. Her additional contribution to the sphere of education was to introduce

“musicology” in higher studies in 1966.

The educational background of all the four personalities was diverse. Bhatkhande got his formal education and practice in Law. Having studied in an English college during the colonial times, his arguments reflected European ideologies driven by scientific and logical explanations discussed in the first and second chapters. Daniélou studied arts and he was indeed familiar with the discipline of musicology. However, he did not appreciate the fixed framework within which those studies took place in the West. Thakur received Hindustani music training in Gandharva

Mahavidyalaya under strict religious environment and tradition of guru-śiṣya paramparā. He wrote mostly in Hindi but his performance tours in the West exposed him to Western ideas of music and the English language. Sharma’s primary subject of study was Sanskrit language and literature, which helped her rigorously in translating the Sanskrit texts on music. She did not have a background in musicology either but she clearly recognized the need for such a discipline and her eclectic skills seemed to have helped her develop one. Sharma’s work was evident at an organizational level and seemed to be driven less by personal interest and more for the benefit of posterity. The Hindi translation of musicology to sangīt sāstra is a small example of what can also be perceived as her step towards countering the colonial hegemony that was at the root of

Hindustani music education.

Curiously (and regrettably, for the case in discussion), the discipline of musicology for higher studies did not proliferate the same way schools for mass education of Hindustani music did during the colonial period. Statistically, about at least fifteen music schools had been reportedly

opened within a period of forty years starting from 1870, whereas, the discipline of musicology was introduced in a single university and even withdrawn from it over a span of fifty years starting from

1966. It may have required a bigger collectively shared vision and more powerful leadership to replicate the proliferation by bringing musicology to other universities and create a transformational impact. Perhaps, studying music from an indigenous point of view within the framework of musicology was a difficult process of decolonizing the colonized. The study of

Sanskrit texts remained the focal point of musicology introduced by Sharma, which limited its scope. It should have given students the freedom to choose and explore. Furthermore, the perpetual glorification of the religiosity or spirituality attached to the Indian music never allowed students to study music from a neutral perspective, which should have been the case for musicology. As mentioned before, the line between music theory/music notations and musicology was always blurry.

Somehow, the way musicology has been understood by the above discussed scholars has been perceived as a threat or a counter-approach to the oral-aural tradition of Indian music by other musicians and scholars. It has been seen as a challenge to the embodied learning: that the culture and values of Indian music can only be imbibed through praxis. Verbalization is undermined. In case of understanding theory, the importance of practicing music is justly recognized. But the bigger question is if it is true at all for musicology. Can musicology not be treated as a practice of its own? Without getting into the internal divisions within the discipline and to go with the simplified and broader version, musicology includes history, taxonomy, acoustics, aesthetics, and pedagogy.155 Musicologists could be “historians” or “literary scholars”156 and in order to be one, do they have to be great musicians or take advanced lessons in music performance?

155 Joseph 1985:11 156 Ibid., 14

It is this clarification, among many others, that has to permeate through the mindsets of musicians and educators associated with Hindustani music.

The present research raises some questions that cannot be answered with utmost conviction, yet it provides some insights that help make sense of the historical past of musicology in

India. The takeaways from the highlighted endeavors of the previous scholars in the given field are plenty. Some ideologies should be reiterated while there were certain mistakes that should not be repeated if the discipline of musicology has to be established permanently. The emphasis within a single educational framework does not need to be shifted from practice to theory. The main idea is to have a separate framework that hones the academic skills and caters to the academic needs of learners. Especially when globalization is at its peak, the students should be prepared to participate in the musicological discussions happening across the world. The information about the scholars and their works instills a sense of hope that revival of musicology is not impossible with the right approach and collaborations.

References

Alter, Andrew. "Gurus, Shishyas and Educators: Adaptive Strategies in Post-Colonial North Indian Music Institutions." In Music-Cultures in Contact: Convergences and Collisions, 158-168. Basel: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1994.

—. "Key processes in the oral transmission of Hindustani vocal music." Musicology Australia 20, no. 1 (1997): 61-83.

Arnold, Alison, ed. "The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music." Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Volume 5 - South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent. Routledge, 1999. 1-2. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Creference_article %7C1000226982.

Bakhle, Janaki. Two Men and Music. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005.

Bhatkhande, V.N. "A Short Historical Survey of the Music of Upper India." All India Music Conference. Baroda, 1916.

Bhattacharyya, Anirban. "Sourindro Mohun Tagore (1840-1914)." Sahapedia. 2016. https://www.sahapedia.org/sourindro-mohun-tagore-1840-1914.

Biondi, Nicola. A Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Alain Danielou's collection at the Georgio Cini Foundation. Venice: NOTA Valter Colle, 2017.

Bor, Joep, and Allyn Miner. "Hindustani Music: A Historical Overview of the Modern Period." In Hindustani Music Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, 197-220. 1997.

Capwell, Charles. "Marginality and Musicology in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta: The Case of Sourindro Mohun Tagore." In Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, by Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman, 228-243. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991.

—. "Representing "Hindu" Music to the Colonial and Native Elite of Calcutta." In Hindustani Music Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, 285-312. 1997.

Chakravarty, Indrani. "Music Education in Indian Universities: An Overview." Teaching of Indian Music. Mumbai: Sangeet Research, 1998. 64-70.

Coleman, Tracey. "Vedic Oral Tradition." Oxford Bibliographies on Hinduism , 2017.

College of Music and Fine Arts, Banaras Hindu University. "Some Salient Features of the Institution." Nāda Rūpa I (1961): 49-52.

Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. "Music and Education in India." In Essays on Music, edited by Prem Lata Sharma. Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre For the Arts, 2010.

Daniélou, Alain. Introduction to the Study of Musical Scales . Benaras: Indian Press Ltd., 1943.

—. Northern Indian Music. London: Halcyon Press, 1954.

—. "Research on Indian Music." The Journal of the Music Academy Madras XXIV (1953): 57-69.

—. "Some Problems Facing Research On Indian Literature On Music." The Journal of the Music Academy Madras XXIII (1952): 117-120.

—. The Situation of Music and Musicians in Countries of the Orient. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1971.

—. The way to the Labyrinth: Memories of East and West. New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1987.

—. Trait de musi ologie ompar e Paris: Editions Hermann, 1959.

Deodhar, B.R., ed. Nāda Rūpa Vol. II. 1963.

Deshpande, Vamanrao H. Indian Musical Traditions: An Aesthetic Study of the Gharanas in Hindustani Music. Translated by S. H. Deshpande. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1973.

Farrell, Gerry. Indian Music and the West. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Gautam, Reena. Sources of Research in Indian Classical Music. Kanishka Publishing House, 2002.

Ghosh, Nikhil. Fundamentals of Raga and Tala: With a New System of Notation. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1968.

Goswami, O. The Story of Indian Music . Bombay: Asia Public House, 1957.

Griffith, Ralph TH. The Hymns of the Rigveda. 1896.

Jamison, S. W., and M. Witzel. Vedic Hinduism. 1992.

Joseph, Kerman. Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology. Cambridge, Masachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Kartomi, Margaret J., and Stephen Blum, . Music-cultures in Contact: Convergences and Collisions. Basel: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1994.

Kippen, James. "The Tal Paddhati of 1888: An Early Source for Tabla." Journal of the Indian Musicological Society, 2007: 151–239.

Kumar, Krishnan. "Imperialism." In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy, 5-26. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Linden, Bob van der. Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and Cross- Cultural Communication. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

McNeil, Adrian. "Making Modernity Audible: Sarodiyas and the early recording industry." Edited by Amlan Das Gupta. Music and Modernity, 2007: 60-83.

Meer, Wim van der. "Cultural Evolution." Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1975: 49-64.

—. Hindustani Music in the 20th Century. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1980.

Misra, Susheela. Great Masters of Hindustani Music. Hem Publishers Pvt. Ltd, 1981.

Nayar, Sobhana. Bhatkhande's Contribution to Music: A Historical Perspective. Bombay: Bombay Popular Prakashan , 1989.

Neuman, Dard. "Pedagogy, Practice, and Embodied Creativity in Hindustani Music." Ethnomusicology, 2012: 426-449.

Nijenhuis, Emmie te. "Musical Forms in Medieval India." Hindustani Music Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, 1997: 95-116.

—. Musicological Literature. Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1977.

Nijenhuis, Emmie te, and Francoise 'Nalini' Delvoyee. "Sanskrit and Indo-Persian Literature on Music." Hindustani Music, Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, 1977, 1994: 35-64.

Powers, Harold S. "Theory and Practice in the study of Indian Music." Society for Ethnomusicology, 1963.

Qureshi, Regula, Harold S. Powers, Jonathan Katz, Richard Widdess, Gordon Geekie, Alastair Dick, Devdan Sen, Nazir A. Jairazbhoy, Peter Manuel, Robert Simon, Joseph J. Palackal, Soniya K. Brar, M. Whitney Kelting, Edward O. Henry, Maria Lord, Alison Arnold, Warren Pinckney, Kapila Vatsyayan, and Bonnie C. Wade. 2001 "India, subcontinent of." Grove Music Online. 29 Jul. 2018. http:////www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630. 001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000043272.

Ranade, Ashok Da. Music Contexts: A Concise Dictionary of Hindustani Music . Bibliophile South Asia, 2006.

—. "Guru-Shishya Parampara: In Wider Perspective ." Teaching of Indian Music. Mumbai: Sangeet Research Academy, 1998. 4-24.

Rebecca Lindsey, Allen Roda. "Raja Tagore: Renaissance Man of Indian Music." The Metropolitan Museum of Art. August 25, 2014. https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/of-note/2014/raja- tagore.

Rosse, Michael D. "Music Schools and Societies in Bombay c. 1864-1937." In Hindustani Music Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, 313-330. 1997.

Schippers, Huib. "The Guru Recontextualized? Perspectives on Learning North Indian Classical Music in." Asian Music (University of Texas Press) 38 (2007): 123-138.

Sharma, Prem Lata. "Innaugral session: Guru & Shishya Parampara." Teaching of Indian Music. Mumbai: Sangeet Research Academy, 1998. 1-3.

—. ed. Nāda Rūpa Vol. I. 1961.

—. Indian Aesthetics and Musicology (The Art and Science of Indian Music). Edited by Dr. Km. Urmila Sharma. Varanasi: Amnaya Prakasana, 2000.

Shringy, R. K. "Aims, Objectives and Activities of the Research Section." Nāda Rūpa I (1961): 206- 211.

Thakur, Omkarnath. "Notes and Scales: Bharata's System." Nāda Rūpa I (1961): 143-163.

—. Sangitanjali. Vol. I. Varanasi: Omkarnath Thakur, 1938.

—. Sangitanjali. Vol. II. Varanasi: Omkarnath Thakur, 1955.

Trasoff, David. "The All-India Music Conferences of 1916-1925:Cultural Transforamtion and Colinal Ideology." In Hindustani Music Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, 331-356. 1997.

Widdess, Richard. "The Oral in Writing: Early Indian Musical Notations ." Early Music, 1996: 391- 405.

Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Appendix

Photographs

Fig. 1: “Tagore’s European-style orchestra, first established in 1875 when the Prince of Wales visited

India. For the orchestra, Tagore used both standard Indian instruments- like the pakhavaj drum in the center and the tambura on the far right – and instruments modified to incorporate both Western and Indian traditions such as the various sizes of esraj; comparable to the cello and double bass of Western orchestras.” (source: https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/of-note/2014/raja-tagore )

Fig. 2: Original handwritten copies of Sanskrit manuscripts and typewritten index cards compiled by Daniélou.

(Photographed by me at the Biblioteche Foundazione Georgio Cini, Venice, on 09/05/2018)

Chronology 1500 BCE-500 BCE Aryan period, start of gurukul or guru śiṣya paramparā 800 BCE Takshashila Vidypeeth – the first university-like educational institution 100 BCE-1200 Sanskrit scholarship 1200-1700 Medieval period, start of gharāna tradition 1746 Birth of William Jones 1792 On the Musical Modes of Hindus- book by Jones based on his discovery of Sanskrit texts 1794 Death of William Jones 1833 Birth of Maula Baksh 1835 English Education Act in India 1840 Birth of SM Tagore 1857 Start of British colonial rule 1860 Birth of VN Bhatkhande 1871 Bengal Music School, start of Western model based music education in India 1872 Birth of VD Paluskar 1886 Children’s Music School, Baroda, by Maula Baksh 1896 Death of Maula Baksh 1897 Birth of Omkarnath Thakur 1901 Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, Lahore, by VD Paluskar 1907 Birth of Alain Daniélou 1914 Death of SM Tagore 1916 Start of All India Music Conferences by Bhatkhande Banaras Hindu University Thakur appointed as principal of Gandharva Mahavidyalaya 1926 Marris College of Music,Lucknow, by Bhatkhande 1927 Birth of Prem Lata Sharma 1931 Death of Paluskar 1935 Daniélou came to India 1936 Death of Bhatkhande 1947 End of British colonial rule 1950 College of Music and Fine Arts, Banaras Hindu University, Thakur as Director , Daniélou as Assistant Director and Head of Research Section 1952/53 Daniélou left Banaras 1957 Sharma appointed Head of Research Section 1961 Publication of Nāda Rūpa – I issue 1963 Publication of Nāda Rūpa – II issue 1966 Sharma set up Department of Musicology, Banaras Hindu University 1966 Daniélou set up International Institute for Comparative Music Studies and Documentation in West Berlin 1967 Death of Thakur 1994 Death of Daniélou 1998 Conference: Teaching of Indian Music, Mumbai 1998 Death of Sharma

2016 Department of Musicology closed down

Questionnaire

Music education Thank you for taking out time to fill in this form. As a Master's of Musicology student at the Arts and Culture department of the University of Amsterdam, I am conducting a historical research on education of Hindustani Sangeet (North Indian music). The aim is to examine the current status of formal music education by analyzing its very foundation dating back to the 19th century and the direction and extent to which it developed.

The purpose behind this questionnaire is to gather a general understanding of what the current music education looks like across well-known institutions in India. The focus is on the curricular structure and pedagogy; the questions do not intend to judge anyone's musical capability in any manner. Please try to be as detailed as possible with your answers, for small bits of information can lead to big discoveries!

Gratitude, Sanjeevani

*Required

Email address * Your email address Name of your institution(s) *

Your answer Name of the study program/course(s) * Please write down all the names if you are/were enrolled in more than one courses.

Your answer Duration of the course(s) * In case of more than one, please mention the duration of each course separately.

Your answer Course structure * 1. Is there a division between practice and theory? 2. How many classes take place for each section? 3. How much weightage is given to each section in the teaching and assessment approach? (Please feel free to add whatever you think is relevant to explain the overall structure of your course) Your answer

Course content * 1. What is the syllabus? (both practice and theory) 2. Is everything mentioned in the syllabus taught wholly? (also mention if you're taught more than what's prescribed.) 3. Are there any textbooks? If yes, please write the names. Your answer

Method of teaching and learning * Describe specifically the setting, duration, composition, and procedure of the class. Your answer

Reading and writing? * Mention if there are writing/reading periods(even if that means notating) or moments of discussion with the teacher/among the students during the class. If there are theory classes, please provide necessary information on how they operate. OR ELSE write NA. Your answer

Assessments * Describe the overall setting of your exams for both practice and theory (if applicable). Your answer

How would you rate your education at your primary music institution? * Disappointing. I don't learn enough. 1 2 3 4

Perfect. I wouldn't change a thing. And why? * Please don't hesitate in stating your honest opinion. Your answer

Do you also learn from a personal teacher? * Yes or no, and why. Your answer

Your name In case I want to reach out to you for a discussion based on your response.

Your answer Send me a copy of my responses.

SUBMIT Never submit passwords through Google Forms.