Prof. Lakshmi Sreeram

Initiated into Khayal by Smt. Madhubala Chawla under whose guidance she passed with a first class the Visharad exam of the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, Dr. Lakshmi Sreeram has been trained by masters like Pt. Vasantrao Kulkarni and Pt. Babanrao Haldankar. She continues her learning from the acclaimed vocalist and musicologist Pt. Satyasheel Deshpande. Lakshmi has given critically acclaimed performances at leading festivals and music venues. Dr. Lakshmi has taught elective courses at IIT Madras on Appreciating Carnatic and Hindustani Music and has put together a widely subscribed and well appreciated course on Carnatic Music for NPTEL in 2015. Lakshmi is a researcher and writer for leading media publications like The Hindu, Firstpost etc. She received the Fulbright Scholarship for 2019-2020 to study improvisation in Jazz at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. Since her return she continues to write and research into the principles of Raga Sangeet, exploring parallels in language theories of the Sanskrit tradition.
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Prof. Srijan Deshpande

Srijan Deshpande is a performer and researcher of Hindustani Khayal music. He is pursuing a doctoral research project at the Manipal Centre for Humanities, in which he is attempting to construct a rigorous account of Pt. Kumar Gandharva's musical alterity in the context of the twentieth-century tradition of the Khayal. Srijan has previously taught vocal music at the Vishwashanti Sangeet-Kala Academy, Pune; FLAME University, Pune; and Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad. He continues to receive training in the genre from Pt. Satyasheel Deshpande.