About The Indian Music Archive
The Indian Music Archive is an independent, non-commercial record of Indian music and the people who carry it. It begins with Hindustani classical music, and grows slowly towards other Indian traditions as the research is done properly.
Every musician here has a permanent page: a life, a way of playing, the recordings that survive and the writing that surrounds them. As new material is published, those pages grow richer rather than being replaced.
What you can discover
Today the archive covers Hindustani classical music most fully — vocalists and instrumentalists, the gharanas they belong to, the instruments they play and the schools that taught them — alongside a growing section on film songs and the musicians behind them. Coverage is uneven by design: a page exists when there is something sourced to say. Carnatic music, folk traditions and much else are ambitions, not claims.
- Musicians — a permanent page for each person, with sources shown.
- Instruments — how each one is made to speak, and who to listen to.
- Gharanas & lineages — the teaching lines this music is carried down.
- Schools, gurukuls & academies — where the teaching happens.
- The journal — researched stories for listeners, not specialists.
- Ways in — every entry point on one page, if you don’t know where to start.
How everything connects
The archive is built as a web of relationships rather than a list of profiles. A musician is linked to the instrument they play, the gharana or lineage they belong to, the institutions they studied or taught at, and the recordings attributed to them. Teacher and student, accompanist and soloist — those connections are typed and run both ways, so arriving at one page opens the people around it.
That is the point of the project: a recording leads to a name, a name leads to a teacher, and a teacher leads to a tradition you can follow backwards.
Who is behind it
The archive was founded by Deekshant Malvi, a software engineer and music lover from India, who started it out of love and respect for Indian music and contributes to it through his technical skills. He writes here as a listener rather than a musicologist or performer.
Write to us at deekshant@indianmusicarchive.org, or follow the project on Instagram: @theindianmusicarchive. Either way, a person reads it.
How this archive is written
- Nothing is invented. No fabricated biographies, quotes, dates, awards or teacher–student lineages. If a fact cannot be sourced, it is left out and the gap is left visible.
- Sources are shown. Each musician page carries the references it was built from, so you can read further and check the work.
- No AI-generated portraits of real people. Where a properly credited photograph isn't available, a typographic placeholder stands in.
- Recordings are never rehosted. Recordings are embedded only from official or authorised channels; where nothing authorised exists, we still keep the catalogue details.
- Conflicts are stated, not smoothed over. Where reliable sources disagree — a birth year, for instance — the page says so.
Photographs, credits and takedown
Photographs here are used for non-commercial, educational and documentary purposes. Wherever possible we use public domain or Creative Commons images, and every photograph carries the photographer or archive it came from, with a link back to the source.
A credit is an acknowledgement, not a licence. If you are a photographer, agency, family member or rights holder and a photograph on this site should not be here — or the credit is wrong — write to us and it will be removed or corrected promptly, with no argument.
Who can edit a page
Editing is by invitation, page by page. The archive’s administrator can edit anything; anyone else is invited to a named email address for one specific page. An invited editor’s saves appear on the public page straight away, and every save is kept in that page’s revision history, so a change can be compared with what came before and restored if it was wrong.
Invitations are single-use, expire after seven days and can be withdrawn at any time. Being an editor of one page gives no access to any other part of the archive, and lineage structures stay with the administrator.
Verified means we have checked the identity or relationship described — nothing more. It is not an endorsement that every statement on the page is correct, nor that this person has reviewed or approved it.
If you are a musician here, or close to one — family, a representative, an institution, a long-standing student — open that musician’s page and choose “Manage this page” to ask for access, or find them in the directory. Access is never granted automatically.
Contribute
A memory of a concert, a correction, a photograph you hold the rights to, a link to an authorised recording — all of it helps. Your email stays private, and nothing you send appears on the site by itself: an editor reads it, checks it and writes it in.
To send photographs, ask to be verified as an artist or representative, check a submission or raise a rights concern, use the contribution desk.
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