(b Bombay, 10 Aug 1860; d Bombay, 19 Sept 1936). Indian musicologist. He was educated as a lawyer and from about 1875 also studied music; from 1884 he was an active member of the Gayana Uttejak Mandali, a newly formed Bombay music society, where he learnt hundreds of traditional raga compositions. Concurrently he studied well-known Sanskrit works on music. In 1900 he collected between two and three hundred khayals from the son of a senior musician at the court of Jaipur (Rajasthan), subsequently persuading the father, Muhammad Ali Khan, to accept him as a disciple, thus legitimizing his musical standing by becoming associated with a recognized professional lineage (gharana). In south India (1904) he encountered the other flourishing canonical system of Indian art music – Carnatic music – and from a study of the 17th-century treatise Caturdandi prakāśikā evolved his system of classifying Hindustani ragas primarily according to ten thāt (scale types). He did further research in central and east India (1907) and north India (1908–9) before retiring from legal practice (1910) to devote himself to musicology. He was an initiator of the first four All-India Music Conferences (Baroda, 1916; Delhi, 1918; Banaras, 1919; Lucknow, 1924); he also provided educational guidelines for state music schools in Baroda and Gwalior and for the Marris College of Hindustani Music in Lucknow (founded 1926). Becoming a disciple of the Nawab of Rampur (Rohilkand), he gained access to the rich repertory and traditions of his court and to its senior musicians, notably Wazir Khan (of the musical lineage of the Emperor Akbar's musician Tan Sen).
In his research Bhatkhande was concerned chiefly with the raga and never dealt with rhythm or instrumentation in isolation. His four-volume Hindustānī sangīta-paddhati (Bombay, 1910–32; Hindi trans., 1954–68; Eng. trans., 1990–) is an analysis of the ragas of the north Indian oral traditions, based on years of collection and notation of the performing practices and an exhaustive investigation of the theoretical literature. One of the most far-reaching and most resisted of his conclusions was that the earliest Sanskrit treatises (pre-15th century) are only marginally relevant to 20th-century Hindustani music theory, but he used numerous passages from later Sanskrit sources in discussing ragas. (Many treatises from the 15th century to the 18th were first published by Bhatkhande or at his instance.) The six-volume Kramik pustak mālikā (Bombay, 1913–37; Hindi trans. 1954–68; Eng. trans., 1990–) contains his conclusions (as opposed to his findings and arguments), hundreds of traditional compositions, and lengthy sets of model phrases for improvised ālāp (slow introduction) printed in his own refinement of the Indian letter notational system. Volume i (1919) is an introductory primer and with volume ii (1921) concerns ten major ‘foundation’ ragas, whose scale degrees and names were those of the ten thāt of his primary classification; the larger volumes iii and iv (1922–3) contain music in 35 additional ragas, and the two posthumous volumes (1937) concern ragas less familiar or less consistently agreed on than those of volumes iii–iv, grouped according to the ten scale types.
Bhatkhande was the most important and influential Indian theorist of the first half of the 20th century. His position with respect to raga in Indian music resembles Rameau's with respect to harmony in European music, in that even those who most vigorously rejected his hypotheses have done so in terms he set. His other writings include the treatise Śrīmal-laksya sańgītam (Bombay, 1910/R), in traditional Sanskrit verse form; the paper ‘A Short Historical Survey of the Music of Upper India’ given at the Baroda Conference in 1916 (published separately, Bombay, 1934/R); and brief accounts of Sanskrit musical treatises collected after his death as A Comparative Study of some of the Leading Music Systems of the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries (Bombay, c1940/R).
HAROLD S. POWERS