Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar

Vishnu Digambar Paluskar was born on 18 August 1872 at Kurundwad, then a small princely state in the Deccan. His father, Digambar Gopal Paluskar, was a keertankar, a singer of devotional story-telling, and the boy learnt to sing by accompanying him. During the Datta Jayanti festival at nearby Narsobachi Wadi, a firecracker burst near his face and badly damaged his eyes. Doctors at Kurundwad and Miraj could not restore his sight, and a career in either school studies or keertan seemed closed to him.

The royal physician at Miraj, who had heard the boy's devotional singing, spoke to the Raja of Miraj, and the Raja placed him with Balakrishnabuwa Ichalkaranjikar, the senior musician of Maharashtra, who had learnt in Gwalior. Paluskar trained with him in the old residential way until about 1896, when relations between them became strained and he left Miraj.

He travelled for several years — to Baroda, where he sang at court, and then through Saurashtra, Gwalior, Mathura, Bharatpur and Delhi to the Punjab. In Saurashtra he gave a public concert and charged a small fee, a break from the custom that classical music was heard only in a patron's rooms or in a temple. At Mathura he studied Brij Bhasha, the language of many of the finest Hindustani song texts.

In Lahore, on 5 May 1901, he founded the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya. It was run on donations, public support and the money from his own concerts, and it taught to regular courses rather than leaving everything to a teacher's moods. He set up a press to print music books in notation, and insisted on strict discipline in both music and conduct, so that families who had looked down on musicians began to send their children, including daughters. In September 1908 he opened a branch in Bombay and later moved the school there; a building was put up in 1915 and a hostel after it, largely on borrowed money. In 1924, while he was away on a concert tour, his creditors seized and auctioned the property.

He moved to the Shri Ram Nam Adhar Ashram he had started at Nashik and gave his later years almost entirely to devotional music. His Ram dhun "Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram" was sung at the head of Mahatma Gandhi's Dandi March in 1930, and his "Vande Mataram" was regularly heard at sessions of the Indian National Congress. In failing health he was taken to Miraj by its Raja, and he died there on 21 August 1931.

Of his twelve children, only one son, Dattatreya, survived; he was eleven when his father died and was trained by his father's senior students, becoming the singer D. V. Paluskar. Paluskar's own students — among them Omkarnath Thakur, Vinayakrao Patwardhan and Narayanrao Vyas — became leading performers and teachers, and after his death they formed the Akhil Bharatiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal to carry the schools on. In 2000 India Today named him, alongside Bhatkhande, among the "100 people who shaped India".

Trained in the Gwalior style through Balakrishnabuwa Ichalkaranjikar. He rewrote or replaced song texts he found coarse while keeping their tunes, and later turned almost wholly to bhajans and Ram dhun. The only recording claimed to be his voice — an early cylinder of "Baalam re" — has not been independently confirmed.