Pandit Sawai Gandharva

Ramachandra Kundgolkar, known throughout his life as Rambhau and later by the stage title Sawai Gandharva, was born on 19 January 1886 at Kundgol, some nineteen kilometres from Dharwad in present-day Karnataka. His father, Ganesh Saunshi, was a clerk to the landlord Ranganagowda Nadiger. School held little for him beyond the singing his teachers admired, and his formal education ended when the family could no longer pay for it.

His first teacher was Balwantrao Kolhatkar, then living at Kundgol, from whom he learned a large body of dhrupad, tarana and other compositions before Kolhatkar's death in 1898 left the training unfinished. Ustad Abdul Karim Khan was at that time touring Karnataka and often stayed with the Nadiger family; hearing the boy sing a Bhairavi composition, he accepted him as a student, on the condition of a long period of study. The apprenticeship began in 1901.

Against his teacher's wishes he joined the Marathi stage, working for a time with Govindrao Tembe's Shivraj Natak Mandali and drawing particular acclaim in female roles — the honorific Sawai Gandharva, meaning "one and a quarter Gandharva", was bestowed in comparison with Bal Gandharva, the reigning figure of Marathi musical theatre. A paralytic stroke in 1942 ended his concert career at fifty-six, but he went on teaching until his death on 12 September 1952. The annual Sawai Gandharva festival at Pune, begun by Bhimsen Joshi in his memory, carries his name.

His reputation rests less on a recorded legacy — only a handful of early discs survive — than on what he transmitted. The slow, weighted Kirana approach to raga he received from Abdul Karim Khan passed through his teaching into several very different voices, and his years in Marathi theatre gave him a directness of delivery that his students remembered.