Tracing Kumar Gandharva’s many worlds through story and song

Account subscription benefits alongside Premium Stories, Editorials, Opinions and more. Unlock these with Subscription

There are excellent musicians, and then there are the prodigious and multifarious ones who leave successive generations of artistes, scholars and listeners with something to ponder for decades after they have passed. In the world of Hindustani music, nobody embodies this more completely than Pt. Kumar Gandharva.

Scholar, archivist, Hindustani musician and teacher Srijan Deshpande recently presented an unusual but deeply engaging conversation-cum-concert, The Stories and Songs of Kumar Gandharva . Srijan shared key moments from the legendary musician’s journey as a composer, focussing on a particularly eventful 15-year period of his short but creatively charged life.

Untypically for a Hindustani classical programme, there was, to use one of Kumar ji’s favourite words, a svabhavik or natural flow to the concert set in the intimacy of the library at the Bangalore International Centre.

Spanning the years between his triumphant return to singing in 1952 after battling TB and the publication of his first anthology of original compositions, Anuprag Vilas , in 1965, the evening was a rare exception to the Hindustani concert template. Hindustani musicians have rarely cared to explain or share their thoughts on the creative process and their artistic journeys. But Kumar ji was an unusually expressive artiste, given to long periods of creative ferment, who believed it was his duty to connect with his listeners intellectually as well as artistically.

As the conversation and music presented in short bursts of passionate singing by Srijan, animated moments from Pt. Kumar Gandharva’s life, we realised that this was a musician who saw no conflict between the mundane and the artistic. Further, he could experience and internalise the music devoid of any notion of hierarchy or an overblown sense of himself as a classical musician.

Able to encounter the world as it came to him, Pt. Kumar Gandharva was a Hindustani musician who could be captivated by the smallest of things and find in them the material for new compositions. For instance, he was charmed by the musically resonant names of villages Dewas, such as Amona and Binjana, whose very names set him off on song-making replete with wordplay and melody.

Doubtless, this creative outpouring was linked to those five years of enforced silence he spent recuperating from TB. It was the folk tunes of villagers passing by his home and the sweetness of the Malwi dialect that set a new set of slow-burning musical ideas into motion. He heard songs sung throughout the day as villagers went about their chores. There were songs on the seasons, the cycles of farming activity and the famous barahmasa tradition, in which a single tune was sung for every month of the local calendar.

Srijan makes a compelling raconteur, employing insight, scholarship, empathy and humour to take us through the many transformations and new directions Kumar ji pursued even as he remained too ill to sing between 1947 and 1952.