After 90 years, Agra gharana has moved out of its home in Mumbai

It must have matched the glamour of its name once, but today, Ruby Mansion at 9, Forjett Street in Mumbai is in a state of gentle decay. If you gaze up its three stories, right at the top, to the left, you will see a flat with a bank of windows, now definitively shuttered. Nothing in the disrepair tells you that, until six months ago, this was a living monument to how Bombay became the epicentre of Agra gharana, a style that claims a history of at least 400 years.

For around 90 years, Ruby Mansions in the Gowalia Tank area had been home to generations of musicians who trace their genealogy to the earliest progenitors of the gharana. That fabled musical past came to an end last year, when vocalist Raja Miyan, among the last in this line to have lived in the building, moved out. It was a wrench, he says, leaving what he calls “sangeet ka mandir”.

“It holds a very important place in the history of our gharana, the centre of its famously generous vidyadaan,” said Raja Miyan. “We had a hall and four large rooms that the ustads and their families shared and doubled up as music classrooms, so...

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