Vishnu Digambar Jayanti presentation traces five decades of Hindustani concerts in photographs

This year's Vishnu Digambar Jayanti in New Delhi marked the birth anniversary of Pt. Vishnu Digambar Paluskar with an audio-visual presentation curated by the photographer Avinash Pasricha. Covering 1944 to 1994, it paired black-and-white photographs with recordings of the music, all drawn from the archives of the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, the institution that holds the festival every year.

Paluskar (1872-1931) made Hindustani music accessible to a wider audience, and his work helped carry it onto the public concert platform. The festival named after him has kept that history in view, and the archival selection put faces and sounds to it.

From D.V. Paluskar to a teenage Amjad Ali Khan

The presentation opened with photographs and recordings of D.V. Paluskar, Vishnu Digambar's son. Among the rarer images was one of Amjad Ali Khan at 14 or 15, possibly taken at one of his first major concerts in Delhi. Each picture was matched to a recording retrieved from the Mahavidyalaya's holdings.

Other items let audiences hear performers they might never have heard live. Vocalist Meera Banerjee and violinist D.K. Datar were among them. Sequences following single musicians across four or five decades drew particular attention; Pt. Jasraj appeared first as a 30-year-old with unruly curls and later as the mature artiste audiences came to know. The archive also yielded excerpts from talks organised by the institution, with Ustad Vilayat Hussain Khan, Pt. S.N. Ratankar and Pt. Dilip Chandra Vedi of the Agra gharana.

Carnatic musicians appear in the festival's history too. The presentation acknowledged flautist T.R. Mahalingam, known as Mali, and vocalist M. Balamuralikrishna.

How the concert experience changed

The images made the shift in concert culture plain. Musicians wore achkans and topis. Stage arrangements were informal, with performers seated close together and listeners sometimes sitting on the stage itself, while much of the audience sat on the floor. Concerts ran longer, often well past midnight, and the sound equipment looked far less sophisticated than it does now.

Partho Datta, a longtime listener, recalled one such evening:

“I remember once sitting on the stage as it was so overflowing, listening to Pt. Kumar Gandharva. Imagine, Shubha Mudgal was playing the tamboora behind him.”

Another regular, Priya Mann, pointed to what has stayed constant. "No one talks on the phone during a concert or walks across the hall in front of the audience," she said, adding that concerts start on time, the sound system is set beforehand and announcements are "muted and informative".

A family association continues

The Maudgalya-Mudgal family remains tied to the Mahavidyalaya into a third generation, represented by Arushi and Sawani Mudgal. The Hindu covered the presentation on thehindu.com, noting that the photographs and recordings now serve as records of a musical era that has largely passed.