First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"Composers have to be schooled in a deep-seated tradition and learn skills that go back not just generations but centuries. So, you find that even the most thrusting, cutting-edge modernists have a deep knowledge of musical history, and a respect for musical history, and indeed the values and worlds that produced those traditions, including religion. That kind of culture-war stuff that you get sometimes in the other arts just doesn’t really appear in the world of music, because there’s this deep knowledge, respect, understanding, and learning about the art of music. For that reason, you find lots of composers who are all over the place politically, but on many things you could say that they are conserving an ancient craft, an ancient tradition. They’re deeply plugged into the roots and in ways that sometimes other artists and other media are not."
Young though he was, his radiant energy produced such an impression of absolute reliability that Hedgewar made him the first sarkaryavah, or general secretary, of the RSS.
- Gopal Mukund Huddar
Largely because of the influence of communists in London, Huddar's conversion into an enthusiastic supporter of the fight against fascism was quick and smooth. The ease with which he crossed from one worldview to another betrays the fact that he had not properly understood the world he had grown in.
Huddar would have been 101 now had he been alive. But then centenaries are not celebrated only to register how old so and so would have been and when. They are usually celebrated to explore how much poorer our lives are without them. Maharashtrian public life is poorer without him. It is poorer for not having made the effort to recall an extraordinary life.
I regret I was not there to listen to Balaji Huddar's speech [...] No matter how many times you listen to him, his speeches are so delightful that you feel like listening to them again and again.
By the time he came out of Franco's prison, Huddar had relinquished many of his old ideas. He displayed a worldview completely different from that of the RSS, even though he continued to remain deferential to Hedgewar and maintained a personal relationship with him.