Walter Kaufmann was a Jewish composer who fled Nazi persecution and arrived in Bombay in 1934. He composed the signature tune for All India Radio (AIR), but his Indian years also included broadcasting, teaching, chamber music, film work and engagement with Indian music. Kaufmann is also a catalyst in The Music in Our Blood, a play about a woman confronting tradition and questions of identity.
Who was Walter Kaufmann?
Born in 1907 in Carlsbad—now Karlovy Vary, in the Czech Republic—Kaufmann was a Jewish musician who left Europe amid Nazi persecution. He arrived in Bombay in 1934; his wife, Gerty Kafka, joined him, and the couple remained in India until 1946, according to the METROMOD Archive and musicologist Shalva Weil’s 2025 scholarly chapter.
In Bombay, Kaufmann worked as a composer, conductor, teacher and broadcaster. He helped establish the Bombay Chamber Music Society with Mehli Mehta and others, organized musical events, contributed to film music and studied Indian music. His story is not simply that of a European musician encountering an unfamiliar tradition: it involves both the experience of Jewish exile and an evolving engagement with the musical culture of India.
After leaving India in 1946, Kaufmann worked in Britain and Canada. He joined Indiana University in 1957 and taught musicology there until his death in 1984, according to METROMOD. The archive and a specialist Holocaust Music profile differ on the day of his death, so the year is the reliable detail to use here.
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How did Kaufmann compose AIR’s signature tune?
Kaufmann composed the All India Radio signature tune in 1936, according to Weil’s chapter record. The sound is described by Simon Wynberg, artistic director of the ARC Ensemble, as a violin melody set against a tanpura drone. Violinist Mehli Mehta recorded the violin part. Wynberg identifies the tune with the Shivarenjani raga, also spelled Shivaranjani, in his Royal Conservatory of Music and ARC Ensemble essay.
Wynberg captures the surprise of the tune’s authorship: “That AIR’s signature tune, based on the Shivarenjani raga, is the work of a 27-year-old Jewish composer from the Sudetenland, rather than a home-grown Indian, always comes as something of a surprise.” The statement is Wynberg’s; it points to the contrast between Kaufmann’s Central European background and the Indian musical reference in the tune.
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The tune is a concise, public-facing part of Kaufmann’s legacy, not a complete account of his work. His broader output and Indian career encompassed chamber and orchestral music, stage works, film, teaching and broadcasting, as reflected in the Holocaust Music profile and the METROMOD biography.
How is Kaufmann connected to The Music in Our Blood?
A 2018 Scroll feature describes the play’s protagonist, Prema, as meeting Kaufmann while she encounters competing perspectives and moves away from rigid traditions. In that account, he changes the path she chooses. The connection makes him a figure through whom the play brings music, migration, belonging and identity into the same story.
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The available feature establishes that premise, but does not establish whether the play is a documentary portrayal of Kaufmann, how much of his biography appears on stage, or the production’s premiere, venue or staging. Those details should not be inferred from the encounter described in the feature.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why does his story matter beyond one familiar tune?
Kaufmann’s biography holds together histories that can be flattened when the tune is treated as an isolated curiosity: a Jewish musician’s flight from Nazi persecution, the work he made in India, and the musical exchange evident in a radio signature built around an Indian raga. Weil’s scholarly framing emphasizes cultural negotiation and hybridity, rather than a one-way story of a European composer discovering India.
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For further reading on his Indian years, METROMOD lists Amrit Gangar’s book The Music that Still Rings at Dawn, Every Dawn: Walter Kaufmann in India, 1934–1946 in its bibliography.
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