Pandit C. R. Vyas

Chintaman Raghunath Vyas was born on 9 November 1924 in Osmanabad, Maharashtra, into a family of Sanskrit scholars and Hari kirtankars, and grew up hearing his father and grandfather sing episodes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

His training was unusually layered. He studied for about a decade with Govindrao Bhatambrekar of the Kirana gharana, then with Rajarambua Paradkar of the Gwalior gharana. While working in the Gwalior style he was drawn to the singing of Jagannathbuwa Purohit "Gunidas" of the Agra gharana and became his student, and he also took guidance from Yeshwantbuva Mirashi. He kept close company with the scholar-musicians S. N. Ratanjankar, Chidanand Nagarkar, S. C. R. Bhat and K. G. Ginde.

Vyas sang with an open-throated voice and a manner that blended the gharanas he had absorbed, with the Gwalior gayaki most audible. He was a leading artist on All India Radio and television and appeared at major festivals in India and abroad, while for much of his life music was not his paid occupation — he held a job at ITC, and said of his generation, "In our time we did not think of earning either fame or money through music."

He researched traditional ragas and bandishes and composed more than two hundred bandishes under the pen-name Gunijaan, and he set out his findings in the book Raag Sarita. In 1977 he founded the Gunidas Sangeet Sammelan in memory of his guru Jagannathbuwa Purohit.

His disciples include Jitendra Abhisheki, who studied with him for close to ten years, Prabhakar Karekar, Shripad Paradkar, Sriram Parasuram, Mangala Ranade, Sanjeev Chimmalgi, Ganapati Bhat and his own son Suhas Vyas. He was married to Indira Vyas; their sons are the vocalist Suhas Vyas, the santoor player Satish Vyas and Shashi Vyas, who runs the concert organisation Pancham Nishad. He died in Kolkata on 10 January 2002.

Recognition came late. S. Kalidas, writing for India Today as Vyas turned seventy-five, called him a reluctant master: musicians of Maharashtra had always known him, but national recognition arrived only after he was sixty-three, when instrumentalists such as Shivkumar Sharma and Zakir Hussain projected him on the concert circuit. He held a white-collar job at ITC for thirty-four years. In 1999 a gathering of musicians of all schools — among them Kishan Maharaj, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Shivkumar Sharma, Gangubai Hangal, Alla Rakha, Amjad Ali Khan, Jasraj and Naushad Ali — felicitated him publicly on his seventy-fifth birthday at the Nehru Centre in Mumbai.

He also built institutions. In 1973 he founded the Maharashtra Lalit Kala Nidhi, and it was through that body that the Gunidas Sangeet Sammelan was started in memory of his guru; accounts differ on the sammelan's first year, with the archive's earlier record giving 1977. In January 2025 the same organisation held the Pt. C. R. Vyas Janm-Shatabdi Sangeet Samaroh at Kamani Auditorium in Delhi to mark his birth centenary, closing with a sarod recital by Amjad Ali Khan.

His own account of the ragas he made is preserved on his son Satish Vyas's website: alongside the bandishes under the pen-name Gunijaan he composed ragas of his own, among them Dhankoni Kalyan, Sanjogiya and Shiv-Abhogi — the last of which is heard in the Sangeet Sartaj recording on this page. The honours listed there are the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1987, the Maharashtra Gaurav Puraskar in 1990, the Padma Bhushan in 1992, the Ustad Hafiz Ali Khan Award in 1994, the Marathwada Gaurav Puraskar in 1998, and both the Tansen Samman and the Master Dinanath Mangeshkar Puraskar in 1999.

An open-throated khayal style blending Gwalior, Kirana and Agra, with a composer's interest in rare ragas and bandishes.