Honoring Kumar Gandharva, a musical pioneer, on his centennial

The couple, who were musicians, relocated to a quiet area in west-central India from the busiest city in the newly formed nation. Just four months into their marriage, Kumar Gandharva and his disciple-wife Bhanumati Kans planned to get through a difficult period that had upended their Bombay life together.

Amidst the post-Partition turmoil, the unfortunate news about the most remarkable singer in traditional Hindustani music was mostly ignored towards the end of August 1947, only one week after the country’s independence. At the young age of 23, the remarkable Kumar was found to have TB. Dewas on the Malwa plateau was the destination of choice for those seeking a warm climate.

On January 30, 1948, the two traveled more than 600 miles to the northeast, arriving in the little, semi-hilly village. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on the same day. The country descended into darkness. In the middle, Kumar tightened his vow of quiet. In any case, the maun vrat was essential; the physicians had advised him to refrain from speaking at all. All the medical community could recommend back then was total rest for the lungs in a clean environment. After a thriving Dhrut-laya, which represented his swift ascent, life abruptly descended into an excruciatingly sluggish vilambit.

Nevertheless, Kumar consoled himself and even strengthened this crucial moment with copious amounts of reflection. The young artist started to notice the beauty of the calm around him, beyond the solemnity of the straitjacketed tunes that used to color his khayals. He was able to create new perceptions of sights, sounds, and scents thanks to the perfume of the monsoon soil, the silence of the cold air, the chirps of spring birds, and the whoosh of the summer dust storms. The folk songs from the uplands north of the Vindhya mountains captivated him more than anything else. Kumar decided to spend the next 44 years of his life in the arid regions of Malwa as a result of his grassroots experience. Hindustani music benefited greatly from the tryst’s innovative interpretation, which grew into a school, until his death in 1992 at the age of 68. However, since eclecticism served as its cornerstone and anybody was free to expand upon it, it was not known as Gandharva gharana.

In what precise way, therefore, did Kumar recover from his illness? That was made possible by an antibiotic that made its way to India almost ten years after American scientists identified streptomycin in a kind of bacterium. The artist was able to recuperate from the infectious condition because to the 1952 treatment. Although Kumar lost one lung permanently, much of his voice was returned. As was the ability to sing. In Mandu, 125 kilometers southwest of Dewas, he performed a chamber performance for Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that year.

In a matter of months, toward the close of 1953, Kumar performed a return performance in Allahabad on a public platform. With the unconventional flow of Raga Lankeshwari, the holy city of Hindu-Muslim syncretism wrote a complete circle for the peninsula’s talent. It was the same location where, in 1935, Kumar had astounded his audience on his first visit from his home town in Belgaum, Karnataka. Hindustani celebrities were among the audience members who were taken aback by the 11-year-old’s performance in the center of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. In addition to playback superstar singer Kundan Lal Saigal, the front row included Faiyaz Khan, Hafiz Ali, Narayanrao Vyas, and Vinayakrao Patwardhan, as vocalist Shantaram Kashalkar memorably recounted. “The boy started with Ugich ka kanta ganjita, which I was familiar with from an album by Abdul Karim Khan,” he said in the theatrical artist Jabbar Patel’s 2006 documentary “Hans Akela.”

Karim Khan (1872–1937), a frequent visitor to the Mysore court, developed the renowned Kirana gharana, named for his location close to Shamli, which is near Delhi. In 1924, a youngster was born into a Kannada-speaking Lingayat home some 600 kilometers north of the sandalwood metropolis. His music-loving parents gave him the name Shivaputra, to which the father’s and the family’s names were added: Siddaramayya Komkalimath. The Bombay Presidency during the Raj period oversaw their Sulebhavi village. The Natyageet musical-drama stream was the source of Kumar’s opening song in Allahabad when he was a preteen, as Marathi plays were very popular in the region.

Another issue is that, despite his reputation as a wunderkind, Kumar began singing at the age of eight, which put the audience in a daze. Up until that point, he would only hear the elders perform the stage performer Bal Gandharva’s words. He was originally from Sangli, near the Krishna River, and was known as Narayan Rajhans (1888–1967). It so happened that BR Deodhar, Kumar’s future mentor, was also from the same sugarcane region. His voice was both dulcet and learned.

While studying music in Bombay, Kumar also mentored Bhanumati, a city girl who was interested in badminton. The pair became enamored. Their 14-year marriage, which had been originally hampered by the husband’s illness, came to an end in 1961 when Bhanumati passed away while giving birth to their second child. In Kumar’s darkest hour, his life partner had been a kind nurse. His second wife, who opted to only accompany Kumar during performances for three decades until his passing in 1992, was as kind. Vasundhara Shrikhande (1931-2015), who was born in Jamshedpur and reared in Kolkata, didn’t start performing solos until later, when her Kumarian approach became apparent. Similarly, their daughter Kalapini Komkali and her niece Bhuvanesh follow same pattern, but Kumar’s son Mukul Shivputra has always tried to follow his own path and has been very reclusive.

Key followers Satyasheel Deshpande, Vijay Sardeshmukh, and Madhup Mudgal, among others, have clearly benefited from Kumar’s influence, and other people who never studied with him yet have a Gandharva touch.

What characteristics of the Kumar gayaki, known for their unrestricted exploration of higher registers, have made them unique? Numerous. First, an abundance of the slippery taan, described by the late musicologist CP Rele as “not’straight’, but ‘double’, where each sur will sparkle twice in succession.” The weaving together of brief sections comes in second. In a language where extended notes are essential, Kumar’s partially perforated lungs emphasized the opposite. Because of it, he gained many more supporters than detractors.