RangKala Art Academy By Supriya Kumar
Sports City 1, Apex Golf Avenue, Sector 1, Bisrakh Jalalpur, Noida, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201306, India
RangKala Art Academy by Supriya Kumar is not a conventional conservatory; it is a living bridge between India’s classical memory and its restless present. Founded in the narrow lanes of Jor Bagh, New Delhi, in 2013, the academy occupies a repurposed three-storey haveli whose mango-wood staircase still smells faintly of indigo dye. Every doorway bears the same discreet brass plate, etched in Devanagari and English: श्रृंगार / Sound in Color. From dawn to nearly midnight, the building vibrates with a deliberate plurality of music: Dhrupad gamaks gliding against Hindustani cello drones, Carnatic microtonal exercises answered by Delhi hip-hop ciphers on the back terrace.
Supriya Kumar—sitarist-turned-curator and great-grand-student of Annapurna Devi’s Maihar gharana—teaches only three cohorts at a time, never larger than nine students each. The disciplines rotate seasonally: monsoon is for voice and drone instruments, autumn for laya and rhythmische manipulations, winter for bridge projects with spoken-word poets and sound designers. Six resident gurus share attic rooms; all are paid a fellowship rather than the usual per-lesson fee. Their authority is upheld invisibly: microphones and mixing boards can be touched only after the last guru has finished chai at dusk.
RangKala’s signature “Rang-Ekaghra” concerts happen every full moon on the rooftop. Guests sit in concentric semicircles of indigo bolsters while oil lamps mark a perimeter no bright stage light ever crosses. Raga Yaman might evolve for twenty minutes into Inuit throat games via a loop station, then recollapse into the tanpura without breaking protocol. These nights are ticketed but not priced; attendees leave donations in recycled Tabla dayan shells, a reminder that nothing here is valued louder than more than eight ounces of resonance.
Archiving is woven into the walls. A climate-controlled basement vault houses 4,000 hours of gurukul recordings, digitized at 192 kHz for future scholars; interactive projections allow visitors to remix drone layers with a fingertip. Upstairs, the Lacquer Gallery stores restored shellac and acetate discs rescued from Calcutta sari shops—Ustad Abdul Karim Khan’s c. 1905 thumri glints beside 1970s street-level recordings of Quechua pan-pipes brought over by AIR engineers.
Community outreach travels farther than the haveli. Every fortnight, academy rickshaws painted saffron-blue carry djembes, tihai bells, and portable loop pedals to resettlement colonies in Sangam Vihar. Teenagers from these neighborhoods return to learn tabla fingering under legend Pandit Suresh Talkwalkar’s occasional guest mentorship, most recently culminating in a site-specific performance around unused Delhi Metro pillars—raga sawara in architectural reverb.
To walk out of RangKala is to carry a suspended chord in your nervous system, a harmony poised between preservation and provocation. Supriya Kumar insists the academy exists for only one paradoxical reason: so that classical music need never again fear its future.
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- Published: July 30, 2025
