Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, New Delhi

Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, New Delhi is a teaching school founded in 1939 to carry on the work of Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, who had opened the first Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in Lahore on 5 May 1901. The name belongs to a movement rather than to one building: this Delhi school is affiliated to the Akhil Bharatiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal at Miraj and follows its syllabus, and it is a separate institution from the schools of the same name elsewhere. It has no branch of its own anywhere else in Delhi.

The school teaches Hindustani vocal music; sitar, flute, tabla and harmonium; and Kathak, Bharatanatyam and Odissi dance. Study follows the Mandal's graded certificates — Prarambhik, Praveshika, Madhyama, Visharad and Alankar, each in two parts — and visiting musicians and scholars give lessons and lecture-demonstrations from time to time. From the 2022 intake onwards the school no longer conducts the examinations itself: it teaches the full range, and students who wish to sit the Mandal's examinations do so privately at other centres. Published figures put it at over 1,200 students and around 60 teachers.

Since 1946 it has organised the annual Pandit Vishnu Digambar Jayanti in Delhi, held each August around Paluskar's birth anniversary.

Pandit Vinay Chandra Maudgalya, a disciple of Pandit Vinayakrao Patwardhan of the Gwalior gharana, came to Delhi from Pune in 1939 and found the city, in his son's account, musically barren. He opened the school that year in Prem House at Connaught Place — its first students were the children of friends — with an early branch in Kamla Nagar near Delhi University. It moved into its present building at 212 Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Marg in 1972. Since 1995 it has been headed by Maudgalya's son, the vocalist Pandit Madhup Mudgal, who describes the founding aim as teaching music to the ordinary listener rather than leaving it the preserve of gharanedaar families who inherit it as legacy.

The Delhi school is one of many that carry the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya name and follow the syllabi of the Akhil Bharatiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal, the examining board built on Vishnu Digambar Paluskar's Lahore school of 1901; it is a separate institution from that board and from the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in Miraj. It has no branch of its own anywhere else in Delhi.

The parent body is a national examining organisation with, by one published account, close to 1,200 affiliated institutions and 800 examination centres; the archive treats that as the Mandal's reach, not this school's. An earlier check in September 2026 could not reach a website then recorded for the school; the working official site, at gandharvamahavidyalayanewdelhi.org, was found and read in September 2026, and the description above follows it. Current courses and admissions should still be taken from that site.