Neela Bhagwat

For all her activism, Bhagwat saw herself primarily as a classical singer, and in this as a proud keeper of the Gwalior gharana, becoming for several decades its leading exponent. She was a student of Sharatchandra Arolkar, himself a disciple of Krishnarao Shankar Pandit. In an essay titled 'The Khayal: What It is and What It is not' in the Journal of Arts & Ideas, she explains the form as Gwalior practices it: a 'dialectical interaction between form, content and technique (where) the bandish implies the unfolding of a process, of improvisation of the song-form, of creation and re-creation of the composed form'.^[5] She also marked in that essay the lineage of the gharana all the way back to Sadarang and Adarang, two been players in the 18th century court of Mohammad Shah, the brothers Haddu, Hassu and Nathu Khan, sons of Natthan Peerbaksh and teachers of Nissar Husain Khan, to the Pandit family and then to Arolkar. Although her primary desire remained that of a practitioner, she says she had been assigned by Arolkar with the responsibility of 'preserving the knowledge': 'You have to become like a Guru, you have to analyse, become the source of Gwalior, the Khayal and the aesthetics', she says in one interview.^[4] She wrote several books on the Khayal, more specifically on the Gwalior gayaki: the biography Krishnarao Shankar Pandit: A Doyen of Khayal (1992),^[6] Sharatchandra Arolkar: Lene Pratibheche^[7] (later published in Hindi as Khyāla-gāyana kī antaragāthā: Mere Guru Sharatchandra Arolkar)^[8] and more recently Gāyanāce Raṅgī (2023)^[9]

Bhagwat began singing professionally from 1979. For the next three decades she gave numerous concerts across India and internationally and became well known as the leading exponent of the Gwalior gayaki. Both in the performances and the several lectures, and in writing across this time, she interpreted the legacies of tradition in unusual ways. As she writes in one essay, if 'the original khayal is the most evolved, it (also) has the potential to absorb a new word, connoting a new idea, thus to communicate the cultural ethos of any period in history, to transcend the boundaries and limitations of the period in which it is born'. What the form demonstrated to her '(was) the potential for being treated on a par with forms like drama, the novel or cinema'.^[5] She became increasingly critical of the conservatism of the traditional forms, their tendency towards secrecy and their gender bias.^[4] Unable to receive the full range of knowledge from Arolkar, she studied with Pandit Jal Balaporia mainly to access traditional compositions she could not learn from Arolkar.

In 2015, breaking from what she saw as the secretiveness of Hindustani music, Bhagwat donated four volumes of compositions that she had learnt to Wikimedia Commons under the title Treasure of Gwalior Gharana. Appreciating this remarkable gesture, the singer Shubha Mudgal described this as an 'exemplary act of generosity, in the very spirit of vidya daan, or sharing of knowledge, that forms an intrinsic part of the guru-shishya tradition'.^[10]

Bhagwat is remembered as much for her work within the pure khayal form as for her several experiments, her musical collaborations, and her original compositions. Among these were Samantar, a cross-disciplinary collaboration with the Carnatic singer Aruna Sairam, singing the works of the saint poets Kabir, Meera, Chokhamela and Sahjo Bai. A special area of focus was the women saint poets, whom she translated together with Jerry Pinto as The Ant Who Swallowed the Sun: The Abhangs of the Marathi Women Saints.^[11] Then there have been her several piano collaborations, with British pianist Camilla Cancantata ('Getting the Feel' and 'The Inner Voice', part of the album titled Meeting Point ),^[12] her extensive work with the pianist Marion von Tilzer, especially 'Meditate Yourself', 'Soul to Soul' and 'Sound to Purity' in the album Moments in Togetherness,^[13] and with Aldo Brizzi ('Endless Trails', 2003-2004).^[14]

She composed and sang for several major films, notably Kumar Shahani's film Khayal Gatha (1989) and Anand Patwardhan's Raam ke Naam (1992) She taught music at the SNDT University and Bombay University. Since the early 2000s her focus was mainly on teaching students, and on presenting the work of musicians young and established as part of the Khayal Trust, an organization she ran with her partner, the singer and author Amarendra Dhaneshwar.