Tradition · dhrupad tradition · India
Bettiah dhrupad tradition
The Bettiah dhrupad tradition at Bettiah in West Champaran district, Bihar — the Bihar dhrupad lineage developed under the Bettiah royal house's 18-19 century patronage. The Bettiah tradition emphasises the Haveli Sangeet temple-devotional style of dhrupad, with slow meditative alaap development, Sanskrit-Hindi devotional composition, and performance at the Bettiah Raj Darbar. The gharana's modern exponent is the Mallick family (Pandit Ram Kumar Mallick and his son Pandit Prashant Mallick), who continue the family lineage of dhrupad gurus traced to Pandit Daya Ram Mallick (early 19-century). The 2015 Bettiah Dhrupad Mahotsav festival at Bettiah draws dhrupad performers from across India. The Bettiah tradition is distinct from the Dagar family dhrupad tradition (Delhi gharana) by its Hindu-court origin and its emphasis on the Haveli Sangeet style over the Dagar vocal technique.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Tradition
- Dhrupad tradition; gharana histories
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 26.802, 84.503
A gharana is a lineage/tradition rather than a simple place-bound institution; the mapped point is an origin, court, or major associated centre and should not be read as an exclusive birthplace.
Connections (1)
- Companion in the same setBhendi Bazaar gharana
Bettiah and Bhendi Bazaar are the two extremes of how a gharana gets its name. One is a Bihar zamindari that paid for dhrupad singers from the seventeenth century and kept a form the cities had stopped wanting; the other is a Bombay street where three brothers from Moradabad set up in the 1890s and built a style around merukhand permutation and breath control. Court money and city rent produced the same institution by different routes.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Dhrupad”. Bonnie Wade and the standard gharana literature; IGNCA and Sangeet Natak Akademi oral-history collections.
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