Ojas Adhiya

Ojas Adhiya was born in Chikhli, Maharashtra. His father, Dr Yogesh Adhiya, noticed his interest in percussion when he was two, watching him at a Siddha Yoga chanting and meditation centre; by Darbar's account he worked out the eight-beat keherwa taal for himself soon after. When the talent was recognised by Kalyanji of the composer pair Kalyanji–Anandji, the family placed him in their care, and at five the family moved to Mumbai so he could study with Shri Mridangraj, of whom he became a gandaa-bandh disciple and from whom he learned the traditional repertoire of tabla solo and accompaniment.

Mridangraj was himself a disciple of Ustad Niazu Khan of Ajrada, and it is through that line that Ojas's training belongs to the Ajrada gharana — a school founded in the nineteenth century by Miru Khan and Kallu Khan, disciples of Sitab Khan of the Delhi gharana.

As a child he travelled with the Little Wonders programmes of Kalyanji–Anandji's Kalavir Academy, performing some five hundred concerts. He entered the Limca Book of Records in 1993 as the youngest tabla player in India, won the Pandit V. D. Paluskar Award in 1998 and a state-level competition award from the Governor of Maharashtra in 2006, and in 2015 received the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar from the Sangeet Natak Akademi.

On the Hindustani circuit he accompanies leading soloists — his Darbar Festival appearances include accompanying Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan in 2018 — and he performs tabla solo recitals in his own right. Outside classical concerts he has played with the group Shakti alongside John McLaughlin, Shankar Mahadevan, Selvaganesh and Ganesh Rajagopalan. He names Ustad Zakir Hussain, Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri, Pandit Kumar Bose and Pandit Anindo Chatterjee among the modern players who shaped his thinking, and as a student he spent time with jazz, ghazal and Carnatic rhythm, advising younger players to listen to everything.

No birth year is stated in any source read for this profile, so none is recorded here.

Exuberance held in check, as he puts it himself: a full solo repertoire in teentaal and in the less common talas, delivered with the clean, open bayan the Ajrada line is known for, and an accompanist's ear formed by years beside singers and instrumentalists. He talks about accompaniment as something that has to be unselfconscious — the moment you are watching yourself play, he says, the spontaneity is gone.