Pandit Bimalendu Mukherjee

Bimalendu Mukherjee was born in 1925 and became a geologist, eventually serving as general manager for ores, mines and quarries at the Bhilai steel plant. Music was not a sideline: over nearly six decades he taught around four hundred students in Bhilai and made the industrial town a regular stop for leading musicians of the era, among them Amir Khan, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Vilayat Khan, Ravi Shankar, Kumar Gandharva, Bhimsen Joshi and Girija Devi.

His own training was exceptionally wide. He is described as a sitar student in the Imdadkhani line of Ustad Enayat Khan, and also studied with the sitarist Balaram Pathak, the khayal singers Badri Prasad and Jaichand Bhatt of the Patiala and Kirana gharanas, the Rampur beenkar Jyotish Chandra Chowdhury, the sarangi and esraj players Halkeram Bhat and Chandrikaprasad Dube, and the pakhawaj player Madhavrao Alkutkar. From Birendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury of Gouripur he learned the sursringar, a bass instrument that had almost fallen out of use.

His eldest and best-known disciple was his son, Pandit Budhaditya Mukherjee, whom he began teaching at five. Other students include Sudhakar Sheolikar, Avaneendra Sheolikar, Sanjoy Bandopadhyay, Anupama Bhagwat, Rajeev Janardan and Kamala Shankar. He died in January 2010.

Mukherjee's teaching drew on the many traditions he had studied, and his son has described the method as careful and systematic but compassionate — technique taught in sequence rather than by imitation. His command of string instruments extended well beyond the sitar, into surbahar, sursringar and the older beenkar repertoire, and that breadth is audible in the students who passed through Bhilai.