MUMBAI, Aug. 11 -- Imagine this: Four women are seated in a loose crescent, their bows poised, facing a rapt audience. The first note rises from the eldest - a slow, unhurried curve that seems to gather the room into its palm. Before the sound fades, the second catches it, turning it over like a piece of river-worn stone. The third leans in, deepening the colour, and the fourth threads her own voice into the weave. This is not a relay but a conversation; one mind speaking through four pairs of hands. The ladies are three generations of violinists -- Padma Bhushan Dr N Rajam, her daughter Sangeeta Shankar, and granddaughters Ragini and Nandini Shankar - expressing an inheritance of music. For Rajam - who pioneered the gayaki ang on violin, making the instrument sing like the human voice in the nuances of khayal - music was not a calculated inheritance. "I have this art," she says, her voice soft but certain. "It is my duty to pass it on." In her home, a violin in a three-year-old's hands was no more remarkable than a spoon or pencil. The ambition was not to mould a child into a professional musician, but to let them grow up fluent in the language of music. If they chose another path, the art would still live in them - a skill, a solace, even a livelihood if life ever demanded it. Her own training was uncompromising. "My father, A Narayana Iyer, would often awaken past midnight, and wake me up to practise," she recalls. "Sometimes I cried, but I still played. Six hours meant six hours - not a minute less." He counted repetitions by hand - units in one, tens in the other - and sometimes, mischievously, made her play more than agreed. "When I was eight, I caught on and said, 'You're cheating!'" That mix of exacting discipline and sly affection would shape her own teaching. Every student - daughter, niece or unrelated disciple - has been drilled in the same way. Once the grammar was solid, she insisted, freedom was essential. "In Indian music, without freedom, there can be no true music." Sangeeta remembers her first concert - at Pune's Savai Gandharv festival -- alongside her mother, at 13. "When you're just a disciple, audiences are forgiving," she says. "But as a daughter, you're expected to match her level. If you don't, the criticism is harsher." It was her first real sense of what "legacy" might mean. Until then, music had been part of the daily routine: three hours of practice before school, because "otherwise my mother wouldn't be happy". The expectation was never spoken aloud, but it was always there - the need to inhabit not just the same discipline but the same emotional depth. "People didn't want to see a promising teenager," she says. "They wanted to hear someone who could stand shoulder to shoulder with her." For Ragini, 36, who is a mechanical engineer, and Nandini, 32, a chartered accountant, growing up in this house meant that music was never confined to a classroom. "We could have a two-minute class anytime," Ragini laughs. "I'd be practising in the puja room and hear her from the kitchen call out 'That's not right!' Then I'd fix it." The learning was continuous, sometimes slipped into the rhythm of household life - a phrase sung while chopping vegetables, posture corrected between sips of tea. When Rajam taught, the method was often oral first: she would sing, the child would sing it back, and only then would it be tried on the violin. The corrections came immediately, like a potter's hand shaping clay before it set. That rigour has softened over time. "When I was younger, it was 'Not right. Again. Again. Again,'" says Ragini. "Now it's a warm conversation: 'This is good, keep it; this is not, change it.'" Their 'Three Generations' concerts are the public face of this private ecosystem. "If you don't look at us," Sangeeta says, "you might think it's one artiste playing. I might leave a note hanging, she picks it up, carries it forward, then the next takes it on. It's like a conversation where no one repeats, only builds." Only the raga is agreed upon before a performance. Everything else is created in the moment. Surprise is part of the delight. "Nandini might play something unexpected," says Sangeeta, "and we are all happily caught off guard. But it still fits. That's the trust training gives you." For the third generation duo, the challenge lies in balancing an unshakeable grounding in Hindustani classical music with the realities of a 21st-century soundscape - one of streaming platforms, global collaborations and shrinking attention spans. Their album Tarana, produced for Decca Records, distils Hindustani roots into concise, contemporary tracks of three or four minutes. "It's a bridge," says Ragini. "We want someone who discovers us online to be curious enough to come to a full-length classical concert." The sound is modern, but the core is traditional - a reminder that tradition is not a cage but a wellspring. The family's work has expanded beyond the stage. Sangeeta's Sharangadev School of Music and Culture offers online teaching and in-person retreats at Swarasadhana Tapovan, a gurukul she has built in the village of Samanur, in Karnataka, in six-and-a-half acres of mango orchard, coconut groves and a sixty-feet circular mandapam open to the sky. The air is laced with the smell of ripening fruit and incense from the small Shiva temple, which houses a rare blue sapphire lingam. Mornings begin with riyaz as the sun rises on the verdancy and afternoons dissolve into discussions under the trees. Every Sunday, children from nearby villages come for free music lessons. They learn, visit the temple for darshan, share prasad, and walk home - carrying not just a lesson but an atmosphere. "It's more than music," Sangeeta says. "It's about building an environment where values and art grow together." If there is one thread binding the generations, it is the clarity that legacy is not a trophy to polish but a living being. Dr Rajam did not pioneer gayaki ang thinking of heritage; she simply wanted the violin to speak more truthfully. Sangeeta's Gurukul is not for heirs but for any student willing to learn with respect and patience. For Ragini and Nandini, legacy feels less like a burden to carry than a river to swim in. "I'm too young to think about passing it on," Nandini says. "Right now, I just want to make the most of what I've been given." In their music, you can hear the layers: the midnight drills by the late Pt Omkarnath Thakur in Banaras, the precision of a guru-mother, the curiosity of a granddaughter adopting a Western bowing technique she heard in a recording. There is both discipline and freedom. Structure and risk. There is also love; not sentimental but the patient, stubborn and kind - which wakes you at midnight to practise, corrects a note from the kitchen, and one that builds a mango-orchard gurukul so a child can play her first scale under open skies. On stage, when the four women lock eyes, the exchange is wordless - I have carried it this far; now it is yours....