Art & Culture · Hindustani Classical Music (Gharanas, Dhrupad, Khayal, Thumri)
The concept being tested: Modern music education institutions - Gandharva Mahavidyalaya movement.
The first Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, a music training school, was set up in 1901 by Vishnu Digambar Paluskar in
Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, a pioneer of institutionalised music education who had trained in the Gwalior gharana style under Balakrishnabuwa Ichalkaranjikar, founded the first Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in Lahore in 1901. The school was named after the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya movement's aim of making classical music training systematic, disciplined and open to students outside the closed guru-shishya lineages of hereditary musician families. Paluskar later opened a second, more widely remembered branch in Bombay in 1908, which became the movement's enduring institutional base and spread its syllabus-based teaching method across India, but that Bombay school was not the first. Since the question specifically asks where the first Gandharva Mahavidyalaya was set up in 1901, and that was Lahore, the official answer is Lahore.
What UPSC was testing
The trap here is biographical conflation: aspirants who recall that Paluskar trained in the Gwalior gharana often mistakenly pick Gwalior as the founding city, and those who recall only the famous 1908 Bombay branch may forget that an earlier, first school existed in Lahore in 1901.
How often this comes up
This concept has appeared 3 times in UPSC Prelims General Studies Paper I between 2015 and 2025 — in 2018, 2019 and 2025.
The option-by-option autopsy for this question — why each of the other three is wrong, and which neighbouring concept each one was built from — is in the app.