Sunanda Mehta in the Indian Express describes "Dharwad district, the official residence of Hindustani classical music, the land that has borne and nurtured legends like Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Gangubai Hangal, Mallikarjun Mansur, Kumar Gandharva and Basavaraj Rajguru":

“I guess you just have to accept what everyone has been telling me,” says the 43-year-old advocate. “It’s in the soil.”

And, may we add, in the soul. Here, every morning, the young and the old sip their brew at the local tea shop, as ragas flit gently out from the radio playing in the background. The guru-shishya bond has not become a quaint fossil in Dharwad. Youngsters know how to tell their Hansadhwani from their Durbari and learn music with single-minded rigour. At every corner, history binds Dharwad to melody. Officials at the All India Radio station here, for instance, recall how in 1950, when AIR opened a station, the inaugural song, Vande Mataram, was sung by Pandit Bhimsen, Gangubai, Mallikarjun Mansur and Basavaraj Rajguru. Even today, the station broadcasts Hindustani classical music three times a day.

History also helps explain the dominance of Hindustani classical music over Carnatic in this region of Karnataka. Royal musicians from the Mughal court at Agra and the seat of the Scindias at Gwalior were regularly invited by the Maharajas of Mysore to perform in their court. On their way, they would halt at Dharwad and perform at impromptu concerts. Ustad Abdul Karim Khan was one such frequent visitor, who would stay with his brother in Dharwad. There he taught his most famous disciple, Sawai Gandharva, the legend who was guru to Gangubai Hangal, Bhimsen Joshi and Basavaraj Rajguru.

And in the Telegraph, Somak Ghoshal writes on a boatman’s daughter who dared the khayal and kept reinventing herself until the end of her life:

Unlike the countless admirers who flocked around Hirabai and Kesarbai, Gangubai lived with a liberal-minded husband, Gururao Kaulgi, a Brahmin lawyer, with whom she had three children. But instead of basking in the success of her marriage, she persuaded Kaulgi to take another upper-caste wife, feeling that it would be the proper thing for a man of his stature. Perhaps the singer who came closest to Gangubai’s temperament was the self-effacing and supremely gifted Mogubai Kurdikar, mother of Kishori Amonkar. It is not surprising that Gangubai and Mogubai became close friends, and even less surprising that they spent more time exchanging notes on their culinary, rather than musical, knowledge when they met.

Both Gangubai and Mogubai initiated an exclusively female line of familial taalim, training their respective daughters, Krishna and Kishori, to become fine singers. As founders of matrilineal gharanas, Gangubai and Mogubai are exceptions in the patriarchal gharanedar system. They also became disseminators of a tradition of music (khayal) that once used to be the exclusive right of male teachers