When we founded Nadavidyalaya in 2006, we wrote down one objective: meticulous training in Carnatic classical music and Bharatanatyam, adopting the guru–shishya system. Twenty years on, that sentence has survived every practical pressure that has been applied to it.
It is worth saying plainly what the system is, because the phrase gets used loosely. It is not a small class size. It is a relationship in which one teacher takes responsibility for one student's art — their body, their voice, their temperament and their progress — over years, and in which the student accepts the obligations that come with that.
What it makes possible
Correction that fits the person. Two students execute the same adavu and get two different corrections, because their hips are different, their attention is different and their habits are different. A batch instruction — “straighten the back” — is right for the room and useless for the individual.
Pacing that follows readiness. A student who needs another six months on the fundamentals gets another six months. A student who is ready early moves ahead. Neither is held to a term calendar, because a term calendar is an administrative object, not an artistic one.
Transmission of things nobody writes down. A great deal of what makes a performance good is not notated anywhere: how a phrase should land, what to do when the mridangist is a hair ahead, when to hold a gaze a beat longer than feels comfortable. This is passed by demonstration and imitation, in a room, over time. There is no other channel for it.
You cannot download a correction. Somebody who knows has to see you do it wrong.
What it costs
We should be honest about the trade-offs, since they are real ones.
- It does not scale. There is a hard ceiling on how many students two gurus can take seriously. We have hit it more than once and chosen the ceiling over the compromise.
- It is slow. Visible progress in the first two years is modest compared with a course designed to produce a performance in six months. What is being built in those two years is the thing everything else stands on.
- It asks something of the student. Attendance, practice between classes, and a willingness to be corrected repeatedly on the same thing without taking it personally.
What about online classes, then?
A fair question, since we teach several students abroad through virtual classes.
Our answer is that the medium changed and the relationship did not. An online student is still taught individually, still corrected individually, still held to the same syllabus and the same examinations. What we lost is the ability to adjust a wrist by touching it, and we compensate by talking more, demonstrating more, and asking for more repetitions on camera. What we gained is a student in another country who would otherwise have had no guru at all.
What we will not do is convert an online class into a broadcast. The moment a lesson becomes a video that one person makes and many people watch, it stops being this system and becomes something else — useful, perhaps, but not what we opened this academy to do.
The part that isn't about technique
The other reason we hold to it is harder to defend in a brochure, so we will simply state it. Alongside the fine arts, we try to give our disciples the philosophical and ethical values of life — to send out complete human beings of culture and tradition, not only competent performers.
That transmission does not happen in a syllabus. It happens because a student spends years in close proximity to two people who take their art seriously, arrive on time, treat the stage and the audience with respect, and do not cut corners when nobody is watching. Children notice all of it. That is the real curriculum, and it needs a small room to work.
If this is the kind of training you are looking for — in Mysuru or online — come and talk to us. We would rather have an honest first conversation than a large enrolment.
