Many years ago Nikhil Ghosh, musician and scholar (he was the younger brother of flautist Pannalal Ghosh) had a dream. He wanted to publish the definitive encyclopaedia of Indian music in which the most eminent musicologists and scholar-performers would contribute. Volunteers would gather information from archives, journals, music manuals, old texts and record memories of ustads. This enterprise would need inputs in many languages (and not only from classical Sanskrit and Persian). The project began modestly at Sangit Mahabharati, the music school that Ghosh set up in Bombay, but the net was cast wide and it grew incrementally over many years. Despite the monumental scope of this task, Sangit Mahabharati managed to rope in a range of people. A team was set up to collate the various entries that poured in. Among many others, doyens of the music world, Birendra Kishore Roy Choudhury, Jnan Prakash Ghosh, Yunus Hussain Khan and Susheela Misra agreed to be 'scrutinisers and contributors'. At some point funds ran low and the Government of Maharashtra stepped in with a modest yearly grant of Rupees one lakh. Musicians contributed also by agreeing to perform for the cause. Meanwhile OUP had been contacted and as the editors write in the preface, crucial publishing inputs became available. Nikhil Ghosh travelled to the USA for further funds and fell ill. He died before the project could be completed. It was more than a decade before his dream saw fruition and the handsomely produced encyclopaedia is finally here—three big tomes, the product of years of industry, diligence and sustained work. The dedication of the late Nikhil Ghosh and his team is heartening. They managed to keep alive this project which took shape in the 1980s, without major government or institutional support. Imagine the fate of such an enterprise if one of the government akademis had been in-charge. Bureaucratic blocks, egotistical chairpersons, politicking musicians would have run it aground long ago. The entries in the volumes are arranged alphabetically and there is also a very detailed index which facilitates cross referencing and locating topics in the individual volumes. Of the New Grove Encyclopaedia of Music (1980, editor: Stanley Sadie) Charles Rosen in a witty review said that the alphabetical order was misleading—editors usually have other concealed orders in mind. The New Grove according to Rosen showcased the conceit of western musicology generating from the entrenched music departments in American ...