Stamps celebrating music personalities are extremely popular. The most commonly featured are composers. Austria created the very first series of stamps dedicated to composers in 1922. This blog has featured composer stamps from the United States, Germany, Cuba, Italy, and Haiti. Musicians like Duke Ellington and Elvis Presley are regularly featured as well. I’ve even featured a post dedicated to an instrument maker on a stamp: Adolphe Sax.
India, 1961
Scott Number IN 344
However, the stamp featured today is of a different type. It celebrates a musicologist, or a scholar who is a scholar of music. I have only come across a couple of stamps that feature music scholars, and this stamp is particularly interesting.
Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande
Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhade (1860-1936) was born in 1860 in Bombay. His family was wealthy and he received a rigorous education, including in classical Hindustani music. He became a sitar player, studied Indian music theory, and joined the Gayan Uttejak Mandali, a music appreciation society.
After Bhatkhande’s wife died in 1900, he dedicated himself more fully to the study of Indian music. He travelled India, reading ancient texts, and interviewing pandits and ustads. This study allowed him to meet and become a disciple of the legendary veena player Ustad Wazir Khan. Bhatkhande realized that modern music practice had changed enormously since ancient times and did not correspond with the texts. He set about to write about the practice of modern Indian music.
He began to publish his work in 1909. Among his contributions was the reorganization of the ragas into the thaat system that is still in use today. Bhatkhande also created a notational system for Hindustani music. He also wrote a four volume commentary intended for use by the common man and he created a notation system for Hindustani music.
The Stamp
India honored Bhatkhande with a postage stamp issued on September 1, 1961. Although he was actually born on August 10th, the year he was born this coincided with the celebration of the Janmashtami festival. Traditionally, his birth is marked by the festival, which fell on September 1st in 1961. I own a first day cover from Bombay and the cancellation mark clearly stats “Birth Anniversary.”
The stamp features a portrait headshot of Bhatkhande. It is a monochromatic raw siena color and also includes his birth and death dates and his name. There is a sitar and tabla drums in the lower right hand corner of the stamp, a nod to his stature in the field of music.
Check out this lecture dedicated to the work of Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande.
