Dhrupad Kendra Bhopal

The Dhrupad Kendra Bhopal (Devanāgarī: ध्रुपद केन्द्र भोपाल) is an institution for training Dhrupad singers, established by the Government of Madhya Pradesh in the state capital Bhopal in 1981 to impart training in the Indian teacher-apprentice or Guru-shishya tradition of education in Dhrupad one of the oldest surviving genres of Indian classical music .

The Dhrupad Kenra was established by the Department of Culture of the Government of Madhya Pradesh in the State Capital Bhopal in 1981 as a result of the efforts of noted Hindi poet and bureaucrat Ashok Vajpeyi who was then the Secretary of Culture of State and noted film maker Mani Kaul. At a meeting at the Cannes Film Festival the two persuaded renowned Dhrupad exponent of the Dagar style Zia Fariduddin Dagar, who had then virtually settled in Europe, to return to India and assume the directorship of the Dhrupad Kendra since it was felt at that time that the ancient Dhrupad tradition was on the verge of extinction and capable bearers of the tradition needed to be trained outside the University system of education using the traditional guru shisya system within an institutionalized set up. A committee of eminent persons was appointed and it was decided that students would be trained in the traditional system in batches each lasting a period of four years supported by a small scholarship from the State.

To train performers in the prescribed short period of four years Zia Fariduddin Dagar developed innovative new methods of teaching that departed from the orthodox traditional system. He considerably shortened the long period of initial technical training and quickly went on to teaching alap, compositions and improvisation in a very rigorous and demanding process of teaching, intensive practice and constant correction and supervision. Rahim Fahimuddin Dagar the elder cousin of Zia Fariduddin Dagar remained skeptical about the experiment preferring the slow and long orthodox traditional system of teaching of his family which lay emphasis on many years of technical grounding using technical exercises before starting training of Dhrupad alap, compositions, improvisation and the shastra or the conceptual foundations of the art.