Pandit Basavaraj Rajguru

Basavaraj Rajguru was born on 24 August 1920 at Yaliwal, a village in the Dharwad district of north Karnataka, into a family of scholars, astrologers and musicians. His father, a Carnatic musician trained at Tanjavur, began his musical instruction; he first became known singing for Vamanrao Master's travelling drama company. He was thirteen when his father died, and around that time the blind saint-musician Panchakshara Gawai took him into his tutelage. In 1936, at the six-hundredth anniversary observances of the Vijayanagara empire at Hampi, he gave his first concert alongside his guru.

After Gawai's death in 1944 he moved to Bombay for the chance to learn from the Kirana teacher Sawai Gandharva. Sawai Gandharva was by then suffering from paralysis and had to leave Bombay, and he directed Rajguru instead to Sureshbabu Mane, another Kirana musician, under whom the training continued. Rajguru later travelled to the north-west of present-day Pakistan to learn from Waheed Khan, who had taught Gawai, and spent six months in Karachi with Latif Khan.

His repertoire was unusually wide for a khayal singer: pure classical khayal alongside vachana, natyageet, thumri and ghazal, in eight languages. He was honoured with the Padma Shri in 1975 and the Padma Bhushan in 1991, held Sangeet Natak Akademi awards from the central and state governments, and received an honorary doctorate from Karnatak University, Dharwad. He died in July 1991, one of three celebrated Dharwad musicians — with Kumar Gandharva and Mallikarjun Mansur — to die within little more than a year. A memorial national award in his name was instituted later, first conferred in 2011.

Sources disagree on his birth year. The Wikipedia article and this archive give 24 August 1920; the Rajan Parrikar Music Archive heads its catalogue entry 1917–1991, and karnataka.com likewise gives 24 August 1917. Both accounts are recorded here. His death is dated 21 July 1991.

Parrikar places him in the Dharwad line of Hindustani musicians alongside Bhimsen Joshi, Gangubai Hangal, Mallikarjun Mansur and Kumar Gandharva, and describes him as an itinerant musician of a now-vanished kind, as learned in the Veerashaiva literary tradition as in raga — a scholarship that fed the vachana and Purandaradasa material in his concerts. Accounts of his training under Panchakshara Gawai describe twelve to fifteen hours of daily practice over some six years.

Among his disciples, Parameshwar Hegde studied with him for fifteen years until 1991 and has kept his guru's repertoire in circulation through lecture-demonstrations, including a centenary tribute in Bengaluru in 2019 built around Puriya Kalyan, the first raga Rajguru taught him.

A high-pitched, wide-ranging khayal voice of the Kirana training, carrying a repertoire unusually broad for the tradition — khayal beside vachana, natyageet, thumri and ghazal, sung in eight languages, with the Veerashaiva devotional literature of north Karnataka always close by.