As a follow up to my piece “A Brief History of Hindustani Music”, I’m sharing this essay on Pandit Bhatkhande.
Also see my review of Max Katz’s Lineage of Loss: Counternarratives of North Indian Music (Wesleyan University Press, 2017).
In her book Two Men and Music: Nationalism and the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Oxford University Press 2005), Professor Janaki Bakhle extensively discusses Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860-1936), a musicologist largely responsible for the standardization of Hindustani Classical Music. Bakhle describes Pandit Bhatkhande as “one of Indian music’s most contentious, arrogant, polemical, contradictory, troubled and troubling characters. It may be better to view him not as a charlatan or a savior, but as a tragic figure, one who was his own worst enemy. All through his writings, there is ample evidence of elitism, prejudice, and borderline misogyny” (99). She goes on to note the irony that though Bhatkhande is revered as a great figure in Hindustani music, his vision for the art form is not being followed today. For example, Bhatkhande wanted to create a national tradition for Indian music, not necessarily a Hindu tradition. Yet today, much of Hindustani Classical music is “suffused with sacrality” (99). Bakhle describes how at a recent musical gathering in Bombay, Bhatkhande’s portrait was adorned by a marigold garland with a silver incense stand placed in front of it. She asks the crucial question: “How did it happen that a vision that began with scholastics, debate, and secularism culminated in garlands and incense?” (100).
Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande was born on August 10, 1860, into a Brahmin family in Bombay. Although neither of his parents was a professional musician, he and his siblings were taught music. This was not unusual in a family of his class background. At age 15, Bhatkhande began receiving instruction in sitar and studying Sanskrit texts on music theory, a field of inquiry that would remain his obsession throughout his life. In 1884, he joined the Gayan Uttejak Mandali, the music appreciation society, which exposed him to a rapidly expanding world of music performance and pedagogy. He studied with musicians such as Shri Raojibua Belbagkar and Ustad Ali Husain, learning a huge number of compositions, both khayal and dhrupad (100-101).
In 1887, Bhatkhande received his LLB from Bombay University and began a brief career as a criminal lawyer. After the death of his wife in 1900 and of his daughter in 1903, he abandoned this career to turn his full attention to music. The first thing he did was to embark on a series of musical research tours, the first of which was conducted in 1896. He traveled with a series of questions. His major project was to search out and then write a “connected history” of music and it began with these tours, which he believed would give him some clues to help recover some missing links. He was less interested in the actual performance of music than in the theory that underpinned the education of the musician. He kept several diaries of his tours, which served not only as an account of his travels but also as blueprints for his future writings. Bakhle notes that he “did not interview the people he met so much as he interrogated them, seeking out what he judged to be their ignorance. In all these encounters Bhatkhande met only men. He had little regard for women musicians and did not believe he could learn anything from them” (103).
Bakhle describes several encounters that Bhatkhande had with various scholars of music. One that is particularly indicative of his attitude towards practicing musicians and to Muslims in general is the dialogue he had with Karamatullah Khan, a sarod player from Allahabad. 1During this conversation, Khan argued that knowledge of Hindustani music did not come only from Sanskrit texts but also from those in Arabic and Persian. He also stated that it did not matter if the ragas had come to India from Persia or Arabia or gone from India to those countries. This argument deeply upset Bhatkhande who was obsessed with finding a Sanskrit origin for an Indian national music. Bakhle writes: “From the vantage point of the late twentieth century, Karamatullah Khan was voicing a prescient and progressive claim against national, ethnic and religious essentialism when it came to music. But Bhatkhande was looking for a ‘classical’ music that existed in his time not one that used to exist in ancient times” (112). She goes on to note that Bhatkhande was “not unique among late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century nationalists in caring deeply about a classical and pure past… All nations ought to have a system of classical music” (113).
Bakhle argues that “Bhatkhande’s search for the origins of Indian music was not a simple Hindu nationalist search. He emphasized that music as it was currently being performed belonged to a different period, one that was constitutively modern and adequately different from previous periods so that any reliance on texts such as the Dharmashastras as a guide for everyday life was seen by him as romantic at best and anachronistic at worst. [He] rejected the idea that the claim for an unbroken history of music could be sustained merely by asserting that Hindustani music could reach back into antiquity, to the Sama Veda chants, as the origins of contemporary music. He also came to discover that music’s relationship to texts more than two hundred years old was difficult, if not impossible to prove” (115).
Bhatkhande believed that someone needed to produce a foundational text that explained the rules and methods of current musical practices. He decided that he was the person best-qualified to produce such a text. Over the course of the year 1910, he composed hundreds of Sanskrit couplets, outlining his theory and history of Hindustani music. He also wrote Abhinava Raga Manjari and Abhinava Tala Manjiri, Sanskrit treatises on raga and tala. With the authorship of these texts, Bhatkhande “wrote himself into a long line of music theorists ranging from Sharangdeva to Ahobal. Tradition was now invented with a classical yet modern genealogy. This modern genealogy was what made Indian music classical, because it had a system, a method of adjudication, order and stability. In other words, the condition for music to be classical was that it was modern” (116-117).
Bhatkhande wrote initially in Sanskrit, which had prestige but limited accessibility. However, he also wrote a number of important texts in his native tongue—Marathi—including four volumes of explicatory texts, which he named Hindustanti Sangeet Padhati, published between 1910 and 1935. Of all his writings, these volumes offer the clearest glimpse into his politics. The years between the publication of the first three volumes and the last one were busy ones for Bhatkhande. He organized five music conferences, established a school of music in Gwalior, and in 1926 co-founded the Marris College in Lucknow, now known as Bhatkhande Music Institute Deemed University (118). The four volumes were intended as pedagogical texts, emphasizing dialogue between teacher and student, but Bhatkhande used the first three to write on a variety of subjects: Indian history and historiography, Sanskrit texts, Muslim musicians, the Vedas and their relationship to music, colonial writers, princely states, Westernization, colonialism, nationalism, the superiority of dhrupad gayaki over khayal gayaki, and the need for notation (119).
Bhatkhande’s criticism cast a wide net, unrestrained by class, hierarchy, caste, or religion. Most of these criticisms were voiced through anecdotal caricatures, so there is no way of knowing if the events and people so unflatteringly described were fictional or corresponded to actual meetings but the ghosts of Karamatullah Khan (the ignorant musician) and Ganeshilal Chaube (the fake Pandit) hover over many of the narratives. Insofar as they reveal the author’s interiority, these texts as much as the diaries can be considered Bhatkhande’s autobiographies (119)
The fourth volume of HSP was Bhatkhande’s final writing project. His failing health and the noises in his head grew burdensome, but his devotion to music never flagged. He had spent most of his life roaming around India conducting music examinations and inspecting music schools. His travels came to an abrupt end in 1933, when he suffered an attack of paralysis that left him bedridden for almost three years. He died in Bombay on September 19, 1936 (129).
Bhatkhande’s commitment to music allowed for a random practice to be disciplined by a connected history, a stern typology, and a documented musicology. These are not mean achievements but they are predicated on the assumption that musicians qua musicians had destroyed music. The same performing artists who had organic and embodied knowledge of their art and in whose families music had resided and flourished for generations were the main problem confronting music. Bhatkhande was clear about the solution to the problem: namely to impose on these practices a nationalized and textual tradition. Despite his desire for an “Indian” music, it is precisely Bhatkhande’s connected history that may have given people like Pandit Paluskar the needed weight to turn classical music into Hindu music (131).
Bakhle concludes her chapter with the crucial question: “What then can we make of this complex man? For all his egalitarianism and high-minded secular approach to musical pedagogy and performance, we cannot ignore the fact that his politics included overt and disquieting prejudice towards musicians as a group and Muslims as a community” (131). Bhatkhande’s narrative history of music was couched in evolutionary terms as the inevitable transfer of power from “feudal Muslims” to national Hindus. One does see repeated iterations of the idea of something he identified as “our” music in his work to which Muslim musicians had, at best, contributed. Had he been able to accommodate, in some fashion, the legacy of the gharana system without appropriating it, he might have had greater success. His many exclusions, not just of Muslims but of women, South Indian music and musicians, can be seen as the inevitable and unintended consequences of a project that could not relinquish the desire for a single origin of music (132-33). Bakhle argues that it is ironic that—against Bhatkhande’s wishes but not without resonance in his method and manner—that Hindu music was further turned back into what he most disliked, namely a music linked to spiritualism and divinity (134)
Two Men and Music introduces a general audience to Pandit Bhatkhande, a fascinating figure who, despite his problematic politics, is an immensely important figure in the world of Hindustani Classical music, seen as the icon of its theoretical modernity. I would highly recommend this book to students and scholars of Hindustani music.
