ELEGY FOR A FALLEN SHRINE

The Bhatkhande Music Institute, once home to Indian classical giants, is now steeped in controversies

- PUJA AWASTHI

It was another jarring note in the story of Bhatkhande Music Institute, one of India’s most respected establishments for the classical performing arts. A gulmohar tree on the institute’s boundary needed to be pruned, and an employee was “verbally” asked to do so. But once the job was done, the employee, a storekeeper, was suspended for stealing wood. He is just a year away from retirement, and is still too scared to speak of it.

That suspension illustrates most tellingly the disharmony in an institute that was deemed a university in 2000. Set up in 1926 as the Marris College of Music by Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, the institute’s vision was to make music education accessible to all. In 1966, it was renamed after its founder, a musician credited with developing the simplest, most precise system of notation for Hindustani music.

The building that houses the institute is in Lucknow’s Qaiserbagh heritage zone. It was once the ‘Pari Khana’ (Abode of Fairies) of Awadh’s last nawab, Wajid Ali Shah. The original building was destroyed in the revolt of 1857.

“When the British rebuilt it, they retained its original aesthetics and did not impose their own style of architecture on it,” said Mehmood Abdi, 60, a lawyer who is an exponent of Awadh history and culture. Thus, within its airy rooms and beneath its imposing domes, one can still be transported to a time when the most resplendent singers, dancers and musicians of the age carved an upward arc of Awadh’s cultural life.