Ashirwad Music Academy
E- Block-1039, 11th Avenue Gaur City 2, Gaur City 2, Greater Noida, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India
Ashirwad Music Academy sits on the first floor of an old colonial-era corner house on Kumara Park Road in Bangalore, its pale-green shuttered windows half-open to a gulmohar-shaded boulevard. A brass nameplate in Kannada and English catches the mellow 4 p.m. sun; as you climb the short flight of stone stairs you meet the faint, reassuring scent of worn rosewood and fresh jasmine that this city’s music rooms often share. Push open the carved sal-wood door and sound leaks out: the sympathetic hiss of tanpura strings being coaxed awake, a drum student rolling tisra-gati strokes on muted rubber pads, a small child humming Sahana to keep check against a shruti box.
The academy was founded in 1999 by vocalist Vidushi Annapurna Subramaniam, disciple of the Dharwad-Agra lineage, who still opens classes at 6:30 a.m. with the same raga Bhoop she used to wake students with at her guru’s rambling house on J C Road. Today the rooms are richer in gear yet poor in clutter: twin tanpuras stand on mahogany racks like bronze swans, microphones hang from articulated boom arms, a reclaimed teak roll-top cupboard stocks harmoniums, violins and kanjelas, while a Yamaha Motif-ES workstation is pinned under half-erased staff-notation sheets.
Each of the four rooms is painted a different patch of pale sunrise—sage, indigo, turmeric, pink—so the afternoon light feels staged inside a thumri rather than a rehearsal hall. The walls are not photographs of the founders, but scores of miniature postcards the guru received over thirty years of touring, Nagpur to New York; they flutter like memory swatches throughout. A5-sized brass plaques near the exit list yearly graded vidwats; gold-lettered names glint when corridor fans swing their overhead pendant lamps.
Evening classes run Monday to Saturday in two circular blocks—Carnatic vocal, Western classical piano, Hindustani tabla, Konnakol rhythm lab—each capped at five students to preserve eye-contact intimacy. Sundays are reserved for baithaks: the main hall folds its collapsible partition into a walnut-collared proscenium, seating fifty on floor cushions and wooden pyramids. Senior students serve filter coffee in stainless-steel davara-tumblers; microphones are banished so a single Mehroon sitar can converse with a reed and goatskin Mridangam at conversational distance.
On festival nights the verandah becomes a lantern-lit threshold where parents gossip in Yakshagana accents and the smallest hopeful tries repeating a taan without apology. The academy has become less building and more relay point between generations—an airy nest tuned to 440 Hz but dedicated, above all, to keeping the parental blessing its name demands.
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- Published: August 17, 2025
