Notes of revival

Umakant and Ramakant Gundecha are working hard to revive Dhrupad and keep it relevant

They say it is one of the oldest forms of music, a thousand-year-old relic of the Vedic age. Its practitioners meditate for days, even months on a single, pure note, averring that Dhrupad provides the base, the grammar so to speak, of all music. Indeed, the traditional pedagogy of most Indian classical music has included training in Dhrupad. Yet, when brothers Umakant and Ramakant Gundecha began singing Dhrupad professionally in the early 1980s, it was fast disappearing into the pages of history. “Dhrupad was in the shadows,” recalls Umakant. “Few practised it, and fewer came to listen.” Fearing that this ancient form of music would die out completely without any special intervention, the two brothers began working on a systematic plan to revive Dhrupad and make it relevant to modern performers as well as audiences. Today, they have not only created a growing community of Dhrupad practitioners, they have succeeded in developing an efficient model that can easily be applied to revive other art forms as well.

 
“Dhrupad is the mother of all classical music,” says Umakant. “We realised that the best way to ensure its future was to teach it to as many students as possible.” The brothers began actively looking for opportunities to teach, and at the same time, began thinking of how exactly they wanted to teach their music. “We established Dhrupad Sansthan, a residential music learning facility in Bhopal in 2004, to teach Dhrupad to meritorious students under the guru-shishya parampara,” says Umakant. Their understanding of Dhrupad as a meditative study of notes unfettered by cultural and linguistic boundaries enabled musicians across the world to sing and practice this form of music. Soon, they began teaching not only students of Indian classical music, but also Kathak dancers, Italian saxophone players, flautists, American Fulbright scholars, young children from impoverished rural families and more. Rebranding the image of Dhrupad as universal music was a brilliant move. “While remaining rooted in its tradition, Dhrupad became imbued with new energy and gained audiences across the world,” says Umakant.

 
After the brothers set up the residential Dhrupad Sansthan in Bhopal, they began spending almost half the year teaching students in different locations across the world.”We realised that the best way to get people interested in Dhrupad was to enable them to experience it,” explains Umakant. “Instead of waiting for them to come to us, we decided to go to them.” Today, along with some of their senior-most students, the duo teaches Dhrupad in five centres across India and one in Nepal. “Additionally, we also conduct Dhrupad workshops across the world,” he says. “We’re getting ready to conduct a seven-day workshop in Hamburg next month.”

 

Creating a growing base of students certainly gave Dhrupad a new lease of life — but the Gundecha brothers wanted more. Perhaps because they are performers themselves, they placed equal emphasis on creating a wider audience for Dhrupad. “To this end, we organise a minimum of five Dhrupad festivals across the world every year,” says Umakant. “We’d love to increase this to once a month in cities across the world.”
 
Given, however, that the Dhrupad Foundation is a non-profit charitable trust and the Gundecha brothers have no formal system of charging fees, their expansion plans hinge closely on the funds they’re able to generate. Of the 40 resident students they have in Bhopal, many are on scholarship. “Sir Dorabji Tata Trust and Asha have sponsored many of them,” says Umakant. “We have several individual donors as well.” Additionally, they teach about 15 paying international students every year. Union Bank and Kalakshetra Foundation sponsored their recent Dhrupad Festival in Chennai. “We are not like western pop singers who sing for huge fees,” says Umakant deprecatingly. “Our needs are minimal and we’re content with very little!”

 
The Gundecha brothers, who have been awarded the Padma Shri for their contributions to Indian classical music, with their two-pronged focus on increasing their student- as well as audience-base, have developed an easily replicable paradigm for reviving other dying art forms. At the recently-concluded Dhrupad festival in Delhi’s Sangeet Shyamala, Umakant watches nervous students practice before they go on stage. “A new generation of Dhrupad singers is in the making,” he says. “I feel satisfied that I’m able to pass on the legacy that my gurus bequeathed upon me.”
 For more, visit dhrupad.org

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