The crowds thronging the PPN College grounds in Kanpur to listen to Mahatma Gandhi at the 1924 Congress party conference had started turning unruly. To calm them, the organisers brought on the music earlier than planned. The renowned musician-reformist of the Gwalior gharana, Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, took the stage with a group of disciples.
So riveting and sweet was the music – bhajans and nationalist songs set to ragas – that the crowds barely noticed Gandhi stepping onto the stage. The principal of the college was impressed. Could Paluskar send one of his students to teach music at the college? There was, the principal complained, no environment for classical music in the industrial city.
The anecdote comes from Uttaradhikar (Inheritance), a collection of essays put together by Veena Sahasrabuddhe, one of the best-loved vocalists of our times. In the book, using her own recollections, and her father’s and brother’s writings, she traces the story of her family’s musical journey.
That journey took a crucial turn at the Congress party conference in 1924. For, among the youngsters in the troupe at the PPN College grounds was her father, Shankar Shripad Bodas, then a 24-year-old student of Paluskar from Sangli, Maharashtra. It was he who was sent by his guru to evangelise classical music in Kanpur.
For young Bodas, the move to Kanpur as a music teacher at PPN College was a step into the unknown. Yet, he worked with relentless patience and enthusiasm to take music to the city’s schools and colleges, set up an arts institution, and establish a music society that brought great artistes to Kanpur. Behind him, working with equal fervour, was a triumvirate of musicians – his wife Shanta, son Kashinath and daughter Veena.
The story of their eight-decade-long, singular music campaign came alive in The Bodas Legacy, an exhibition presented at Kolkata’s Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre last September. The exhibition was researched and curated by Ranjani Ramachandran, a student of both Kashinath and Veena, and also a researcher-performer who teaches Hindustani music at Visva Bharati in West Bengal. It was richly designed by visual artist Sanchayan Ghosh using varied materials ranging from handwritten notations to rare recordings of music and interviews.
“As an extension of my ongoing research on the Gwalior gharana, I thought that there was a need to share archival material highlighting the multi-faceted approach of the Bodas family in music making,” said Ramachandran. “They were all practitioners who embraced multiple roles of performer, teacher, composer, and author and considered each of these roles as mutually reinforcing. Pedagogy and dissemination of the art practice have played an essential role in sustaining the vitality of the Hindustani music tradition. Through their work, the members of the Bodas family bridged the gap between theory and practice and acknowledged the role of institutional music education.”
There was another occasion to celebrate the family’s legacy last year – it was the 75th birth anniversary of Veena Sahasrabuddhe, who passed away in 2016 of a rare degenerative neurological disorder, deeply mourned by the music community.
Although steeped in musical history, Ramachandran’s show drew visitors that included not just music lovers but also historians, ethnomusicologists and arts practitioners. The display allowed viewers, says Sanchayan Ghosh, to navigate between the individual archives of the three musicians separately and also contextualise their contribution to the Gwalior Gharana.
For historian Prachi Deshpande, the exhibition underscored the importance of family archives in preserving the history of Hindustani music. “The most interesting for me was the display of notations in notebooks in different scripts: SS Bodas’s writings in Marathi and Hindi, and Veenatai’s performance scripts,” she said. “It showed how musicians and educators negotiated (and still do) language and script in this process of teaching and practising their art, the relationship between the written record and the performance, and the everyday multilingual worlds of Hindustani music.”
Musical evangelist
To understand the challenges Shankar Shripad Bodas dealt with, it is important to wind back to the early decades of the 20th century. Back then, even great musicians lived on the margins of society. For women, a life in music was verboten, with an exception being carved out for hereditary performers. In Uttaradhikar, Veena notes her father’s early tribulations: when he sat down to teach women, a purdah would be delicately dropped between the master and pupil, and a chaperone would be parked in the room.
“Shaadi kaun karega (Who will marry you)?” was the biggest question posed to women who wanted to stay with music, recalls vocalist Veenapani Shukla, who attended Bodas’s classes at Kanpur’s SN Girls’ College. Now based in Pune, the 83-year-old has clear memories of Kanpur of the 1940s and ’50s and its social taboos.
“What he did for Kanpur was huge,” she said. “My mother had learnt some of his bhajans but she married into an orthodox family so that was the end of her music. She let me take his classes but under one condition – I could only learn, not perform, I could sing for the family, not strangers, never on stage and not even on radio.”
She was allowed to participate in a bhajan recital on All India Radio with three other girl students. “But each of us was assigned a stanza. A family friend heard me sing two lines solo and asked my mother about it. And that was it, that was the end of my music.”
Shukla says Bodas worked patiently to make inroads into the city’s heart by following the Paluskar model of promoting classical music – do what you can, open a music school, teach music in a high school or school, or join a music society. Teach using systematised, course-based lessons like any other subject and ensure students can read notation. Use bhajans as an entry point to ragas and start early.
“He would never insist that children sit in a class and learn music,” said Shukla. “They would be taught at play, jumping to taal. They were introduced to notes as human characters.”
One account talks of how he would describe to children the difference between flat and natural or pure notes: the flat note was the perpetual latecomer, sneaking into the class through the backdoor while the pure note sat confident and ready upfront. The one often forgot to bring a compass, the other never lacked a full geometry box.
Bodas would take his students to patriotic rallies in town, says Shukla, and recognised that singing for leaders like Nehru brought more acceptability to music. She recalls the times he would go to religious functions at the homes of the city’s notables, listen to the tuneless devotional music being sung, and ask: “Bas, itna sookha sookha sangit bhagwan ke liye (You are offering the gods this tuneless music)?” Rebuke delivered, he would proceed to sing with tabla and kartal the sweetest bhajans imaginable, she says. Slowly, the city grew to love this music, Gwalior style pure ragadari but made it accessible.
By the 1980s, the family had taken music to more than half a dozen Kanpur institutions – the Methodist High School, SN Sen Girls College, Juhari Devi Girls Inter College and Omar Vaishya Inter College. Bodas set up the Gandhi Sangeet Vidyalaya in 1948 with vichitra veena exponent Lalmani Mishra and musicologist Thakur Jaidev Singh. Around three decades later, Veena Sahasrabuddhe began teaching music at her marital home in IIT Kanpur, the beginnings of what was to later become the Shankar Sangeet Vidyalaya. The Kanpur Sangeet Samaj was set up in the city by the family as early as 1927, a forum that brought great musicians to the city.
“Their family home was always a welcome space, abuzz with talk around music and musicians,” said Shukla. “I recall a lively discussion on how and why Kumar Gandharva would choose from among his 16 tanpuras. There were endless cups of tea and conversations late into the night.”
Individual journey
Though he was a fine vocalist, Bodas chose to remain a teacher all his life, instead of becoming a performer like his great guru bhais, Omkarnath Thakur and Vinayakrao Patwardhan. Only one recording is available of his voice, a Maxitone 78 RPM record of bhajans.
Kashinath and Veena, however, emerged as both superb performers and teachers.
Ranjani Ramachandran’s family had close links with the Bodas family. Her mother Vijaya trained under Bodas in Kanpur and later under Kashinath. Initiated into music by her mother, Ramachandran went on to learn under Kashinath and later under Veena, whom she accompanied at concerts. The exhibition included her own and her mother’s collection of notations from the Bodas family.
An interesting aspect to the family’s story is their individual evolution as musicians. While Kashinath and Veena were initiated into music by their father, they followed independent creative paths.
“Both of them were also deeply inspired by Kumar Gandharva’s music and assimilated several aspects, such as subtle voice modulations and vocalisation patterns in their own gayaki,” said Ramachandran. “Kashinathji had an exceptional voice, an all-round sweetness, melodious yet vazandaar (weighty), and his music carried a sense of effortlessness and ease.” Renowned for his fine expertise in tuning the tanpura, Kashinath was also inspired by the musical refinement of DV Paluskar, the son of his father’s guru.
Veena also learnt briefly from Gajananbua Joshi, a vocalist of Gwalior, Agra and Jaipur gharanas. “She was gifted with a powerful and captivating voice with a wide vocal range,” said Ramachandran. “She chose to sing in a laya slower than the traditional Gwalior tempo and her music was both systematic and emotionally appealing.”
Kanpur gave the siblings a unique advantage. “Growing up in Kanpur, both had impeccable command over the Hindi language and the understanding of the lyrics of the compositions, stressing on a meaningful interpretation of the song texts, clear diction and pronunciation of the lyrics of the bandish, contributed to the aesthetics of their music,” Ramachandran said.
The family invariably kept up its association with teaching and institutions. Kashinath taught at the women’s college in Kanpur and died young at 59 of a cardiac arrest. Being far from the country’s busy classical music hubs, the stalwart did not get the recognition he so richly deserved.
Veena moved with her husband, one of her staunchest supporters, to Pune in 1984. Her appearance at the Sawai Gandharva festival that year catapulted her into the big league, and her ready smile and strong sense of integrity brought her a massive following. She went on to become the head of the music department at SNDT Women’s University in Pune in the late 1980s.
In a sense, the Bodas legacy had returned to its earliest roots.
Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at writermalini@gmail.com.
