Pandit Anindo Chatterjee

Anindo Chatterjee was born into a musical family in Bengal. Wikipedia gives 30 May 1954 at Kashimpur in North 24 Parganas; Sruti gives 1953 and places the family in Kolkata. No independent source settles it, so treat the date as unsettled.

Music surrounded him at home. He began tabla at five after watching his uncle Biswanath Chatterjee play; another uncle, Debiprasad Chatterjee, was a sitarist, and his younger sister Keka performs sitar solos. In the same year he became All India Radio's youngest performing artist. His first tabla teacher was Ustad Afaq Hussain Khan of the Lucknow gharana, briefly; he then entered the gurukul of Pandit Jnan Prakash Ghosh, with whom he studied for some thirty years in the grammar of the Farrukhabad gharana before widening his vocabulary across other traditions. He was, by one account, blessed by Ustad Amir Khan at ten.

From 1972 he performed as soloist and accompanist internationally. His longest and most celebrated partnership was with the sitarist Pandit Nikhil Banerjee, but the list of soloists he has sat behind runs across instruments and both classical systems: Ravi Shankar, Imrat Khan, Budhaditya Mukherjee, Rais Khan, Shahid Parvez and Manilal Nag on sitar; Ali Akbar Khan, Amjad Ali Khan, Buddhadev Das Gupta and Tejendra Narayan Majumdar on sarod; Hariprasad Chaurasia on bansuri; Shivkumar Sharma on santoor; Mallikarjun Mansur and Gangubai Hangal singing. He has played in more than sixty countries, at Carnegie Hall, the Royal Albert Hall and the Sydney Opera House, was in 1989 the youngest tabla player to perform at the House of Commons, and played at Rashtrapati Bhavan during President Obama's 2010 visit. At the Darbar Festival he gave a solo in 2006, a duet with Pandit Kumar Bose in 2016 and a duet with his son in 2024.

Alongside performance he teaches, researches and makes tabla. His students include Bhooshan Munja, Anindo Gangopadhyay, Sanjay Jhalla and Anil Datar. His son Anubrata Chatterjee, born 1985, trained with him and was the last ganda-bandh disciple of Jnan Prakash Ghosh; father and son now often play in duet.

He received the President's Award in 1970 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2002. In January 2022 he publicly declined the Padma Shri, saying he would have accepted it ten years earlier. That July the West Bengal government conferred the Banga Bibhushan on him.

Two things are named in almost every description of his playing: speed, and the clarity of each bol within it. Nothing blurs. The foundation is Farrukhabad — its open, resonant compositions and intricate structure — but the vocabulary draws on Lucknow, Punjab and Ajrada as well, a breadth he attributes to Jnan Prakash Ghosh's cross-gharana scholarship.

His accompaniment list is close to a roll-call of the era: Nikhil Banerjee, Imrat Khan, Budhaditya Mukherjee and Rais Khan on sitar; Ali Akbar Khan and Buddhadev Das Gupta on sarod; Mallikarjun Mansur and Gangubai Hangal singing; Hariprasad Chaurasia on bansuri; Shivkumar Sharma on santoor. To that he adds a teaching lineage and an uncommon sideline as a maker of the instrument itself.