Pandit Bhimsen Joshi

Bhimsen Joshi was born on 4 February 1922 at Ron in present-day Karnataka. As a boy he left home in search of a teacher, travelling through north India — a much-told episode that ended when he returned to Dharwad and became a disciple of Sawai Gandharva, the leading pupil of Ustad Abdul Karim Khan of the Kirana gharana.

He gave his first significant concerts in the early 1940s and recorded in Kannada and Hindi soon after. From 1953 he organised the annual Sawai Gandharva festival in Pune in his guru's memory, which became one of India's major music gatherings.

Alongside khayal he sang bhajans and abhangs, and was widely heard through the national-integration film Mile Sur Mera Tumhara (1988). He performed into his eighties and died in Pune on 24 January 2011.

The sources do not fully agree on where he was born. Wikipedia and most reference works give Ron, in Dharwad (now Gadag) district; The Hindu's obituary by Deepa Ganesh says simply that "Bhimsen Joshi was born in Gadag in 1922". The date, 4 February 1922, is not disputed. He was the eldest of sixteen children of Gururaj Joshi, a schoolteacher and Sanskrit scholar, and Godavaribai; his grandfather was an established kirtankar. The wandering began early: from the age of three he would follow processions and the muezzin's call, and his father took to writing "son of teacher Joshi" on his shirts so that strangers could return him.

Before the discipleship settled him, he worked in radio. Frontline records him as a staff artiste at All India Radio, Lucknow in 1941–42, giving three ten-minute bhajan broadcasts a week and sharing a room with the not-yet-famous Bismillah Khan; he moved to AIR Bombay late in 1942 in order to be near Pune, where Sawai Gandharva lived. His first Pune concert was in 1941, and in 1946 he sang at the celebration of his guru's sixtieth birthday — the performance usually treated as his arrival.

The touring years took the Kirana repertoire abroad: between 1964 and 1982 he sang in Afghanistan, Italy, France, Canada and the United States, and Wikipedia records him as the first Indian musician whose concerts were advertised on posters in New York City.

The festival he began in 1953 was, at first, a small memorial for the first death anniversary of Sawai Gandharva, hosted by the Arya Sangeet Prasarak Mandal. He personally invited every performing artist for as long as he ran it, and a debut there came to mark a young musician's arrival. He led the organisation until 2002, when his health made it impossible; his youngest son Shrinivas Joshi and his senior disciple Shrikant Deshpande took it on, and after his death in 2011 the Mandal renamed it the Sawai Gandharva Bhimsen Mahotsav.

He was the first Hindustani vocalist to receive the Bharat Ratna, in 2008.

Joshi's singing is Kirana in its patience with the swara — slow, exact intonation, an unhurried building of the raga from a single note outward — but it is his own in its power. He had extraordinary breath control and a voice that could move from a whisper to an open, ringing upper register without losing tuning.

Ragas such as Miyan ki Todi, Puriya Dhanashri, Multani and Shuddha Kalyan are closely identified with him. His devotional singing brought the same discipline to simpler forms, which is much of why he was heard so widely.