Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande

Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande was born on 10 August 1860 at Walkeshwar in Bombay. Music was part of home life — his mother sang and his father played the swarmandal as an amateur — and as a boy he learnt the flute and later the sitar. He studied at Elphinstone College, took a law degree from Bombay University in 1887 and practised as a lawyer.

In 1884 he joined the Gayan Uttejak Mandali, a music society in Bombay, where over several years he learnt khayal and dhrupad compositions from musicians including Raojibua Belbagkar and Ali Hussain. After the deaths of his wife and daughter in the early 1900s he gave less and less time to law and, by about 1910, devoted himself entirely to music.

From 1904 he travelled widely. In the south he met Carnatic musicians in Madras, Ramanathapuram and Ettayapuram, and obtained two old treatises that classified ragas, the Chaturdandi Prakashika of Venkatamakhin and the Svaramelakalanidhi of Ramamatya. In 1907–09 he toured central, eastern and northern India, visiting court and temple musicians and comparing different versions of the same compositions. At Rampur he studied with Wazir Khan, a descendant of Tansen.

From this material came his best-known work. He grouped the ragas in use into ten parent scales, or thaats — Bilawal, Kalyan, Khamaj, Bhairav, Poorvi, Marwa, Kafi, Asavari, Bhairavi and Todi. His four-volume Hindustani Sangeet Paddhati, written in Marathi as a dialogue between teacher and student, discussed raga theory in detail. The six-volume Kramik Pustak Malika, published from 1919 and completed after his death, set out more than two thousand traditional compositions in his notation, graded for students. He also wrote lakshan geets, songs that describe a raga's features, and some of his books appeared under the pen-names Vishnu Sharma and Chaturpandit.

Bhatkhande believed that musicians of different traditions should compare and discuss their music openly. In 1916, under the patronage of Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, he organised the first All-India Music Conference at Baroda, bringing together some four hundred musicians; further conferences followed in Delhi, Banaras and Lucknow. He was asked to reorganise the Baroda state music school, helped set up the Madhav Sangeet Mahavidyalaya in Gwalior, and in 1926, with Rai Umanath Bali and other Lucknow patrons, founded the Marris College of Music in Lucknow — now Bhatkhande Sanskriti Vishwavidyalaya.

After a stroke in 1933 he grew weak, and he died at Walkeshwar on 19 September 1936. His students S. N. Ratanjankar and G. N. Natu carried on his teaching; Ratanjankar in particular shaped what became known as the Bhatkhande tradition. In 1961 India Post issued a stamp in his honour, and in 2000 India Today named him, with his contemporary Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, among the "100 people who shaped India".

A scholar more than a performer. His thaat system classifies ragas by their scale and is used mainly for teaching; musicians have long argued that ten thaats cannot hold every raga. His notation, written in Devanagari with marks above and below the letters, became the standard for printed compositions.