Kumar Gandharva

Shivaputra Siddharamayya Komkalimath was born in Sulebhavi, near Belgaum, on 8 April 1924. He was recognised as a prodigy very young and was given the title Kumar Gandharva as a boy, after a performance at about ten.

He went to Bombay to train under Pandit B. R. Deodhar, whose school was unusually open to comparative listening across styles. Kumar absorbed the Gwalior repertoire there, and also the habit of asking why a tradition does what it does.

In 1947 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He was told that singing could kill him, and he did not sing for roughly six years. He moved to Dewas, in Madhya Pradesh, for the dry air, and spent those years mostly in bed, listening — to the folk songs of the Malwa countryside as much as to anything else.

When he returned to the stage in the early 1950s he had lost the use of one lung and had arrived at a different music: short, high, sharply cut phrases in place of long expansive ones, and a body of work drawing openly on folk melody. He gave these hybrid pieces the name dhun-ugam ragas — ragas sprung from folk tunes.

He made Kabir's nirguni bhajans central rather than decorative, and continued composing until his death in Dewas on 12 January 1992. His wife Vasundhara Komkali, son Mukul Shivputra and daughter Kalapini Komkali all sang.

The title Kumar Gandharva was given to him as a child — a gandharva is a celestial musician in Hindu mythology — after the head of his father's family heard him sing; he was born into a Kannada-speaking Lingayat household in which his father revered the Marathi singer-actor Bal Gandharva and his elder brother sang. He was eleven when he was sent to B. R. Deodhar, and was teaching at the school before he turned twenty. The Tribune fixes the sequence of his illness precisely: the tuberculosis was detected towards the end of August 1947, four months into his marriage to his disciple Bhanumati Kans, and the couple reached Dewas on 30 January 1948, the day Gandhi was assassinated. Doctors prescribed complete rest and total silence, and the enforced maun vrat became a long period of contemplation in which the seasons of the Malwa plateau and, above all, its folk tunes reshaped his musical thinking. He stayed in Malwa for the remaining forty-four years of his life. Vamanrao Deshpande wrote in Between Two Tanpuras that where a singer usually rebuilds from phrases inherited like bricks from his teachers, Kumar "created his own bricks according to his own genius"; Govindrao Tembe called him a question mark in music, and others an exclamation mark. His biographer Raghava R. Menon wrote that he "cut Hindustani classical into two neat halves: one before Kumar Gandharva, one after him". He married Vasundhara Komkali in 1962, after Bhanumati's death the previous year.

Kumar Gandharva's first contribution was a question: what is a gharana for? He had the training to sing within one and chose not to, arguing that a style's value lay in what it let a singer express, not in its pedigree. The judgement was contested in his lifetime and has shaped Hindustani musical argument ever since.

The second was the material itself. He treated the folk melodies of Malwa as a serious source and traced their kinship with classical ragas, composing new ragas out of that relation. And he took the nirguni bhajans of Kabir — often placed at the end of a concert as a light coda — and made them a principal vehicle, sung with the full weight of his art.