Sangit Mahabharati

Sangit Mahabharati is a music academy in the JVPD Scheme in Juhu, Mumbai, with a graded curriculum, a teachers' training course and a research and documentation programme. It is a school and an archive rather than a gharana: its founder's own tabla playing drew on the Delhi, Ajrada, Farukhabad, Lucknow and Punjab lines, and the institution has never presented itself as the property of one house. It is registered as a public trust, and its own account names the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the state and central governments and the municipal corporation among the bodies that have recognised or supported its work.

The academy teaches vocal music — Hindustani classical and light — and instruments: sitar, tabla, harmonium and flute, with sarod, santoor and surbahar taught on request. Kathak and Odissi are taught alongside the music. Teaching follows the guru-shishya parampara, but the teachers themselves take a formal training course first, which is unusual among institutions of this kind.

Its graded courses run from Sangit Mukul, a one-year certificate for children, through the three-level Sangit Naveen diploma and the two-level Sangit Teertha degree to the two-level postgraduate Sangit Gaurav. The academy states that the Department of Education of the Government of Maharashtra recognises these as equivalent to a diploma, a BA and an MA or B.Ed. respectively; that equivalence is the institution's own description and the archive has not found an independent confirmation of it. Collection, documentation and research have been part of the work from the start, alongside annual festivals, recitals, lecture-demonstrations and listening sessions.

Pandit Nikhil Ghosh (1918–1995) founded the institution in Mumbai in 1956, originally as Arun Sangeetalaya. It moved to its present premises twelve years later; the foundation stone there was laid by his own teacher Ustad Ahmed Jan Thirakwa on 20 October 1969. Ghosh had trained under Thirakwa, Ustad Amir Hussain Khan and Pandit Jnan Prakash Ghosh, and taught at the academy himself; among the musicians tutored there is the tabla player and music historian Aneesh Pradhan. His son, Pandit Nayan Ghosh, is its principal.

The academy's own website has not been refreshed since about 2017 — its front page still announces a December 2017 festival, and two inner pages carry unfinished placeholder headings. The archive could find no primary evidence published after 2017 describing its present teaching. Current course availability, fees and faculty should be confirmed with the academy directly; this description was last checked against its published material in September 2026.