Role of performing art in Indian freedom struggle has had immense significance. India was colonized by the British for close to two hundred years. Aspects of Indian society, namely law, education, medicine, literature and art bear varying shades of influence from the colonial masters and their culture. The one art form which might have offered some resistance during the nineteenth century was probably Indian classical music. That is because music was performed mainly in courts and temples and did not receive any patronage from the colonial and imperialist state. Lakshmi Subramanian has argued that the reconstruction of classical music was an integral part of a self-conscious cultural project that helped frame the contours of a national heritage, with all its material and symbolic artefacts.

In the twentieth century the same music was seen simultaneously classical and national. Classicism invariably accompanied the processes of modernity and tradition. However, history has not treated music as having played a critical role in the development of Indian cultural nationalism. If one traces the history of music in any region, particularly peninsular India, that by the end of nineteenth century music and theatre assume great importance in the cultural life of the people. In the twentieth century, music and musicians move into the larger cultural public sphere to give ticketed-entry performances in modern auditoriums. Music evolved into a high art form that occupied pride of place in the national imagination.

It is difficult to identify this change from private sphere to public sphere with a particular ideology, or a religious group and to assign it an ethnic identity. In the case of north India the credit for this transformation is given to Vishnu Narayan Bathkande and Vishnu Digambar Paluskar. It is generally agreed that these two men were the key orchestrators of modernization of Hindustani music. Paluskar was a bhakti nationalist because he stood for devotionalism in preference to Vedic literature Brahminism with a greater focus on Bhajans. Bhathkande was a musicologist and batted for the idea of music as a hope for a new, modern, national and academic art. Both men wanted to save music from extinction. In their own ways they engaged themselves with the colonial challenges to classical music.