Gwalior gharana

The Gwalior gharana is generally regarded as the oldest of the khayal vocal lineages, and most later khayal schools trace some part of their training or repertoire back to it. Its singers approach a raga through the bandish — the fixed composition — treating its words and melodic outline as the map for everything that follows, rather than as a pretext for free improvisation.

The style is deliberately unshowy. Gwalior singers tend to choose well-established ragas over rare ones, keep the slow khayal moving rather than stretching it to extreme slowness, and build the exposition through clearly ordered stages. For a listener new to khayal, it is often the most legible of the gharanas: the composition stays audible throughout.

Khayal is generally said to have taken shape in the Delhi court of Muhammad Shah "Rangeela" (reigned 1719-1748), through the composers Sadarang and Adarang. As Delhi declined, musicians moved to Gwalior, where the Scindia court employed Natthan Pir Bakhsh, whom practitioners of the tradition name as the founding musician of the gharana (Pandit Sharad Sathe, sharadsathe.com).

His grandsons Haddu Khan and Hassu Khan carried the style to its nineteenth-century height. Sources disagree on the surrounding detail. Sathe, following his guru Sharadchandra Arolkar, holds that their father was Amir Bakhsh rather than the commonly cited Qadar Bakhsh, and places Haddu Khan's death in 1883; the Wikipedia account gives Hassu Khan's death as 1859 and Haddu Khan's as 1875. The archive records both rather than choosing between them.

Gwalior also absorbed the taan-based art of Bade Mohammad Khan, who came to the court from Awadh. The familiar story that Haddu and Hassu Khan learned his taans by listening in secret is repeated widely; Sathe rejects the implication that they had achieved nothing before, arguing that taan is an ornament added to an already formed gayaki.

Teaching spread the style far beyond Gwalior. Ghagge Khuda Bakhsh of Agra learned khayal from Natthan Pir Bakhsh. Among Haddu and Hassu Khan's students, Vasudeva Buwa Joshi and Ramkrishna Deva taught in turn; Ramkrishna Deva's student Balakrishnabuwa Ichalkaranjikar (1849-1926) carried the Gwalior gayaki into Maharashtra, where it became the foundation of much twentieth-century Marathi concert singing. Another disciple, Miyan Banney Khan of Amritsar, took khayal into Punjab and Sindh.

The Gwalior line also runs through the institutional turn in twentieth-century Hindustani music. Vinay Chandra Maudgalya, a disciple of the Gwalior singer Vinayakrao Patwardhan, founded Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in New Delhi in 1939 to carry on the work of Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, whose first Gandharva Mahavidyalaya had opened in Lahore in 1901 — a school-and-syllabus model of transmission alongside, not in place of, family teaching (Wikipedia, Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, New Delhi).

The Gwalior line also shaped how Indian music came to be taught in classrooms. Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, trained in the Gwalior manner under Balakrishnabuwa Ichalkaranjikar, founded the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in Lahore on 5 May 1901; after his death his students turned that work into the Akhil Bharatiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal, whose graded examinations are still taken by around a lakh of students a year (abgmvm.org).

Gwalior singing is described through the ashtanga gayaki, an eight-part framework: alap (including bol-alap), behlava, taan (including bol-taan), kampan, meend, gamak, khatka and murki. Of these, meend — the glide between notes — and behlava are held to matter most.

A typical exposition moves in stages. The behlava sets out the notes at medium tempo following the raga's ascent and descent; a swara-vistara with weighted meends and taans follows; then dugun-ka-alap, in which note-groups double in speed while the underlying tempo holds; then bol-alap, where the words of the composition are turned over in different ways; then murki, faster and ornamented; then bol-taans set to the text, and finally the remaining taans, gamak among them.

Two habits distinguish the school. Its taans are sapaat — straight runs up and down the scale — rather than the zig-zag vakra patterns other gharanas favour. And in bol-baant, the rhythmic play on the composition's words, Gwalior uses every word of the sthayi or antara in its proper order, without disturbing the sense of the line. Vilambit khayals are sung relatively briskly, rarely below about 30 beats per minute, so the tradition avoids the extreme slowness associated with Kirana. Because both dhrupad and khayal developed at Gwalior, the repertoire overlaps: Mundi Dhrupad, sung within the khayal style, keeps the features of dhrupad but drops the mukhda.