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India Abroad
* SPOTLIGHT*
A school for Dhrupad

by Priya Ganapati

Excerpts from article - the full text is in copies of India Abroad on the newsstand.

Priya Ganapati listens to the sound of music at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai

At one of India's top six engineering schools the classrooms are reverberating with more than the usual studious murmur. The Indian Institute of Technology at the northern Mumbai suburb of Powai will play host to a gurukul on its campus where budding engineers are learning one of the oldest forms of Indian classical music - the Dhrupad. The gurukul is a throwback to the ancient Indian system of education through which a student and his teacher lived together on campus, extending their interactions beyond the scheduled teaching hours.

The Dhrupad Sansar, the gurukul, will be run by renowned vocalist Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar (http://www.dagar.org), who will stay on the campus. First year students at lIT usually choose between music and sports as one of their term subjects. But there has never been an institutionalized system of teaching music. Freshmen usually attend the music classes to earn the credits required for the semester. Madhav Desai, professor of electrical engineering at lIT Mumbai, and one of the key figures behind the establishment of the gurukul, believes the exposure to music is necessary to help the students become well-rounded individuals.

"As one of the leading Indian educational institutes we also bear the responsibility of transmitting Indian values and culture", says Professor Desai. "We want our students to be not just good engineers but also be exposed to different parts of our culture which will make them complete persons."

...

The gurukul will be the first for any IIT in India. "The Dhrupad Sansar goes deeper than the mandatory classes of music that the students take", says Dr B B Appaji, the professor in charge of student affairs at lIT Mumbai. He adds there is no compulsion to attend these classes and that it is not to be treated as a hobby. "The gurukul will build in IIT's students an abiding love and understanding of our country's cultural and musical heritage", agrees Professor Desai. Dhrupad with its history is best suited for this, he feels. Dhrupad, the oldest existing form of Indian classical music, is spiritual in nature and its main purpose is aradhana (worship). It seeks not to entertain, but to induce feelings of peace and contemplation in the listener.

Dhrupad originated in temple renditions well before the sixth century when the royal courts of various kingdoms in India patronized it. This ensured its survival over 1,500 years. Today there are just three families in all of India that practice this time-honored art form. Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar represents the musical tradition of one of the three families believed to have preserved and nurtured Dhrupad music for 20 unbroken generations. One of the most acclaimed proponents of the musical form, the Ustad learnt vocal and instrumental music, veena and sitar from his father who was the court musician for the maharaja of Udaipur in Rajasthan. For 22 years, the Ustad ran a gurukul in Bhopal funded by the Government of India and tutored several classical musicians. Finally, the 70-year-old Ustad decided to move to Mumbai to be with his family and friends.

The gurukul at lIT had its genesis in a workshop, Introduction to Dhrupad, organized by lIT Mumbai in August last year. The 15-day event had nearly 40 participants and included students, professors and other campus residents. Participants were given an introduction to Dhrupad and had to adhere to a grueling schedule. Classes began at 4 am and continued till 8 am, after which the participants attended college. A four-hour session was also held every evening. "There were enough people affected to decide whether they wanted to continue with it after the workshop was over", says Desai. "So they requested Ustadji to continue at IIT". So from October last year, the Ustad started visiting lIT regularly. In the beginning he dropped in just once every few weeks and then started upping the frequency of his visits to more than once a week.The sylvan lIT surroundings and the spirited enthusiasm of the students worked their magic on the Ustad, who quickly warmed to the idea of heading a gurukul within the prestigious institute.

The gurukul, where classes will be on from morning to evening, will be located at a bungalow that overlooks the picturesque Powai lake at the perimeter of the IIT campus. Once the residence of the director of IIT, the bungalow will now have the Ustad living and conducting classes in it. Students are welcome to drop in anytime to meet with the Ustad for riyaz (practice) at the gurukul. For now, the Ustad has decided to stay for at least five years on campus.

Teaching students at IIT, who are known better for their logical bent of mind, does not faze him. He believes there is music in every form of life. "Man has music in every part of his body. The flow of blood through the veins and the sound of air exhaled are all a form of music. Without music life is incomplete, however much you learn anything else", he says.

Initially, he has picked 40 students for his gurukul. The selection has been made from out of the nearly 4,000 students that study at ITT Mumbai. To help zero in on the candidates, he conducted a Dhrupad workshop on October 10; the final 40 were selected from among the participants of the workshop. "From the beginning I was clear that the only way I wanted to teach was through the gunishishya method in a gurukul. I did not want to get into diplomas in music and other formal educational systems", says the Ustad.

The Ustad's insistence on the purity of the age-old gurukul system also means the students will learn music for free. But professors and other residents of the campus will have to pay about Rs 1,000 (about $20) a month as fees. The Ustad will be paid around Rs 25,000 (about $600) per month by the institute. IIT has already provided the Ustad with a home and is committed to supporting all his activities on the campus. Students at ITT Mumbai may learn with the Ustad for four years if they begin training from their first year. But the maestro is not averse to accepting students in their final year. "All I look for in my students is lagan [dedication]". he declares. Whether they are musically inclined is secondary, he believes. "Lagaan can overcome any other obstacle".

The gurukul has already started attracting its share of enthusiasts. Sunita Amin, a former resident of Sunnyvale, California, moved to IIT Powai a few days ago with her husband and child, simply for the gurukul. Sunita's husband Amberish was a software engineer, in a Silicon Valley firm. The couple moved to California about a year-and-a-half ago but soon found they did not like the US. Sunita missed her dance and music and Amberish started feeling homesick. They wanted to return to India. "My guruji in India is Bahruddin Dagar, Ustadji's nephew", says Sunita. "When he talked about the gurukul at IIT I thought this would be a good time and place to come back My husband, a former IITian, then got a job as a systems administrator at the School of IT on the campus and we decided to move here".

Professor Desai hopes the gurushishya form of learning demonstrated at the gurukul will have an impact on the institute's relationship with its students. "I feel I can teach my students the philosophy of Dhrupad - purity and honesty - in their vocation of electrical engineering", says Professor Desai. "I want them to learn to love the subject and show the same devotion and practice that they do while learning the music. And I want to build a closer relationship with my students. As the gurukul system shows the teacher is not above the student."

"There are only three things in this world that we cannot see without our eyes", he says. "One is god, whose presence is only established by faith. The second is air, which we can only feel. And the last is swur [musical notes]. I want the students here to experience all three. Only then their life is complete."

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