Dhrupad Gurukul, Palaspe

The Dhrupad Gurukul stands at Palaspe, a village near Panvel on the outskirts of Mumbai. It is a residential teaching household founded by Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar — a family gurukul, distinct both from the state-run Dhrupad Kendra in Bhopal and from the Dagar vani lineage itself.

A small number of students live under one roof with the guru and learn by daily immersion: riyaaz from before dawn, listening at the household's music sittings, and correction in person rather than by timetable. It was conceived as the opposite of institutional training.

An ethnographic study of the place, written in 2013 by a student there, describes what that means in practice. What the gurukul offers is a maahaul — an atmosphere of music kept up around the clock by students practising at different hours, by conversations that keep returning to music, by the sound of a tanpura or a pakhawaj somewhere in the house, and by the guru taking an instrument apart and mending it in the middle of the day. Three generations of practitioners share the one space and each teaches differently: the senior ustad takes the advanced students, an older student becomes a master to a newcomer, and simply watching the veena player at his practice is itself a lesson for the youngest. Teaching happens, in the writer's account, almost incidentally.

The idea was entirely Zia Mohiuddin Dagar's own, worked towards over some twenty years, and the gurukul came into being at Palaspe. Sources differ on the year: an account of its establishment gives 1982, as does Darbar's profile of him, while a 2018 interview with his son in The Hindu says 1981. After the Babri Masjid riots his brother Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar left his visiting teaching work and settled at the gurukul, where he died in 2013.

Both brothers had led the teaching at the Dhrupad Kendra in Bhopal, the state-run school, for more than two decades; the gurukul was the family's own household answer to the same question, a handful of students living in rather than a syllabus.

The house is still teaching. A 2025 report describes the sculptor Kunal Joshi arriving there in 2020, staying through the pandemic and turning to the making and restoring of rudra veenas under Ustad Mohi Bahauddin Dagar — including the instrument built in Calcutta in 1960 for his father, who had redesigned the rudra veena to reach a lower octave matching the human voice.