Vrindaban Gurukul

Vrindaban Gurukul is a teaching institution rather than a gharana: a building in Versova with a staff, a curriculum and a prayer room, founded by the flautist Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia and run on the guru-shishya parampara, in which the gurukul is described as the home of the guru and his musical family. Chaurasia's own training was with Annapurna Devi, daughter of Ustad Allauddin Khan, and The Hindu's account of the Versova building notes a bust of Allauddin Khan in the practice room and the Senia-dhrupad shaping of Chaurasia's alap; the lineage reaches the gurukul through its founder rather than as an institutional claim to a gharana.

The gurukul teaches bansuri, tabla and vocal music. Its bansuri teaching is the centre of the work: it offers diploma and certificate programmes in affiliation with the University of Mumbai, which it states are not available at the university directly and from which diploma holders may go on to a bachelor's degree. Its named bansuri mentors include Jayesh Kulkarni, Vaishnavi Joshi and Suchismita Chatterjee, each a student of Chaurasia's. Alongside the resident teaching it runs an online foundation course and an online platform, iSM, for learning from senior musicians at a distance.

The Mumbai gurukul was established in 2002 on the Juhu–Versova link road in Andheri, built with patronage from the Sir Ratan Tata Trust; a second campus opened in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, in 2010. The idea long preceded the building: an India Today interview of 1987, reproduced on the gurukul's own site, has Chaurasia describing a dream of "a modern Vrindaban from which a thousand flutes will ring out each day" — the archive has not seen the original of that interview, only the gurukul's reproduction of it.

Writing in Scroll.in in 2022, the tabla player and historian Aneesh Pradhan placed the gurukul within a wider change: the modern gurukul is no longer literally the guru's home but an institution with the facilities of a music school, usually founded by a well-known musician or their family. The Hindu visited the Versova building in 2023 and described Chaurasia's aim for both campuses, to make serious classical training reachable for young learners. The gurukul was enrolling for a foundation course beginning in 2026; this description was last checked in September 2026.