Saptak School of Music

Saptak is a public charitable trust in Ahmedabad — registered there as trust no. E.4054 — that runs a school of Hindustani classical music, a recordings archive and India's best-known long-form classical festival. The school and the festival began together in 1980 from what the trust describes as "a group of performers and music connoisseurs in Ahmedabad", among them the Benares gharana tabla player Nandan Mehta and the sitarist Manju Mehta, with the blessings of Ravi Shankar and Kishan Maharaj. It is an organisation rather than a gharana: its faculty come from several traditions, and students learn from the teacher they are placed with.

The school opened in 1981 with 77 learners and reports more than 450 on its rolls. Classes have been held since the early years in the premises of Vidyanagar High School at Usmanpura, offered by its managing trustee Himmatbhai Kapasi, and run from 6 pm each evening in sitar, sarangi, violin, flute, tabla, pakhawaj and vocal music. By its own description the teaching is deliberately not exam- or syllabus-bound: the starting age is eight with no upper limit, and the roughly twenty faculty members are performing musicians teaching within the guru-shishya parampara. Its vocal faculty has included Rupande Shah, a founding trustee, and Ustad Shaukat Hussain Khan of the Agra-Atrauli line, son of Sharafat Hussain Khan; Manju Mehta taught the instrumental side.

Since 2002 a scholarship programme has supported a small number of advanced scholars — fifteen at the time of writing — alongside financial help for students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Saptak Archives preserves recordings with details of place, date and raga, and hosts baithaks at which advanced students play to a small audience before moving to larger platforms.

Saptak describes all twenty of its faculty as working performers. Ustad Shaukat Hussain Khan, trained from the age of five by his father Ustad Sharafat Hussain Khan and afterwards by his maternal uncles Yunus Hussain Khan and Mubarak Ali Khan, heads the vocal department; Rupande Shah, the founding trustee who oversees it with him, studied under Raosaheb Mhasker of the Gwalior gharana and later with Pandit Rajan Mishra in the Banaras style, and her singing draws on Gwalior, Agra, Mewati and Banaras together. That mixture is the point: a student at Saptak learns a tradition through the teacher they are placed with rather than a house style.

Saptak's Annual Festival of Music has run from 1 to 13 January every year since 1980, latterly at the L. D. Arts College campus opposite IIM Ahmedabad; reporting on the 2026 edition, its forty-sixth, described over 150 artists across 43 sessions, and the festival mixes Hindustani and Carnatic music. Since 2012 the trust has also held the Pandit Nandan Mehta Taal-Vaadya Spardha, an all-India tabla and pakhawaj competition whose winner performs at the January festival, and the Sangeet Sankalp Saptah, whose thirty-first edition was announced for 25 September to 4 October 2026 at Lions Hall, Mithakhali, Ahmedabad.

Musicians who have performed at or written about Saptak include Ravi Shankar, Shivkumar Sharma, Zakir Hussain, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Shubha Mudgal, Shahid Parvez, Ajoy Chakrabarty, Shobha Gurtu and the Gundecha Brothers; the archive records them as festival associations, not as teaching posts. Checked September 2026; current classes, fees and admissions should be taken from Saptak's own site.