How did distance and intimacy work across genders? And across class and caste? Again, it is not possible to find empirical evidence of how many women in Mumbai attended musical events through the 20th century, but we can make a guess by extrapolating from other public events. Available documentation of the struggle for Indian Independence in the first part of the century suggests that large numbers of women were involved in mass civil disobedience and other forms of political action. Music, however, may have borne a different set of connotations, some illicit, connected to courtesans and Muslim musicians, that would have kept middle class Hindu women out of audiences. The timings of mehfils would have been another important consideration: the performance would begin around 11.00 pm and go on until 5.00 am in the early decades of the 20th century, as musician Govindrao Tembe testifies in his memoirs. Again, as we can see from these memoirs, going to listen to music was a form of male socialising, and while it might have provided a link between rich patrons and not-so-wealthy musicophiliacs who were also perhaps performers, it seems to have left women out of the picture. The only women mentioned in such autobiographies are female performers, who at that time were clearly not from a middle-class background. 

Thus it appears from these accounts that women in the musicophiliac context, at least before the 1940s, would have been those from performing and courtesan backgrounds who had become proficient in art music, or who sang the so-called light classical forms like the thumri and ghazal. There are references to Anjanibai Malpekar hosting other musicians in her house to take part in musical exchange and discussion. They included wellknown women singers from Banaras and Kolkata, like Gauhar Jaan, Vidyadhari Devi, Rasoolan Bai and Siddheshwari Devi. Tarabai Velingkar, known as Baputara because she functioned like a male head of household (bapu meaning father), regularly organised baithaks in her house and patronised a number of musicians. Gangabai, the chaudhurayin of N.B. Compound near Congress House, took part in musical exchanges that she hosted. The lack of references to non-courtesan women in relation to music is puzzling if we recall that from the 1870s on, Kaikhusro Kabraji, founder of the Gayan Uttejak Mandali, wanted Parsi women to learn Hindustani music so that men would hear them singing at home and stop patronising entertainers outside. Although Kabraji’s ideas were not popular among the Parsis, the Mandali did enable a number of Parsi women to become familiar with Indian music. And when Paluskar started the Bombay branch of the Gandharva Mahavidyalay in 1908, he was able to attract both Hindu and Parsi women to his school. As Janaki Bakhle says, speaking about the Bombay Gandharva Mahavidyalay in 1911, ‘[It] had a total of 792 students on its roster, of whom 88 were women.’ We don’t know about the class background of these women, but some of them were probably training to be music teachers. Paluskar himself, according to Bakhle, did not encourage women to become performers. Given his focus on what he thought of as ‘Hindu’ music, there was a good deal of emphasis on learning devotional songs like bhajans and kirtans that women could sing at home during Hindu religious festivals. 

When Paluskar’s student B. R. Deodhar started his School of Indian Music in 1925, he was able to bring in even larger numbers of students, both men and women. Ramdas Bhatkal, a musicophiliac whose profile I discuss at length later on in the chapter, mentions that his sister was learning music at the Deodhar School in the early 1940s, and that the syllabus consisted only of Hindustani raga music, even if the compositions included ‘traditional’ as well as more recently composed devotional ones. We hear about schoolgirls learning music from Deodhar at the Prarthana Samaj in the 1920s. In the words of Deodhar’s granddaughter Sangeeta Gogate: 

Mr. Kore of the Prarthana Samaj used to meet Deodhar regularly, and when Deodhar told him he wanted to teach music classes, Kore gave him the books published by Prarthana Samaj which had prayers in them, and asked him to put them to music and teach them to the schoolgirls. 

Deodhar then asked Mr. Kore whether he could have space to conduct Hindustani music classes, and was given a couple of rooms in Rammohun School. From four or five girls in 1925, Deodhar’s school grew to thirty female pupils, and then boys also started coming.

It is possible that new platforms of dissemination, like the radio, were acceptable for middle-class women who were being trained in Hindustani music. This Bombay Radio Club listing of 17th April 1925, from The Times of India, for example, announces a ‘special programme of Indian music’ by Mr. S. H. Sukthankar, along with his pupils ‘Miss Kusum S. Dhurandhar and Miss Mirabai S. Kerkar’, from 9.00 to 10.30 p.m. While famous singers from a courtesan background like Bai Sunderabai are listed with just the prefix ‘Bai’, the prefix ‘Miss’ and the women’s surnames suggest that they probably came from ‘respectable’ Hindu families. 

The fact that so many young women were learning Hindustani music by the 1920s did not necessarily translate into their presence at public musical events, but as the long 20th century wore on, women became part of the concert audiences: Trinity Club photos from the 1960s show some women listening intently, although their number is fewer than the men in the room. At the Ganesh Utsavs, which are huge public events, there would certainly have been large numbers of women. The musical play, through which many people learned to follow Hindustani music, also had many female fans. In the public concerts or amplified radio broadcasts at Ranibaug (Victoria Garden) and Malabar Hill, we may speculate that the audiences included many women, perhaps on an outing with their families. But whether these women with their multiple responsibilities could afford to be ‘crazy’ about music is another matter. 

I asked Nilima Kilachand, from a wealthy music-loving Jain family, who spoke about growing up in the 1960s, whether she had many opportunities to listen to music in public settings. 

NK: You know for me, very few because my mother was interested but my father wasn’t. He was a diamond merchant. He would travel to Antwerp and all. Really not into music, but my mother was. She had learnt the sitar and vocal music. But there was no opportunity or I think it wasn’t the culture in those days to buy tickets and go and listen to late night ... We sort of did what everyone else did in the family. By the time I got into college and had my own music-loving friends, I was almost 17–18. At 20 I got married. So yes, I did go to concerts after I got married— my husband and I [in the 1970s].

We know very little about Mumbai’s women musicophiliacs who were not themselves singers. But one piece of information catches the eye. A wealthy widow named Dhaklibai Sukthankar or Bai lived in a three-storeyed house by the sea in Walkeshwar. She had inherited a great deal of property from her father, being the only surviving child. Being ‘passionately fond of music’ and, as a woman of the upper classes, not being able to learn music herself (this would have been in the 1910s or early 1920s), she supported the work of Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, the famous codifier of Hindustani music. Almost an entire floor of Bai’s house was dedicated to Bhatkhande’s Hindustani Music Research Project. In her granddaughter, actor Durga Khote’s account:

Bai spent thousands of rupees to help him [Bhatkhande] in his project of evolving a notation system to teach Hindustani music. She paid honoraria to all the musicians who assisted him in his work, and housed them. She enabled him to travel all over India to collect the information he required. The teaching methodology for Hindustani music that he evolved was built on the strength of her support. Yet, the house where this was happening was itself musically mute.

Another woman, identified only as the mother of a music student, is vividly presented in this story told by Girgaum resident Nitin Shirodkar about his guru Firoz Dastur and the guru’s guru: 

Firoz Dastur’s mother was a sacrificing woman. That entire Grant Road-Khetwadi area during the monsoons, even today you have knee-deep water, one spell of rain and there is knee-deep water. Sawai Gandharva used to come to teach Panditji at his house because they had a very big house; his father, Dasturji’s father, had a billiards table on the first floor. Dasturji’s mother doted on her son a lot and she was the one who was encouraging him to learn from Sawai Gandharva. It so happened that one day Sawai Gandharvaji said that I’m coming and it was raining cats and dogs. One hour passed, two hours passed, she was all the time going to the balcony to see whether from Khetwadi she can see Sawai Gandharva coming, and after about two hours she saw a man wading through knee-deep water trying to protect his dhoti from the rain with his umbrella. Finally, he reached his pupil’s house. The mother offered him a towel to dry himself and the taleem started right in earnest. Panditiji says: ‘I went into the kitchen to see what my mother was doing and Sawai Gandharva’s wet leather slippers were being dried on the pan. The pan that my mother used to make rotis, that same pan was being used to dry guruji’s slippers. She felt that if guruji’s slippers remained wet he would get a fever and I would miss my training the next day; this is what my mother did for me. I can never forget this sacrifice that my mother made for me, especially when it came to Guruji.’ 

Dastur’s mother and other female members of the family stood behind the curtain dividing the taleem room from the rest of the house to be able to listen to the singing. This was in the late 1930s when Sawai Gandharva was teaching the young Firoz. Why the drying out of the guru’s footwear is seen as a ‘sacrifice’ is interesting. Is it because the slippers were being dried on a cooking pan? Or because the touching of someone else’s footwear is seen as ‘polluting’ in a Hindu context? Does the Parsi Dastur use the word ‘sacrifice’ because he is embedding his experience in a majoritarian understanding of purity and pollution? Is this the word Dastur used, or is it the word his acolyte Nitin remembers him using?

As my interviews show, by the 1960s it was a common practice for Hindu women in wealthy business families to learn Hindustani music at home, usually from a Muslim ustad. However, by the 1940s, large numbers of middle-class women were attending music schools like the School of Indian Music in Girgaum, or any of the numerous ‘classes’ that were on offer. In the early 21st century, when I conducted my interviews with musicians and musicophiliacs in Mumbai, it was impossible to think of middleclass (and especially Hindu) women as not having a place among students, practitioners and audiences of Hindustani music. 

Over nearly 80 years, they have come to achieve a centrality in how the music is both represented and perpetuated. While the achievement has something to do with the de-eroticisation and sacralisation of Indian music through nationalist efforts, it was also spurred on by the growing opportunities for women to learn music through music schools as well as through individual discipleship.

The Indian Broadcasting Company started using a highpowered transmitter in 1927 and ‘Indian music’ formed an important part of its programming, just as it was for the Bombay Presidency Radio Club from the early 1920s. Now that Hindustani raga music was reaching the home directly, it is likely that more and more people, women as well as men, were exposed to it. While in the earlier decades of the emergence of Hindustani music in Mumbai, the only way in which musicophiliacs could listen to their favourite singers was by attending concerts or private baithaks, or going to Ganesh Utsav festivities, the habit of listening was additionally cultivated from the mid-1930s on through radio broadcasts. These broadcasts often provided the earliest initiation into classical music for middle-class families. As [musician] Murli Manohar Shukla puts it:

Including my father, there were four brothers [in the family]. Although all four were music-lovers, my father fancied music the most, maybe because he was the eldest. Every night All India Radio used to be on, and from 10.00 pm to midnight he would take me into his lap to listen ... I was four years old at the time. I would listen to the radio, and sometimes I would fall asleep even as my father kept asking: you’re listening, right?

Another musicophiliac, Ramdas Bhatkal, speaks about the importance of the radio in offering shravan shiksha or musical instruction through listening:

At the time there were really good programmes on the radio at night and actually even during the day, what they called marathon—somebody would sing in the morning, in the afternoon and evening, and mind you, those days were not days of recording, so the singer had to actually wait there throughout the day and sing live. But anyway, for us as listeners every day there was a feast. To add to that, post-Independence some of the greats started singing regularly, even Faiyaz Khan, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, they would be fairly regular. And the best thing was Dr. [B.V.] Keskar [Minister of Information and Broadcasting from 1952] and his idea of national programme, with that deed taas [one-and-a-half hours] every Saturday, we would really listen to somebody really great, some of whom we couldn’t [otherwise] have listened to at all ... So we learnt a great deal through listening.

This is an excerpt from pages 88 to 93 of Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious by Tejaswini Niranjana, published in 2020. No part of this excerpt may be quoted or reproduced without prior written consent from its publisher, Tulika Books.