When Hindustani music arrived in post-war America, it was often heard as mysticism or exotic texture. Beneath the haze of spiritual consumerism, however, a quieter experiment was taking shape, one that insisted on patience, hierarchy, and institutional seriousness. This is the story of a classical tradition that resisted becoming merely ambience and instead demanded time, discipline, and sustained attention.
When the great sarod maestro Ustad Ali Akbar Khan (1922–2009) first arrived in California in the mid-1960s, he had 20 students to teach in a summer course. The following year, sixty showed up. By 1967, that number had increased to eighty. This growth convinced the maestro, already hailed by Yehudi Menuhin as “the greatest musician in the world,” that there was a need for something more permanent than seasonal workshops. What emerged was the Ali Akbar College of Music (AACM), a year-round sui generis institution, a space in North America where Hindustani music could be transmitted with rigour and continuity to enthusiastic students, who, at the time, knew little of Indian music or its history and cultural contexts. Before it found its permanent home in San Rafael in 1974, the college was forced to move more than 20 rented locations, but its initial itinerant existence did not dent the resolve of the maestro or that of his students.