Manik Bhide

Manik Bhide was born Manik Potnis in Kolhapur in 1935 and was encouraged towards music by her parents. Her early classical training was with Madhukar Sadolikar of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana.

After her marriage to the scientist Govind Bhide the couple moved to Mumbai around 1964. A family friend, the musicologist Vamanrao Deshpande, took them to meet his guru Mogubai Kurdikar; Mogubai was not at home, but Manik Bhide met Kishori Amonkar there and became her student soon after Amonkar heard her sing. She learned from Amonkar for some fifteen years, accompanying her in concert for over a decade alongside fellow students including Suhasini Mulgaonkar, Arun Dravid and Meera Panshikar. The apprenticeship was demanding; she stopped learning from Amonkar in 1981 after a falling out, and the two reconciled decades later. Accounts of her training consistently name Sadolikar and Amonkar as her teachers; a Discogs artist note that also lists Mogubai Kurdikar among her gurus is not corroborated by the Marathi and English sources consulted, which place Mogubai in her life as the gharana elder who urged her to teach her own daughter.

She performed at most of the major music conferences in India and sang regularly for All India Radio. Her one widely circulated recording, The Sanctity of Parampara (Rhythm House, 1987), preserves her Nayaki Kanada and Bihag, accompanied by Baban Manjrekar on harmonium, Omkar Gulvady on tabla and Vandana Shirodkar on tanpura, and recorded by Avinash Oak. From the 1980s she gave her musical life chiefly to teaching, and it is as a guru — exacting, and concerned above all with the transmission of parampara — that she is most often remembered. At Mogubai Kurdikar's urging she taught the Jaipur-Atrauli gayaki to her daughter Ashwini Bhide-Deshpande, and her many other students include Geetika Varde, Jyoti Kale, Sveta Hattangdi Kilpady, Nishad Matange, Meenal Bhide, Maya Dharmadhikari, Sandhya Deshmukh and Priti Talwalkar. In 2018 she received the Bharat Ratna Pandit Bhimsen Joshi Jeevan Gaurav Puraskar, presented by Arvind Parikh. She died on 13 September 2023, aged 88.

In her last years Bhide's health was affected by Parkinson's disease; Maharashtra Times reported that she had been under treatment for some years before her death.

A Jaipur-Atrauli singer of khayal, bhajan and thumri, whose reputation rests as much on her teaching of the gharana's gayaki as on her concert work.