KALADHWANI - Academy Of Performing Arts

KALADHWANI – Academy Of Performing Arts
Ground Floor, NL-002, Sector 116, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India
https://kaladhwani.com/
KALADHWANI—Academy of Performing Arts—occupies the airy, red-stone top floor of Sena Bhavan in Connaught Place, New Delhi, a building better known for ticket counters and government offices. Once the elevator sighs open on the sixth floor, the clamour of the capital melts into an anteroom perfumed with rose–agarbatti and polished teak. An ochre Madhubani mural greets visitors: Krishna’s flute spirals into musical notation, its coils hinting at the literal meaning of the school’s name, “the sound of time.”

Past the shoe rack and the miniature tanpura display stretches an elliptical corridor that connects five sound-treated chambers. Each door is painted with a swara—Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa—so students can locate their teacher by humming. The largest room, Bharati Sabhagriha, seats fifty and features floating teak parquet laid over neoprene pads to cushion the knees of tabla and mridangam players. Under recessed yellow lights, a wall-to-wall jute trellis diffuses frequencies so that the sarangi’s upper registers do not glare.

Kaladhwani is both modern and rooted. Fibre-optic lines snake beneath the rafters so Hindustani vocal recitals are streamed live to diaspora patrons in Toronto or Sydney, yet superstition survives: no one touches the framed black-and-white of Vidushi Saraswati Rao—founder and disciple of the late Padma Bhushan Chhannulal Mishra—before performance. Weekly credit sessions, called “guru dakshina hours,” encourage students to sweep corridors, tune tanpuras, or annotate archival tapes in lieu of fees, making elite training democratic.

Courses run the gamut from foundational Khayal to Carnatic percussion crossover labs. Mondays begin with 5:45 a.m. “Riyaaz-e-Sur” where senior pupils cycle through dawn raags on the covered terrace, drones thick as January fog floating above telegraph wires. Saturdays belong to children: half-size sitars and colour-coded floor keyboards turn theory into hopscotch. August hosts the monsoon baithak, doors flung wide so traffic rumble and light drizzle become accidental accompanists to Misra Kirwani.

The faculty holds three unofficial rules: sing first, speak second, phone last. Mobiles surrendered at reception are labeled with the Vedic syllable inscribed on the student’s wristband; reclaiming the device means singing it back. Retired AIR producers moonlight as engineers in the in-house studio—rubber gaskets salvaged from bus-depot scrap form floating mounts for condenser microphones. An annual vinyl release, pressed at the old His Master’s Voice plant on Theatre Road, collects the year’s best taans and korvais, its cover art always a charcoal sketch of the monsoon terrace where “time becomes sound.”

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