Debopriya Chatterjee

Debopriya Chatterjee was born in Allahabad into a family of musicians. Her parents, Robin and Krishna Chatterjee, were Hindustani vocalists who gave their daughters their first musical grounding and encouraged them towards the flute; the family lived for a period in Afghanistan because of her father's work.

Back in India, she took her initial flute training under Pandit Bholanath Prasanna in Allahabad, and in her teenage years began studying with Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. She studied world music at the Rotterdam Conservatory in the Netherlands on a Nuffic scholarship, completing performing-musician and music-teacher certifications with distinction in 1998. She went on to take the Sangeet Prabhakar at Prayag Sangeet Samiti in Allahabad in 2001, winning the silver performance medal for flute, and the Sangeet Pravin in 2005, this time with the gold medal.

She made her Bombay debut with her sister in 1995 at the Sampoorna Yugal Sangeet Ratri conference, and the two have since accompanied their guru on stage and performed widely in India and abroad. In 2008 she received the Sangeet Natak Akademi's Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar. Alongside concert work she has taken part in outreach programmes introducing schoolchildren to Hindustani music, a response to the near-absence of women flautists she and her sister encountered as students. She lives in Mumbai.

Bansuri playing rooted in the teaching of Bholanath Prasanna and Hariprasad Chaurasia, heard both solo and in sustained jugalbandi with her sister.