The village of Sulebhavi, in the Belgaum — now Belagavi — district of northern Karnataka, is remembered in Indian music as the birthplace of Shivaputra Siddharamayya Komkalimath, the singer whom the world came to know as Kumar Gandharva. He was born there on 8 April 1924, and although the greater part of his life's work would unfold far away, in the Malwa uplands of Madhya Pradesh, the Kannada countryside of his childhood gave him the first sounds he ever sang. His career was built on a habit of listening to ordinary people sing — women at work, wandering mendicants, villagers at festival time — and that instinct was formed in the lanes of Sulebhavi long before any concert hall knew his name.

A prodigy from the Belgaum countryside

The boy's gift announced itself very early. By about the age of five he was reproducing intricate classical passages he had merely overheard, and by ten he was singing before audiences who could not reconcile the authority of the voice with the small child producing it. It was in these years that he received the name he would carry for the rest of his life. In Indian tradition a gandharva is a celestial musician, and kumar means a boy; the title Kumar Gandharva, bestowed on him in wonder, gradually displaced his given name altogether. Few musicians anywhere have been so completely absorbed by an honorific.

Fame at that age can be a burden as readily as a blessing, and the young singer was soon being carried from one platform to another as a marvel to be exhibited. What rescued him was a decision, unusual in a celebrated child, to stop performing and start studying. The choice took him from the Deccan countryside to Bombay, and it shaped everything that followed.

Training under B. R. Deodhar

At about eleven he became a pupil of Professor B. R. Deodhar, among the most rigorous and intellectually curious teachers of the period, whose school in Bombay served as a meeting point for musicians, scholars and critics. Deodhar's method was systematic. He was interested not only in transmitting compositions but in the reasoning behind them — in voice production, in the anatomy of a raga, and in the comparative study of the gharanas, the hereditary stylistic schools that then organised Hindustani classical music. His student absorbed this analytical habit completely.

Before he was twenty, Kumar Gandharva was already teaching at the same institution. He had acquired an extraordinary command of many gharana manners and could reproduce the style of one celebrated singer after another with disconcerting accuracy. That very facility left him uneasy. A musician who can imitate everyone is not yet anyone, and the question of what his own voice might sound like, once the borrowed ones were set aside, began to press on him. Circumstances would answer it in the harshest possible way.

Illness, silence and the songs of Malwa

Around 1947, at the very moment his professional life was opening out, he contracted tuberculosis. In an age before the disease could be reliably treated, the prognosis was severe: he lost the use of one lung, and he was told that he would never sing again. He moved to Dewas, in Madhya Pradesh, for the dry climate, and there he spent roughly six years as an invalid, largely silent, forbidden the exertion that singing demands. Treatment with streptomycin, which became available to him in 1952, eventually turned the illness back, and he returned to the concert platform in 1953.

Those silent years at Dewas are the hinge of his life. Unable to sing, he listened. Malwa is a region rich in song, and from his sickbed he absorbed the music that passed under his window and across the fields: harvest songs, wedding songs, the seasonal songs of the rains, the chants of itinerant singers, the devotional verse carried from village to village by people who had never heard of a gharana. He listened with a trained ear and no professional agenda, and he came to regard this repertoire not as raw material to be decorated but as a complete musical language with its own logic. When he sang again, that language had entered him.

A style that belonged to no gharana

The voice that returned in 1953 was necessarily different. With a single functioning lung he could not sustain the long, unhurried phrases that Hindustani vocal music conventionally prizes. He rebuilt his technique around what he could do: short, concentrated, sharply etched phrases; sudden leaps into a bright upper register; silences used as deliberately as sound. What might have been heard as a limitation became a signature, and audiences soon recognised it within a few notes.

He also refused, permanently and publicly, to be bound by the orthodoxy of any single gharana. He constructed his own concert programmes around themes rather than convention, drawing together folk melody, seasonal song and classical structure. He composed new ragas, among them Madhsurja, Ahi Bhairav and Lagan Gandhar, built from phrases he had gathered in Malwa. Above all he became the definitive modern interpreter of the nirguni devotional poems of Kabir — verses about the formless divine, about the body as a rented house, about death and detachment. Sung in his stark, unsentimental manner, they reached listeners far outside the classical audience and remain, for many Indians, inseparable from his voice.

His approach divided opinion. Traditionalists objected that he had abandoned the discipline of the schools; others heard in him the most original musical mind of his generation. He was largely indifferent to the argument, and he continued to teach, to write about music, and to perform on his own terms for four decades.

Family, honours and legacy

He married Bhanumati Kans in 1947; she died in 1961, leaving two sons. He later married the singer Vasundhara Komkali, who became his musical partner as well as his wife. The line has continued: his son Mukul Shivputra and his daughter Kalapini Komkali both became musicians, as did his grandson Bhuvanesh Komkali, who carries the repertoire forward today.

Public recognition came steadily. He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1977 and, in the same year, the Padma Bhushan; the Akademi later elected him to its Fellowship, its highest distinction. In 1990 he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, one of India's foremost civilian honours. He died at Dewas on 12 January 1992 and was cremated with state honours.

Madhya Pradesh instituted the Kumar Gandharva Samman in his memory, and India issued a commemorative postage stamp in his honour in 2014. His deeper legacy, however, is a change in what Indian classical music is permitted to be. He demonstrated that a singer could take the songs of villages seriously without condescension, that a personal style could be built rather than inherited, and that the boundary between folk and classical was a convention rather than a law. For a heritage of village India, few lives make the point so plainly: a boy from Sulebhavi listened to the countryside, and the countryside entered the concert hall on equal terms.