Pandit Arun Dravid

Arun Dravid was born in 1943 and trained in childhood with Ustad Abdul Majid Khan before beginning study with Kishori Amonkar in the early 1960s, when she had only recently started performing in public. He continued learning from her intermittently until the early 2000s, and is usually described as her foremost disciple.

His musical life ran alongside an entirely separate career: a gold medallist at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and a doctorate in chemical engineering from MIT, he rose to become chairman of the Indian operations of Jacobs Engineering. He learned in the same circle as Suhasini Mulgaonkar, Manik Bhide and Meera Panshikar, and later guided younger singers including Devaki Pandit.

Since the late 2010s he has given a series of lecture-demonstrations examining Amonkar's music as it changed over six decades, dividing her performing life into two broad periods — roughly 1960 to 1985, and 1985 to 2017 — and describing how she moved away from the strict discipline of the Jaipur gharana towards a more openly emotive manner. One of the last of these, a three-hour presentation, was held at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai in January 2019. He also appeared as the guru Pandit Vinayak Pradhan in the 2020 film The Disciple.

A Jaipur gharana singer whose concert work and lecture-demonstrations both centre on the gayaki he learned from Kishori Amonkar.