Dhrupad Kendra, Bhopal

The Dhrupad Kendra is a training centre for dhrupad singers established by the Government of Madhya Pradesh in Bhopal in 1981. It operates under the Ustad Alauddin Khan Sangeet Evam Kala Akademi and is a state institution, not a gharana or a family lineage, though its teaching has been carried out by musicians of the Dagar line.

The Kendra admits students in batches on state scholarships and trains them intensively in dhrupad singing under a resident guru, using the teacher-apprentice (guru-shishya) relationship rather than a university curriculum. The academy's own description places the Dhrupad Kendra alongside its Chakradhar Nritya Kendra for kathak, and lists Bhopal and Gwalior as its locations.

The Kendra is residential: the guru and the students live at the centre. Students are admitted in two categories — regular full-time students, given free accommodation and a state scholarship for the four years of a batch, and visiting students, who come for a few weeks or months on a daily fee that covers tuition, a room and meals, and who sit in on the regular teaching sessions. A batch announced in January 2021 offered ten places to applicants from across the country, the first intake after a gap of about four and a half years; the guru at that time was Afzal Hussain, himself a student of the Kendra's second batch.

It was created by the state Department of Culture as a result of efforts by the poet and bureaucrat Ashok Vajpeyi, then Secretary of Culture, and the filmmaker Mani Kaul. Meeting at the Cannes Film Festival, the two persuaded Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar — by then largely settled in Europe — to return to India and take up the directorship. The reasoning at the time was that dhrupad was close to extinction and that its bearers had to be trained outside the university system, but within an organised setting. A committee of eminent figures was appointed and it was decided that students would be trained in batches of four years each, supported by a small state scholarship.

In 1999 the Madhya Pradesh government opened a second centre for traditional dhrupad teaching at Tikamgarh, the Maharaja Vir Singhjudeo Dhrupad Kendra, named after the former ruler of Orchha state. The singer Asgari Bai taught there until her death in 2006; the centre reopened two years later and was eventually moved to Gwalior, where it is headed by the dhrupad singer Abhijeet Sukhdane. It is a separate centre under the same state academy, not a branch of the Bhopal Kendra's teaching lineage.

The parent body, the Ustad Alauddin Khan Sangeet Evam Kala Akademi, is named after the sarod player and teacher Ustad Allauddin Khan of Maihar. It traces itself to the Madhya Bharat Kala Parishad of 1952, renamed the Madhya Pradesh Kala Parishad in 1956, with its early work centred on Gwalior; besides the Dhrupad Kendra it runs the Alauddin Khan Samaroh and the Pandit Kumar Gandharv Samaroh, and the Chakradhar Nritya Kendra for kathak.

To train performers within the prescribed four years, Zia Fariduddin Dagar developed teaching methods that departed from family practice: he shortened considerably the long opening period of technical exercises and moved quickly to alap, compositions and improvisation, under demanding supervision and constant correction. His elder cousin Rahim Fahimuddin Dagar remained sceptical of the experiment, preferring the family's slower order, in which years of technical grounding precede alap, composition, improvisation and the shastra of the art.

Zia Fariduddin Dagar remained director until his resignation in 2007. For about two years afterwards the Kendra was headed by Abhay Narayan Mallik, a dhrupad singer of the Darbhanga style — a different lineage from the Dagars. From 2011 it was headed by Ashish Sankrityayan, who had himself studied at the Kendra under Zia Fariduddin Dagar and later with Rahim Fahimuddin Dagar, and who set out to combine the two approaches he had been taught; his own account says he taught there from 2011 to 2019. Students of the batch that began training in December 2011 performed at the Tansen Samaroh in Gwalior in 2012 and 2013.

Documented students of the Kendra who perform regularly include Pandit Uday Bhawalkar and the Gundecha Brothers, Umakant Gundecha and Ramakant Gundecha, from the first batch; Afzal Hussain, Ashish Sankrityayan, Manoj and Sulbha Saraf and Sombala Kumar from the second; Lakhan Lal Sahu and Sulekha Kamble from the third; Pallab Das, Rajesh Sendh and Vishal Jain from the fourth; and Amit Sharma Bandhavi from the fifth. Nirmalya Dey and Abhijeet Sukhdane are recorded as having studied at the Kendra independently with Zia Fariduddin Dagar. The list is not complete, and the Kendra also admits exceptional students outside the scholarship scheme.