How the friendship between two women changed the way classical music is taught and staged in Delhi

In Delhi of the late 1950s, two friends would often be seen at Pandit Brothers, a popular store in Connaught Place, confabulating excitedly over tall glasses of cold coffee in the afternoons. Theirs was an easy camaraderie, marked by chatter and laughter.

The two came from different worlds of pre-independence India: Sumitra Charat Ram, the daughter of a progressive zamindar family, had married into the Shriram business clan, and Nirmala Joshi was an arts activist, the niece of the leftist PC Joshi and daughter of a medical practitioner.

They had different temperaments, abilities and personalities. But in a little over a decade, their close collaboration was to drive some big shifts in how classical music was learned, taught and staged in the capital city. The fruits of association stand in Delhi’s art district, Mandi House.

On its main circle stands Sangeet Bharati, founded by Joshi in 1936, and on the Copernicus Marg radial you cannot miss the distinct, red-bricked facade of the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra set up by Charat Ram in 1952. On the parallel Bhagwandas Road, stands the Kathak Kendra, a dance school that revitalised Kathak. Now a government institution, its early avatar was the brainchild of the energetic duo.

How did they pull this off? To get a sense of that, it is important to rewind to the euphoric day India gained Independence. On August 15, 1947, the twin havelis of the Shriram family on Curzon Road, just off Connaught Place, were buzzing – Charat Ram had decided to host a soiree in celebration, egged on by the young sitarist Ravi Shankar.

Every musical genius of the time was at the concert – Allauddin Khan, Hafiz Ali Khan, Pannalal Ghosh, Mushtaq Hussain Khan, Faiyaz Khan and Ravi Shankar himself, among them. And what was to be a small unadvertised home baithak ended up drawing over 1,000 people and turned into an all-nighter. The event was the seed of what came to be known as the Jhankar Music Circle, a platform for concerts, some of which went on to make creative and personal history for the artistes, such as Ravi Shankar and Annapurna Devi and the Ali Akbar Khan-Ravi Shankar-Vilayat Khan trio.

Bolstering this music circle initiative was Joshi. “Mummy used to call Nirmalaji her ‘energiser’,” recalled Shobha Deepak Singh, vice chairperson of the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra now.

By the time the music circle was set up in 1947, Joshi was already a pioneering arts entrepreneur, having set up the Delhi School of Hindustani Music and Dance in 1936. It was located in a small space next to Regal cinema in Connaught Place but her ambition was audacious – to create a new arena for India’s classical arts that had by then lost their old moorings and patron circles. Three years later, the Gandharva Mahavidyala came up.

The institutional template was one that Charat Ram was to adopt at the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra as well, bringing in vocal greats like Hafiz Ali Khan, the Dagar brothers, Dililp Chandra Vedi, Amarnath, Vilayat Hussain Khan, Mushtaq Hussain Khan, Naina Devi and great dancers such as Shambhu Maharaj, Durga Lal, Gopinath, Mayadhar Raut and Narendra Sharma.

In Charat Ram’s reminiscences, Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra: A History, coauthored with arts scholar Ashish Khokar, Joshi’s contribution to the fledgling venture is acknowledged for “starting and shaping the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra with Sumitra Charat Ram. Her long years of association with the kendra gave it direction, purpose, substance and strength.”

A dream realised

Across India in the 1930s and 1940s, arts institutions were burgeoning, led by renaissance men and women. There was Shantiniketan, Kerala Kalamandalam, Kalakshetra, and the Uday Shankar School at Almora, all spaces where traditional and cutting-edge work was happening in music, dance and theatre.

Jayant Kastuar, current director of the kendra and former secretary of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, says the work done by these new institutions was priceless.

“The most difficult work in arts institutions is the day-to-day management of the creative process, the training, the production, the performance,” he said. “It takes sagacity, large heartedness and understanding of the arts. And it meant taking a traditional system, consolidating its scattered elements, retaining its foundations and fitting it into a modern, urban milieu.”

It was the work at Almora that inspired her, says Charat Ram in her memoir – the fact that artistes could live, practise and teach in a community was a revelation to her. “It excited me to think that so much could be done under such humble and modest circumstances,” she says of her visit to the arts school in 1939. As a student of Benares Hindu University, Charat Ram had been riveted by its traditions of music and dance. The kendra for her in many ways was a realisation of an old dream.

It was set up in the basement of her Curzon Road home, but with the faculty and students growing, it was soon shifted to Pusa Road in west Delhi. Old timers have recollections of Hafiz Ali Khan’s young son Amjad – soon to grow into sarod prodigy – running around the garden of the bunglow. The kendra then shifted briefly to Mata Sundari Lane in central Delhi before finally arriving at its destination, Mandi House.

Arts revival

There are not many among us who witnessed those stirring decades of change. Hindustani vocalist Shanno Khurana, 96, is among the few.

Just in her 20s and newly arrived from Lahore post-Partition, she and her husband, a medical practitioner, were looking to find their feet in Delhi. They had a home on Parliament Street, but how was he to set up practice and what was she to do with her khayal training?

“Nirmala Joshi’s father was a doctor, and we visited their home in Karol Bagh for some ideas,” Khurana recalled. “When she found out that I was a trained khayal singer she asked: ‘Would you like to teach young women music?’ Those days, ‘bahu betis’ were not supposed to learn music and certainly not to perform in public and she wanted to change that. I agreed and joined at a monthly fee of Rs 75.”

The classes began in earnest on the terrace of a building near Regal cinema in Connaught Place. Joshi had invited Achhan Maharaj, the great Kathak maestro of the Lucknow gharana at the Rampur court, to join the faculty. His first student was Kapila Vatsyayayan, the indomitable arts scholar.

“This was the beginning of a non-hereditary and syncretic restoration of institutional Kathak in pre-Independence India,” says research scholar Suman Bhagchandani in her essay Institutions of Change: Kathak dance from Courts to Classrooms.

Also at the new school was flautist and choreographer Vijay Raghav Rao teaching Bharatanatyam. And Sharan Rani, a very young sarod enthusiast who was already making waves as a student.

The government, then keen to promote the idea of an arts district representing traditional practices, offered land at discounted price to Joshi. “But she still had to pay Rs 5,000 and those days, who had that kind of money?,” Khurana recalled. “So we would get on a bus and go to Old Delhi to seek donations with our jholi spread out from the seths who owned big shops.”

Sangeet Bharati’s ownership went out of Joshi’s hands under circumstances about which there is little clarity but she was not one to sit and mope. “She was a motivator, an organiser and activist,” says Charat Ram of her friend in her reminiscences.

Noticed by the Nehru government for her cultural interventions, Joshi was soon to be made the first secretary of the newly minted Sangeet Natak Akademi, which was set up as an autonomous arts body in 1953. There, she went on to host what is considered the most historic of dance seminars, bringing together for the first time multiple dance forms, styles and experts from across India.

Among the biggest contributions the two made to the revival of the classical arts was in the field of Kathak, at the time in a state of churn about its identity. The Kathak Kendra actually began as the Kathak wing of the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra in 1955, with Joshi as usual showing the way forward.

“The ecosystem created by the kendra became a pioneering force of floor-level work,” said Kastuar. “It institutionalised traditional artistic systems and gave artistes the freedom to be creative.”

The kendra first brought in Shambhu Maharaj, the younger brother of Acchan Maharaj and known for his exquisite abhinaya skills, as a teacher. Maya Rao, the fabulous dancer, was to be his first student. Among the greats to emerge from these Kathak classes were Kumudini Lakhia, Uma Sharma and Shovana Narayan. In 1964, this section was placed under the Sangeet Natak Akademi by the government and five years later it moved to Bahawalpur House.

In the meanwhile, a new collaborator and friend had widened the circle of solidarity between Charat Ram and Joshi. This was Naina Devi, the outstanding thumri singer, who joined the kendra as its director. “We were like a threesome: Nirmala Joshi gave the idea, Naina Devi helped in its implementation and I helped financially.”

It clearly made for a magic formula.

Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at writermalini@gmail.com.