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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Kumar Gandharva’s central idea, as Aditi Deo presents it in her Scroll.in essay published on April 8, 2024, is that art changes and that convention is not the final boundary of Hindustani music. In his own words, the theory underlying music may stay the same while the way it expresses beauty changes. The essay treats him as a performer and a thinker who kept reinterpreting inherited material and who pulled folk traditions, devotional poetry and abstract philosophy into a classical idiom.
What the essay argues
Deo’s piece is an interpretive essay about an artistic philosophy, not a full biography. Its argument rests on a single tension that Gandharva raised himself. In an interview with the poet Vasant Bapat, as quoted by Deo, he said:
“The character of art, of music, is to change. On the one hand, you say it changes and on the other hand, you do not accept the change. How can that be? The theory underlying music may not change but how it expresses beauty, that changes.”
That distinction between a stable theory and a changing expression is the key to reading the rest of the essay. Gandharva does not appear as a rebel who discarded the grammar of raag. He appears as a musician who asked which parts of the grammar were structural and which were habits that had hardened into rules.
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Who he is in this account
The essay gives Gandharva’s birth date as April 8, 1924, and places him among performers whose work has continued to puzzle and inspire admirers. It does not supply a full chronology of his career, teachers, recordings or later years, so readers looking for those details will need a biographical source. What the essay does concentrate on is his curiosity about how music can carry experience, beauty, sound and ideas across time.
Tradition as active reinterpretation
Deo describes two kinds of creative work. The first is reinterpretation of established repertoire. The second is composition: new raags, new bandishes (fixed compositions), and melodies drawn from folk poetry. The essay treats these as one project rather than two, because both start from the same question about what a raag or a bandish is for.
In Gandharva’s account, a received form is a starting point. Keeping its underlying theory intact while changing its expressive shape is how a tradition stays alive. That is the sense in which the essay says he did not accept convention as the last word.
Listening as method
Malwa folk music and Nirgun bhajans
The essay links Gandharva’s interest in Malwa folk music and in Nirgun bhajans to close, patient listening to oral traditions. Those traditions are not written down in the way classical compositions usually are, so the musician had to learn them by ear.
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Architect B. V. Doshi, quoted in the essay about a recording of Malwa ke Lok Geet, describes what that listening gave him:
“Every time I listen to his recording of Malwa ke Lok Geet, I see an open door of how to re-look at folk and classic traditions and their roots, and to restructure their fundamental meanings into present day needs.”
A method that resembles research
Deo reports a comparison made by the physicist Sunil Mukhi, who likened Gandharva’s approach to systematic research. In this description the work involved attending closely to sounds, texts and poetry, listening widely across kinds of music, and speaking with performers from different genres. This is the essay’s account of his method. It is not an independently verified record of every stage of his career, and it is best read as a way of understanding how the essay’s author and her sources see him.
A case study: Raag Madha-Suraja and Bachale Mori Maa
The essay’s most concrete example is the origin story of Raag Madha-Suraja. According to Deo, the sound of a goat being led away for sacrifice, and the animal’s fear, inspired the composition Bachale Mori Maa. The essay presents this as a break from the themes conventionally found in Hindustani composition, and as an attempt to bring fear and the goat’s bleating into music.
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The anecdote is the essay’s own account and is not corroborated elsewhere in the material available for this article. Its value for a reader is the argument it makes: an everyday event, and an animal’s distress, can be a legitimate source for a raag, which widens what music is allowed to be about and which sounds it can use.
Nirgun and the problem of abstraction
The essay gives particular weight to Gandharva’s engagement with Kabir and with Nirgun, the idea of a characterless divine. It presents the question as a formal problem: how can a concept with no form be expressed through sagun, or concrete, music? In the essay’s quotation, Gandharva describes the difficulty and his response:
“The question of nirgun was tricky. How do you convey an abstract idea like nirgun, the characterless divine, through a sagun [concrete] form that is music? I tried to contemplate on the solitary lives of the Naath-Panthi ascetics, their abodes close to cremation grounds, and the tonality that they adopt.”
The reference to Nath-Panthi ascetics shows where he looked for answers. He did not look only to other composers. He looked to the lives and sound-worlds of people who practised the ideas he was trying to express. The essay also places his work on Kabir alongside his interpretations of Meera, Surdas and Tukaram, which it describes as part of the same exploration of devotional traditions.
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Comparing the lenses the essay offers
The essay does not rank Gandharva’s works against one another, and it does not compare him with other singers. It does, however, return again and again to a few contrasts that help make sense of his output. The table below sets them out as ways of reading the essay rather than as a scorecard.
| Lens | What it contrasts | How the essay frames it |
|---|---|---|
| Classical composition vs Malwa folk repertoire | Formal training against oral material learned by ear | Close listening to folk traditions as a source of new musical thinking |
| Sagun vs Nirgun | Concrete form against the characterless divine | Nirgun as the hardest expressive problem, approached through ascetic practice |
| Established repertoire vs new raags and bandishes | Inherited material against newly made material | Reinterpretation and composition as one continuing project |
| Conventional themes vs expanded material | Customary subjects and sounds against everyday events and animal fear | The Madha-Suraja origin story as an example of a wider palette |
Influence beyond the concert hall
The essay argues that Gandharva’s legacy reached well beyond listeners of classical music. Deo quotes three figures from other fields. The architect B. V. Doshi, as shown above, describes the recording as a way of rethinking roots and restructuring meaning for present needs. The painter Gulam Mohammad Shaikh and the writer U. R. Ananthamurthy are also quoted as artists and thinkers who were affected by him. The essay’s point is that his method of questioning inherited forms was useful to people working in other media.
Prabhas Joshi, the journalist whose remark gives the title its phrase, sums up the restlessness the essay keeps returning to:
“If he had not been a brilliant singer, he would have been an author. If not an author, then a painter…That is, if he had been in an ocean, he would have been a storm.”
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Where to hear the music
The essay names a recording of Malwa ke Lok Geet, which is the most direct way to test Doshi’s description against sound. The essay does not confirm where that recording is currently sold or streamed, or in which formats it is available, so readers should check a current catalogue before searching. Any recording you find should be checked against the title and performer given in the essay.
Reading the essay with its limits in mind
The essay is most useful as an account of how Gandharva’s ideas were understood and presented in 2024. Its strongest material is the quoted interview, the explanation of his approach to Nirgun, and the statements from other artists. Its weakest ground is the level of detail about his life and its anecdotes, which should be read as the author’s narrative. The argument itself, that music changes while its theory holds, is clear enough to be tested against the recordings and the other sources a reader can find.
For a documentary viewer or a listener, the essay offers a set of questions to bring to any performance: what is being kept, what is being changed, and what the new material is trying to say.
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