Considered to be a pillar of the Gwalior tradition of Khayal singing, Vidushi Neela Bhagwat, or Neela Tai as she was lovingly called, passed away on April 14, 2026. With her, we lose not just an extraordinary musician but a way of thinking about the world. I had sat down with her for a conversation about four years ago. It was a long conversation that kept moving between music, politics, memory, and everyday life. There was a certain kharash in her voice that resisted smoothness, and that same quality marked her thinking and her existence.It is difficult to understand the artistry of Vidushi Neela Bhagwat without returning to the life that shaped it. What made her was not just her training in music, but everything that moved alongside it. Perhaps that is why her music never felt contained. Like a bandish, which is by definition set and bounded, she entered it fully but never stayed confined within it, always testing its edges, always finding a way to move beyond what was given.Born in 1942, in our conversation, she recalled, with a mix of humour and seriousness, that even before she was born, her parents had set out for the August Kranti Maidan during the Quit India movement, only to be persuaded to turn back because her mother was pregnant. “Sometimes I feel,” she said, “I was already interested in the revolutionary movement.” It was only half in jest.Her childhood, by her own telling, was marked by an unusual freedom. She could argue with her parents, question them, and disagree openly. There were no closed doors in that sense. She often returned to this as the ground from which everything else emerged. Even her earliest feminist instinct appeared in that space. When confronted with the expectations of domestic life, she questioned them with startling clarity. Cooking, she observed, meant dirtying vessels only to clean them again. If that was what family life amounted to, she wanted none of it. She would later laugh and add that she must have been a little arrogant.‘Once you read Marxism, you will never forget that’At the same time, this was also a home filled with music. Her father had a tambura, a tabla, and a harmonium. Everyone sang. “We had all the instruments in the house,” she recalled. But it was not just music. It was an expression in a wider sense. “We used to write, we used to sing, we used to dance and make plays,” she said, remembering how they would invent characters and perform them without much concern for how it looked. Her aunt, who was also her teacher, would set poems to tune while teaching them. That, she said, stayed with her. It gave her the sense that anything one feels can be sung, that music is not separate from language or emotion. There was also the presence of the Rashtra Seva Dal, its songs, its gatherings, its sense of collective participation.There were other influences too. She spoke of her granduncle, a Varkari, who would call her to sing. “He used to call me, ‘Neela, come, sing a song,’” she remembered, and she would go and sing without hesitation. It was part of the same world that drew her, even as a child, to the Dnyaneshwari. She recalled reading it early on, absorbed in it in a way that worried her mother, who wondered what kind of life this would lead to. But for her, it did not feel unusual.From there, almost without transition, she moved to reading. She spoke about Marathi literature with a certain dissatisfaction. “I could really count on some five, six great writers,” she said, and then almost immediately, “why don’t we have great writers?” What troubled her was what lay behind this, a “petty bourgeois mentality” that recognised only what was respectable. “The lower class we don’t know, we are not fair to them… and we have the caste hierarchy, which is horrible.” It was around this time that she encountered Marxism, and the two seemed to meet for her.Her encounter with Marxism in her youth was decisive. “Once you read, you will never forget that. Once you read, your life has changed… you won’t be free of it,” she said, describing the effect it had on her. It altered how she understood class, caste, and the everyday exclusions that structured society. For Neela ji, Marxism was never an abstract theory, it was a way of life. She was closely connected to left cultural and political circles, including communist Party of India (CPI)-linked spaces, and was part of a generation for whom art and politics were inseparable.She spoke of her association with figures like Tara Reddy and the collective Jagruti Mandal, where writing, discussion, and performance came together as political practice. These were also the years when she moved within circles that included working class writers such as Namdev Dhasal and Baburao Bagul. “They were writers and they were fighters, both ways,” she said.She remembered those decades, particularly the 1960s and 1970s, with a certain affection. There were cyclostyled magazines produced with almost no money, ideas circulating through small networks, and homes that functioned as open spaces. Anyone could walk in. There would be food, conversation, disagreement, and a shared sense of purpose. If one person did not have money, someone else did. There was always a way of making things work. It was a deeply collective way of living and thinking.Her relationship with filmmaker and thinker Arun Khopkar was also part of this wider intellectual world. They grew together as comrades through conversations around music, cinema, and politics, reflecting a milieu where disciplines overlapped and nourished one another.At the same time, she was never uncritical of the movements she was part of. At one point, she spoke about trade unions through a memory of her father, who worked in textiles. “You are saying that the trade union movement is very necessary,” he would tell her, “but the workers that I see… they have not been sufficient yet. They should work hard. Why don’t you teach that also to them?” She did not dismiss it. “Later on,” she said, “I felt that what my father said was right… we had to socialise the working class in many ways, which we were not doing.”She spoke with characteristic directness about what she saw as a contradiction within Marxist spaces. “I still call myself a Marxist and then feminist,” she said, “because Marxists also have this contradiction of not being fair and egalitarian to the women they live with… I could not take that and I started rebelling against it.” Her feminism emerged from this refusal. This refusal extended into her engagement with the classical music world as well. While she learned deeply from her gurus, she did not accept unquestioning submission as a virtue.The hierarchical structures of the guru-shishya tradition, with their insistence on loyalty and silence, were things she navigated but never fully internalised. She spoke of negotiating these spaces carefully, sometimes even having to be “cunning” in order to learn across lineages, but always retaining her independence of thought.Her journey into music itself followed an unconventional path. Though music had always been present in her life, she began serious training relatively late, at the age of twenty-six. By then, many had already established themselves as performers. She did not see this as a disadvantage. Before turning fully to music, she had studied literature and sociology and taught in colleges. But eventually she made a decision she articulated with characteristic clarity: one thought, one voice, and two jobs were impossible. So, she chose music.A leading exponent of the Gwalior gharana, Neela Bhagwat approached music as a form of thinking. For her, a khayal was not merely sung but constructed, a design where poetry, raga, and taal came together. Improvisation, she insisted, was not variation but creation, the point at which the artist enters the composition fully.She often emphasised that she was singing in the twenty-first century, in a world that was confusing and troubling, and that this reality inevitably entered her music. She spoke of a turning point around the time of the Babri Masjid demolition. It was not something she described at length, but its presence was unmistakable. The atmosphere of division, of rupture, made certain kinds of expression feel inadequate. It was around this time that she began to turn more consciously towards Kabir. Kabir, for her, was not simply a saint-poet from the past. He was a way of thinking through the present.She was also sharply aware of how gender shaped expectations within music. She would remark, without hesitation, that her voice was not “sweet” in the conventional sense expected of women. But she embraced its texture, allowing it to carry honesty rather than conform to aesthetic norms.Khayal maestro Vidushi Neela Bhagwat at a private concert. Photo: Eshan SharmaAs a teacher, she taught for decades, documented compositions, and reflected on pedagogy with unusual seriousness. She resisted the culture of secrecy that often surrounds classical traditions. Writing down bandishes, preserving them, and sharing them widely was, for her, both an artistic and political act. As a true marxist, she did not believe that music had to be private property. Her practice remained open and exploratory. She engaged with different musical traditions, thought about their commonalities, and resisted rigid boundaries. “I do not close myself to life,” she said. “I am open to life.” This was reflected in her collaborations with carnatic musicians like Vidushi Aruna Sairam.In reflecting on the present, she returned often to the role of art. Even when it does not speak directly in political language, she believed, it makes a humanitarian intervention, one that resists fragmentation and violence. A society without music, she would insist, is a society moving towards brutality.And yet, alongside all this, there was a deeply personal dimension to her life. She spoke of relationships with honesty, of separation without bitterness, and of raising her child with care and clarity. In later years, her companionship with Amarendra ‘Nandu’ Dhaneshwar became an important part of her life, a relationship grounded in shared music and thought.To remember Neela Bhagwat is to remember a voice that refused to settle into a single identity or a single form. She was a musician, a Marxist, a feminist, a teacher, a comrade. But more than any of these, she was someone who remained open, questioning, and unwilling to accept the world as given.In her passing, something larger than a person has fallen quiet. But her music, her words, and her way of thinking remain, asking us to stay with complexity, to resist easy answers, and to keep the conversation going.Eshan Sharma is a history researcher, documentary filmmaker and the founder of Karwaan: The Heritage Exploration Initiative.