To condense the prolific, six-decade-long career of Pt. Kumar Gandharva into six hundred words is as impossible as it would be to experience the tumult of a year’s worth of seasons in a day; but let me begin by saying that Kumarji conducted his artistic journey as a series of experiments with music, questing for its essential nature and challenging stagnant customs.

As a child prodigy, Kumarji was already famous by the age of eleven for his uncanny ability to imitate the masters of the time. From the records his father bought him, he was instinctively able to internalize the artist’s spirit and continue singing in that vein long after the recording had ended. It was the good fortune of our music that his father submitted
this wildly talented child to the guidance of Prof. B. R. Deodhar.

Deodharji’s School of Indian Music in Mumbai was a center of communion for artists belonging to all Gharanas and Deodharji himself was not a protagonist of any single Gharana. He was an open-minded eclectic who had himself studied the various Gharanas of the Hindustani tradition. In a pedagogy that was unprecedented, Deodharji asked his students to observe and study how each of these masters went about their upaj (‘improvisation’ while, grossly insufficient, is the closest synonym). More specifically, he exposed Kumarji to the many ways in which an aavartan (the rhythm cycle) could be constructed and the sam (its first beat) arrived at. The universe of approaches to raga, tala, composition, and upaj that Kumarji was flown through in his twelve years with his guru provoked him to forge an identity which, while being a choice blend of all that he had witnessed, would also be uniquely his own.

Deodharji’s school was also where Kumarji met and married Bhanumati Kans – herself an accomplished musician, tennis player, and beauty queen. But this was where his career hit its big roadblock – tuberculosis. The doctors put him on Streptomycin (which had, serendipitously, just made its appearance), advised him to leave Mumbai for a drier climate, and forbade him from singing. Kumarji moved to the town of Devas in Madhya Pradesh and spent the next five years in silence, being nursed back to health by the indomitable Bhanumatiji. The seasons of the Malwa came and went, its folk greeted each season with their simple lokdhun (folk songs), and Kumarji, while taking it all in, filled his void with fierce introspection, reexamining and reinterpreting the nature and the purpose of music and its tradition.

Five years later, the disease left Kumarji, taking with it one of his lungs; but he emerged from it a new musician with an idiom that was contemporary. His music, though, appeared ‘new’ only because it reaffirmed the timelessness of the traditional values of music that their ritualization had made obscure. Ragas had been reduced to immutable sets of rules; Kumarji set them free. Performance and improvisation had been reduced to the ordered execution of musical devices (ashtangas) – Kumarji rejected such conventions - and those who mindlessly followed (or made) them labeled Kumarji a rebel. Never defining a formula for his improvisation as most musicians of the time did, Kumarji sought to use
the ashtangas as tools to organically explore and develop the dhun - the song - inherent in the bandish he was singing.

All that is abstract, inexpressible, and mysterious in Hindustani art music lies right next to, and just beyond, the rules of its grammar. The two are neighboring kingdoms, often at war, but inevitably allies. What Kumarji did was focus on the tightrope that was their border. Avartan after avartan, he walked this tightrope, using his virtuosity to relentlessly reinterpret everything he was doing – the shrutis he was employing, how he was structuring his raga, what a particular bandish meant to him and how it ought to grow; and this process of introspection and reinterpretation was, for him, classicism.

Kumarji was also widely known for his ‘Special Programs’. Whether it was thematic concerts that incorporated folk and classical forms to mirror the cycles of the seasons, forays into thumri, tappa, tarana or the theatre music of Balgandharva, composing music for the poetry of Kavi Anil and B. R. Tambe, three-hour concerts that explored the many faces of a single raga or turning India’s Bhakti poetry into a means for musical contemplation, Kumarji’s output of other forms of music was phenomenal.

But with more than 250 bandishes and several folk-derived ragas to his credit, Kumarji was primarily a Khayal singer. He ritually abandoned each of his Special Programs after a few performances to return to the never-ending process that was his Khayal. For Kumar Gandharva’s music was just that – a process. Manufacturing a product for consumption or public exhibition was never on his mind.