Ashish Sankrityayan

Sankrityayan learned the sitar as a child and later took up vocal music. By his own account he turned to dhrupad while studying mathematics at the University of Bombay, after hearing a recording of the elder Dagar brothers Nasir Moinuddin and Nasir Aminuddin Dagar and meeting the rudra veena player Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar.

His principal teachers were Ustad Rahim Fahimuddin Dagar, Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar and Ustad Hussain Sayeeduddin Dagar, across roughly twenty years; he also received guidance from Ustad Nasir Aminuddin Dagar and Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar. He studied at the Dhrupad Kendra in Bhopal under Zia Fariduddin Dagar as part of its second batch of students, and afterwards continued with Zia Fariduddin's elder cousin Rahim Fahimuddin Dagar - two teachers whose methods pulled in opposite directions, one having compressed the family's long technical grounding to fit a four-year course and the other having refused to.

He began performing publicly in 2000, after that long apprenticeship, and has since given concerts and workshops in India, Europe and the United States. He was awarded a National Junior Culture Fellowship by the Sangeet Natak Akademi. He has performed with medieval, renaissance and contemporary musicians and with dance choreography, including work with the kathak dancer Vidyagauri Adkar.

From 2011 he headed the Dhrupad Kendra Bhopal as its guru and director. His own site states that he taught there from 2011 to 2019, and records that two of his students at the Kendra received CCRT national scholarships for young artists. In his teaching there he set out to combine Zia Fariduddin Dagar's compressed methods with the orthodox sequence he had learned from Rahim Fahimuddin Dagar. He was also responsible for putting in place a Bachelor and Master of Arts programme in classical music at the Madhya Pradesh Raja Bhoj Open University with dhrupad as its principal focus, so that students learning in the guru-shishya system could take a university degree through examinations spread over several years.

Alongside performing he works on the history and musicology of dhrupad, and has lectured and taught at institutions including the Free University and Humboldt University in Berlin, the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler and UdK Berlin, the University of Copenhagen, Anton Bruckner University in Linz, Hildesheim University, the University of Vienna, the Ateliers d'Ethnomusicologie in Geneva and AKDT in Belgium. He acted as a consultant to the Maharana of Mewar Foundation in Udaipur on the restoration and release of its archival recordings of the elder Dagar brothers. His book Dhrupad of the Dagars: Conceptual Foundations and Contemporary Questions was published by Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi; he has also published on Zia Fariduddin Dagar's teaching methods in the journal Samaas, and wrote his teacher's obituary in the Hindustan Times in 2011.

He sings the Dagarvani dhrupad he was taught, and his writing sets out the conceptual framework behind it - the traditional pedagogy of the Dagars, and the newer models that arose when the genre had to be taught in fixed terms rather than over a lifetime. Descriptions of his singing emphasise breath discipline, a subject he treats as part of the technique rather than as mysticism.