The Sargam school of music
FGH4+WC7, Block E, Beta I, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201308, India
Tucked away on the second floor of a pale-yellow colonial-era building in Pune’s Deccan Gymkhana neighbourhood, The Sargam School of Music announces itself modestly: a carved teak plaque beside the ancient lift and the muted drone of a tanpura floating down the stairwell. When the narrow wooden door swings open, you step onto cool Kota-stone floors that have absorbed sixty years of alaaps and arpeggios; before you stretches a long verandah wrapped around an open central courtyard. Across the verandah five practice rooms radiate calm: faded dhurries, photographs of Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and M. S. Subbulakshmi watching from cracked plaster walls, and tall double doors that can be folded back so the monsoon air can wander through the music.
Founded by vocalist-pianist Niranjan Dandekar and his tabla-playing wife Meera in 1963, the school began as a single harmonium in their living room; now it mentors roughly two hundred students, three to seventy-three years old, in Hindustani vocal, Carnatic violin, sitar, sarod, acoustic guitar, piano, and light-sound engineering. Prospective students sit quietly for an intake session on cane chairs while Meera—now silver-haired and invariably draped in a Kashmiri shawl—listens for swara discrimination by humming three notes and asking the child to echo the middle one. Graded certificates are affiliated with the Akhil Bharatiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal, but the licence the school truly prizes is the glowing letter from Bhimsen Joshi taped to the glass showcase, praising their “suron ki pavitra sadhana”.
Weekly riyaaz begins at 6:30 a.m. on the open terrace for seniors doing taan patterns; younger ones start at 4 p.m. under whirring fans. A visiting-artist scheme brings sitarist Shahid Parvez one autumn month every year, and last December the courtyard hosted a chamber concert featuring violinist Kala Ramnath and four alumni now studying at Berklee. Practice is punctuated by the smells of Meera’s ginger chai boiling on a kerosene burner and the thud of Niranjan’s walking stick as he patrols the corridor, humming Dagarsaab’s bhimpalasi to check intonation through the half-shut doors.
Tuition runs ₹2,000 a month for a half-hour individual lesson and ₹1,200 for group batches; sibling discounts and donated instruments—retuned sitars and unvarnished violins—are quietly arranged so no learner is turned away. A small alcove library holds 700 vinyl LPs, kutcheri programmes annotated from the sixties, and fading reel-to-reel tapes labelled “Mehfil at Sargam, 22-11-1978”. Every December the annual ‘Baithak’ transforms the verandah into a makeshift proscenium with a marigold backdrop; parents bring bajra khichdi in steel tiffins, and the youngest pupil opens the concert, tiny fingers trembling on the keys until the first sa of Yaman arrives, flawless and luminous.
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- Published: July 29, 2025
