ध्रुपद
The oldest living Hindustani vocal genre, sung with the pakhawaj drum
Dhrupad, the oldest Hindustani vocal genre still sung, opens with a long unaccompanied alap on the raga, then sings a fixed composition with the pakhawaj drum.
Historians date dhrupad as a named genre to the Gwalior court of Man Singh Tomar (reigned 1486 to 1516), where musicians such as Bakshu and Baiju, a figure much wrapped in legend, set Hindi verse in place of Sanskrit. His treatise, the Manakutuhala, is lost apart from one chapter and survives through a Persian rendering of 1665-66. The historian Hariharnivas Dwivedi notes that songs called dhruvapada existed earlier. Practitioners trace dhrupad further back, through older song forms to Sama Vedic chant and temple singing. From Gwalior it spread to Sufi gatherings, temples and the court of Akbar, where 15 of the 36 master singers Abu'l-Fazl lists came from Gwalior, Tansen foremost.
The solemn style heard today had probably formed by the reign of Muhammad Shah (1719 to 1748), who also brought khayal into the classical mainstream. Hereditary lineages carried dhrupad through khayal's rise, among them the Dagar family and the Mallick family of Darbhanga. After independence the Senior Dagar Brothers, Nasir Moinuddin and Nasir Aminuddin Dagar, and their cousins are credited with keeping it alive. New state patronage followed, and the Dhrupad Kendra in Bhopal opened on the initiative of the civil servant Ashok Vajpeyi.
A dhrupad performance opens with the alap, sung over the tanpura drone with no drum and no song text. The singer uses syllables in place of words. Dagar practitioners derive these syllables from a mantra phrase, while other writers describe them as conventional syllables with no meaning.
The alap usually starts at the middle tonic and sinks into the low register (mandra), then climbs through the middle (madhya) to the high register (tar), though singers do not always keep that order. It then takes on a pulse that quickens in stages. Vocal practice calls the pulsed phase nom-tom; it parallels the jor of instrumental music, and a fast closing phase often resembles instrumental jhala. The drum stays silent throughout.
Only then does the composition begin with the pakhawaj. The ethnomusicologist Bonnie Wade puts a concert performance at about 40 to 60 minutes, opening with a lengthy alap.
The pakhawaj, a horizontal two-headed barrel drum, accompanies dhrupad in place of the tabla, and the tanpura supplies the drone. Paintings show how the ensemble changed. In the 1500s singers kept the tala with hand gestures and sang with the rudra veena. Paintings of the 17th century add a long-necked drone lute and the pakhawaj, and in the 1700s the veena left the vocal group as its players became independent.
The drummer need not play the theka, the fixed pattern that marks a tala in khayal. Instead the drummer joins the rhythmic improvisation, playing complex patterns, falling silent where a beat is expected or improvising alongside the singer. Wade suggests this freedom may date from the time when singers kept the tala by hand.
Of the five talas in 1990s performances, chautal (12 beats) and jhaptal (10) led; practitioners also list sultal (10) and tivra (7). Songs for the spring festival of Holi, set in the 14-beat dhamar tala, form the related genre dhamar.
Dhrupad has four banis (also vanis), stylistic streams named Gauhar, Dagar, Khandar and Nauhar. Spellings vary between sources: Gauhar also appears as Gauri, and Khandar as Khandhar. The streams differ in tempo, voice culture, the balance between alap and composition, and ornament.
In practitioners' accounts, Gauhar is known for smooth glides and a reposeful gait, and the Dagar bani gives most weight to a slow, subtle alap with close attention to shruti. Khandar, the bani associated with the Mallick family of the Darbhanga gharana, uses a forceful voice and vigorous gamak. Nauhar is known for rhythmic division of the text and lively passages. Tradition names a founder for each, such as Tansen for Gauhar and Swami Haridas for Dagar, but these attributions remain unverified, and practitioners stress that the boundaries between banis were always fluid.
Suivez ce parcours structuré pour maîtriser cette discipline
A dhrupad alap covers a wide range, from the low tonic to the fourth or fifth note above the upper tonic, and Bonnie Wade notes the heavy demand this makes on the voice. One Dagar-trained singer describes the aim as an unsupported sound that fills the body (niradhar nad), in place of a frontal throat sound. Practise long tones across that range with your teacher.
Learn to unfold a raga at a slow pace on syllables over the tanpura drone, carrying it from the low register to the high, with close attention to shruti (microtones). Then add the pulsed nom-tom phase and the faster passages that lead towards the composition, the order a dhrupad alap follows in performance.
A bandish is a fixed composition set to a tala, a repeating rhythmic cycle. A dhrupad bandish can have four sections: sthayi, usually in the lower half of the middle register; antara, which rises to the upper tonic; sanchari, often in the low register; and abhog, which returns towards the sthayi. Many have only the first two. Learn one composition and mark where each section begins.
Dhrupad ornament rests on meend, a glide between notes, and gamak, an oscillation on or around a note. Students work on both and leave aside the fast runs (tans) and the quick turns called murki and khatka that khayal uses. As the alap gathers speed, new and quicker ornaments enter that are almost absent from the slow opening.
Performance practice centres on improvising on the composition's words once the pakhawaj enters. In bol-bant the singer divides the words into faster note values, such as halves, thirds and quarters; in laykari the singer plays rhythm against and within the tala. Dhrupad is sung solo or by a pair, and Dagar singers have performed as duos, often brothers, over several generations.
Interprètes renommés de cette discipline
You can learn dhrupad singing online with KalaSudha, in live one-to-one lessons with a vetted teacher. Dhrupad, the oldest Hindustani vocal genre still sung, opens with a long unaccompanied alap, an unmetred exploration of the raga, then sings a fixed composition with the pakhawaj drum.
Your first stage at Foundation is voice production. You practise long tones across the range a dhrupad alap covers, from the low tonic up to the fourth or fifth note above the upper tonic. Our courses run in levels, and KalaSudha adds workshops and summer camps where enough learners sign up.
Have more questions? Contact our support team and we'll be happy to help!
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