Calcutta Music Blog

 Morning Ragas by Kesarbai Kerkar and Pt. D.V Paluskar
Six extraordinary morning ragas including raag – Jaunpuri, Desi, Bilaskhani Todi, Asavari, Bivhaas and Lalit exclusive at Calcutta Music Radio FM by Kesarbai Kerkar and Pandit D. V. Paluskar. Have a great morning.

Kesarbai Kerkar

Kesarbai-Kerkar

Hindustani vocalist Surashri Kesarbai Kerkar (b. July 13, 1892 – d. September 16, 1977) is considered one of the finest and most powerful Indian classical singers of the 20th century.

Early life
Born in the tiny village of Keri (also spelled “Querim”), in the Ponda taluka of North Goa, Goa (then a Portuguese colony), at the age of eight Kerkar moved to Kolhapur where she studied for eight months with Abdul Karim Khan. Upon her return to Goa, she studied with the vocalist Ramkrishnabuwa Vaze (1871-1945). At the age of 16 she migrated to Bombay, where she studied with various teachers, eventually ending up as disciple to Ustad Alladiya Khan (1855-1946), the founder of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana, beginning in 1921.

Career
Kerkar eventually achieved wide renown, performing regularly for aristocratic audiences. She was very particular about the representation of her work and consequently made only a few 78 rpm recordings, for the HMV and Broadcast labels.

Kerkar was awarded the decoration of Padma Bhushan by the government of India in 1969, and in the same year the government of the Indian state of Maharashtra conferred upon her the title of “Rajya Gayika.” Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is said to have been very fond of Kerkar’s singing. Her honorific title “Surashri” (or “Surshri”) literally means “excellent voice” (sur meaning “voice” and shri meaning “excellent), and was bestowed on her in 1948 by the Sangeet Pravin Sangitanuragi Sajjan Saman Samiti of Calcutta. In her ancestral village of Keri, the Surashree Kesarbai Kerkar High School now occupies the site of Kerkar’s former second home, and the house where she was born still stands, less than one kilometer away. A music festival called the Surashree Kesarbai Kerkar Smriti Sangeet Samaroha is held in Goa each November and a music scholarship in her name is awarded annually to a University of Mumbai student.

Kerkar has the further distinction of having one of her recordings, “Jaat Kahan Ho”, duration 3:30 (an interpretation of raga Bhairavi) included on the Voyager Golden Record, a gold-plated copper disc containing music selections from around the world, which was sent into space aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts in 1977. The recording was recommended for inclusion on the Voyager disc by the ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown, who believed it to be the finest recorded example of Indian classical music.

Since 2000, several CDs of her archival recordings have been released, including one on the Golden Milestones series, which contains several of her most famous songs.
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P.V. Paluskar
Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar (August 18, 1872 – August 21, 1931) was a Hindustani musician.

P.V-Paluskar

Early life
Vishnu Digambar Paluskar was born in Kurundwad, a small town falling under the Deccan division of Bombay Presidency during British rule, presently in Maharashtra. His father, Digambar Gopal Paluskar, was a singer of Kirtan—a religious song. He went to a local school in Kurundwad for primary education. But tragedy struck Paluskar at an early age. During a Hindu festival called Datta Jayanti, a fire-cracker burst near his face damaging both his eyes. Being a small town, there was no immediate treatment available and Paluskar lost his eye-sight. The king of Miraj recognising the talent in the boy put him under the guidance of Balakrishnabuwa Ichalkaranjikar, a learned musician. Paluskar trained under him for 12 years till in 1896 the relations between the teacher and student became strained.

Travels and study of music

After that Paluskar began touring the country and studied the musical traditions in each part of Northern India. He went from place to place and visited many royal families in cities like Baroda and Gwalior, well known for their patronage of musicians. But he broke a long standing tradition of Indian music by giving a public concert in Saurashtra and charging a nominal fee. Concerts by musicians were always given in palaces or temples but never in public. He studied Brijbhasha, a dialect of Hindi, spoken at Mathura. He met Pandit Chandan Chaube and learnt Dhrupad music from him. Paluskar reached Lahore in 1901 where he decided to settle down and establish a music school.

Gandharva Mahavidyalaya

On May 5, 1901 Paluskar founded the Gandharva Mahavidyala, a school to impart formal training in Indian classical music.[1] It was a school open to all and one of the first music schools in India to run on public support and donations rather than the patronage of the royalty. The school was a challenge to the traditional teacher-student method of training music where a student lived under the roof of the teacher. Many students from his early batches became respected musicians and teachers in North India. This brought a change in the way people looked at classical musicians. They started treating musicians with respect which was not associated with the profession earlier.

In September 1908 Paluskar went to Bombay (now Mumbai) to establish another branch of the school. As the work-load increased, Paluskar shifted the school from Lahore to Bombay. To accommodate all the students, he took loans and built a new building for the school and built hostels for the students. He worked very hard and gave several concerts in public places but could not gather sufficient funds to pay his debt. Finally, when he was on a concert tour in 1924, his creditors attached his properties and auctioned off the school. This was a big blow to Paluskar.

Association with the Independence struggle

Paluskar came in contact with leaders of the Indian independence movement like Lala Lajpat Rai, Lokmanya Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi. When Lala Lajpat Rai was arrested in 1907 he sang a composition of the famous song Pagree Sambhal Jatta. He used to attend the conventions of the Indian National Congress and sing his own composition of Vande Mataram, the national song of India, in Raga Kafi.[3] Paluskar was a master of taking old religious songs and setting them into classical tunes. Paluskar composed the tune of the devotional song Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram. This was Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite Bhajan and was sung daily by the satyagrahis during the famous Dandi March.[4] He also composed a variation of the patriotic song Saare Jahan Se Achcha. Such was his fame that when King George V came to India, Paluskar was asked to perform at the Royal Garden of Lahore.

Death and legacy

Paluskar died on August 21, 1931. On 21 July 1973, the Posts and Telegraph Department, Government of India paid homage to Pandit Paluskar by releasing a commemorative stamp.[6] Today Paluskar is seen as the musician who brought respect to the profession of classical musicians and took Hindustani classical music out from the traditional Gharana system to the masses of India. He has written a book on music called Sangeet Bal Prakash in three volumes, and also written 18 volumes on ragas. Many of his disciples like Omkarnath Thakur, Vinayak Rao Patwardhan and Narayan Rao Vyas were renowned classical singers. His son D. V. Paluskar was also trained in classical music and carried on the mission of his father. In 2000, the India Today magazine named Pandit Paluskar to be one of the 100 people who shaped India.

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Tracklist of Morning Ragas Exclusive at Calcutta Music Radio Blog

1. MORNING RAAGA – Raag Jaunpuri.mp3    by Kesarbai Kerkar
2. MORNING RAAGA – Raag Desi.mp3   by Kesarbai Kerkar
3. MORNING RAAGA – Raag Bilaskhani Todi.mp3    by Pt D V Paluskar
4. MORNING RAAGA – Raag Asavari.mp3    by Pt D V Paluskar
5. MORNING RAAGA – Raag Vibhaas.mp3    by Kesarbai Kerkar
6. MORNING RAAGA – Raag Lalit.mp3    by Pt D V Paluskar