Bageshree Institute of Music, Dance & Arts
H-509, Sector Alpha Rd, Pocket H, Block H, Sector Alpha II, Greater Noida, Brahmpur Rajraula Urf Nawada, Uttar Pradesh 201310, India
Bageshree Institute of Music, Dance & Arts rises from a quiet, tree-shaded corner of Pune’s historic Erandwane suburb—a purposeful contrast to the traffic that hums along Karve Road only fifty metres away. Its grey stone façade is veined with bougainvillea and punctuated by long teakwood jali panels that allow music to spill outward without letting urban noise in. Step past the threshold and the first thing that strikes most visitors is the cool hush: the entry foyer doubles as an intimate amphitheatre, ring-shaped, with terraced seating for forty and a central skylight that shifts tone every hour as sunlight is filtered through stained glass quarter-tones cut like musical notation.
The institute, founded in 1987 by vocalist-parliamentarian-pedagogue Pt. Adinath Bageshree, follows his credo “shastra, sharira, sharana”—discipline, body, refuge. Six sound-proof practice chambers line the eastern wing; two are equipped with tanpura-tuned ceiling resonators designed by acoustic engineers from IIT Madras, eliminating the need for electronic drones. Students place themselves beneath the domed wooden canopy; once they begin the alaap, the room seems to answer back. In the northern wing, a mirrored studio with sprung maple flooring and built-in LED proscenium lights accommodates kathak, Odissi and contemporary classes. Bharatanatyam guru Mitali Thakker insists that every Thursday the mirrors remain curtained; dancers rehearse facing an un-reflected wall, relying only on tactile memory to check their alignments.
The library—named Akaar after the first vowel sound—stretches across the first-floor mezzanine, shelving 3,500 rare microfilms of 78-rpm recordings, a complete digitisation of Abdul Karim Khan’s 1913 Berlin sessions, and recent MIT Press journals on embodied cognition in music. A Coleman-Bell spectrograph salvaged from All India Radio’s 1960s studios sits in the glass corner; students have used it to map how Dhrupad dhamars create subharmonic “difference tones” that a stethoscope picks up in the chest cavity. Coffee is strictly filter kaapi, served in brass davara-tumblers on the verandah outside; the institute’s rhythms are set less by clock-time than by its daily riyaaz bell—three descending notes on an 18-inch bronze manjira struck at 6:30 a.m., 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Every March the institute hosts the all-night “Raag-Rasm” festival, turning the front garden into a mandap lined with kerosene-lit terracotta lamps. Concerts move from dusk’s Bhairav to dawn’s Lalit in a 300-minute sequence that visitors follow barefoot on woven seagrass mats. Admission is free, but you exchange your show ticket for a stamped postcard; musicians sign it on exit, obliging them to also give the audience three minutes of spoken insight—a tradition Bageshree called “chatting across centuries.”
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- Published: August 17, 2025
