Spandan School of Art & Culture

Spandan School of Art & Culture
Godrej Woods, Block A, Sector 43, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201303, India

Spandan School of Art & Culture is a Mumbai-based institute where music is treated not merely as repertoire to be memorised, but as an embodied language that begins in the artist’s pulse and finds voice through disciplined practice. Founded in 2001 by sitarist Dhruv Prakash and vocalist Amrita Chaterjee, Spandan set out to answer a deceptively simple question: how do you teach centuries-old ragas and talas so they remain alive, personal, and socially relevant in a metropolis that moves at the speed of local trains and stock-market tickers?

The answer lies in the architecture – both human and literal. The school occupies the top floor of a restored Portuguese-era manor on Chapel Road, Bandra. A vaulted teak ceiling, once carved for colonial dinners, now becomes an acoustic vault for khayal and raga-sangeet. Students leave their footwear at the arched doorway and advance across cool kadappa stone into classrooms where cushioned alcoves absorb overtones better than any imported foam. Each room has an assigned raga: morning sessions in Bhimpalasi happen under north-facing louvres that filter gold light; Kafi arrives in a south chamber latticed with rain-soaked planters. The common hall, “Saraswati Chowk,” is a sunken rectangle of polished mango-wood flooring large enough for a twenty-musician ensemble yet intimate enough that a tanpura drone still feels like a private conversation.

Curriculum is the intersection of guru-shishya intimacy and modern pedagogy. Core faculty – all practising performers rather than career teachers – mentor in clusters of five students at most. A three-year Diploma in Hindustani Vocal or Instrumental (sitar, tabla, sarangi and, since 2019, bansuri) is evaluated through quarterly baithaks: mini-concerts held Friday evenings on the rooftop. Here, neighbours, café waiters, film editors and aunties from the old parish crowd onto dhurries under fairy-light canopies, grading students not on concert etiquette but on whether they can make the raga breathe for listeners who may know nothing of aroha-avaroha. Fee is tiered: students from low-income municipal schools receive full scholarships funded by corporate sponsors attracted to the school’s “Concert for the Commuters” series staged monthly at Bandra station foot-overbridge, 8:00 – 8:20 a.m., when the city’s busiest minds need music most.

Technology never replaces guru, yet is deployed without apology. Each classroom has a 360-degree camera; students can revisit the guru’s meend or krintan gesture at quarter-speed on custom tablets during next-day practice. The library houses 1,200 digitised recordings of Jaipur-Atrauli and Patiala masters; bluetooth-encrypted, they travel to learners in Jaipur dorms and Marol call-centre backoffices alike. Every Diwali, Spandan mounts “Antar-Yatra,” a web-streamed cycle of twelve raags performed continually for twenty-four hours by alumni now settled from Brooklyn to Bhutan.

Exit the main gate and you hear rehearsals drifting over the banyan roots; tabla bols skitter past auto horns; a harmonium strains its reeds into evening air thick with prism-spray from Koli fishmongers hosing down their catch. That blend – briny, metallic, melodious – is Spandan’s signature chord.

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