Srijan Deshpande is a performer, writer, researcher, educator, and archivist of Hindustani Classical Music. He has received training in the genre from his father, the illustrious singer-musicologist Pt. Satyasheel Deshpande. He is a fellow of the New India Foundation, and is currently involved in writing a major biography of the iconic twentieth-century Hindustani vocalist Pt. Kumar Gandharva, with the fellowship’s support. Srijan is also a Research Associate at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Srijan performs Hindustani Khayal music on the concert stage and is a regular performer in India and in the United States. His musical idiom derives itself from his continuing eclectic, expressive, and scholarly training with his father, his decades-long exposure to the diversity of the Hindustani tradition through his work with music archives, and his scholarly work on the music of Kumar Gandharva, vocal acoustics, and a variety of other areas of musicological interest.
Srijan has a doctorate in musicology from the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India. His dissertation is a study of the music of Pt. Kumar Gandharva, one of the most important figures of Hindustani music in the latter half of the twentieth century, and involves constructing a rigorous account of the alterity of his music in the context of the recent history of the Khayal genre. It is thus a critical examination of how the Hindustani tradition and some of its important protagonists attempted to reconcile colonial, modernist, and reformist forces with pre-colonial musical practice, pedagogy and performance. Srijan also writes on music for important publications, including The Hindu, Frontline and Scroll.in, and authors papers in various academic publications. A paper was awarded the Martin Hatch prize, 2023 by the Society for Asian Music.
Srijan has substantial experience teaching graduate and undergraduate courses on Hindustani music. He is co-creator/instructor for the MOOC course ‘Appreciating Hindustani Music’, produced by the Government of India’s Swayam program and facilitated by the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL). Srijan has previously taught music to full-time students of music at the FLAME University’s School of Fine and Performing arts and at MIT’s Vishwashanti Sangeet Kala Academy in Pune, India. He has also taught courses on music appreciation, voice training and on the physics of musical sound (through musical instrument construction) at Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, India. Srijan currently teaches music privately to a number of students of all ages and levels in Fremont, California, and is engaged in developing new ways to teach music in a way that is relevant, engaging, performative, and backed by rigorous scholarship.
Through his work at the Samvaad Foundation, one of India’s most important archives of Hindustani music, Srijan has been exposed to an eclectic mix of perspectives and approaches towards music making in this tradition. While at Manipal, Srijan was also coordinator of the Manipal-Samvaad Centre for Indian Music, where he led the creation of a musicological catalogue of the archive’s holdings. He has previously been the recipient of a research fellowship from the Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India for studying and documenting the various Gharana traditions of Hindustani Music. His curatorial work at the Saptak Archives, Ahmedabad has further enriched his exposure to the diversity of the Hindustani tradition and has led to his involvement in the creation of a much appreciated video series on Gharana music, and a podcast on iconic musicians. Srijan thus has over 15 years of musical, scholarly and technological experience in the preservation, documentation, research and dissemination of Hindustani music using digital technology.
Forging a symbiosis between scholarly work and musical practice, and allowing the one to feed off the other is one of Srijan’s enduring goals. Presently, Srijan resides in Fremont, California with his wife and ten-year-old son, where he is engaged in his book project while also freelancing as performer and educator of Hindustani music.
