Pandit Budhaditya Mukherjee

Budhaditya Mukherjee was born in 1955 in Bhilai, the steel township in what is now Chhattisgarh, where his father worked as a senior official at the Bhilai Steel Plant. No source gives an exact day and month of birth.

His father, Acharya Pandit Bimalendu Mukherjee, was his only teacher. As a boy in Mymensingh in undivided Bengal, Bimalendu had assisted Ustad Enayet Khan and absorbed his teaching by listening in on lessons; after Enayet Khan's death in 1938 he studied further with Jitendra Mohan Sengupta, Niroda Kanta Lahiri Chowdhury and Birendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury. He played sitar, surbahar, sarod, rudra veena and sarangi, and sang.

Budhaditya was given a small sitar at five. Musicians passed through the house; he has recalled sitting on the lap of Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan as a child. In 1970 he won two national music competitions, and in 1975 became a Grade-A artist of All India Radio. His Calcutta debut in 1976 drew praise from Satyajit Ray, and a radio broadcast prompted the veena player S. Balachander to call him "the sitar artist of the century".

He kept up his studies alongside all this, graduating first in his class with a gold medal in metallurgical engineering from what is now NIT Raipur in 1977.

He began touring internationally in 1979 and has since performed in more than twenty-five countries. On 30 June 1990 he became the first musician to perform at the House of Commons in London. He has taught as visiting sitar faculty at the Istituto Interculturale di Studi Musicali Comparati in Venice from 1983 and at the Rotterdam Conservatory from 1995. His son Bijoyaditya, born 1984, began sitar at five under his grandfather and father.

Mukherjee coined the term "Imdadkhani gharana" himself, to credit Ustad Imdad Khan rather than the town of Etawah. His playing is gayaki ang — modelled on the voice — carried by meends so deep that a single fret yields a bend of five and a half notes, and matched with an unusual clarity of articulation at very high speed. He has said the speed began as a practical necessity in his early years, before he had instruments that matched what he heard; he later spent some fifteen years researching sitar construction to get the tone he wanted.

The debt to Ustad Vilayat Khan's singing sitar is one he acknowledges openly, but his repertoire and phrasing draw as much on sarangi players — Ram Narayan, Gopal Mishra, Bundu Khan. During the 1970s he was, by most accounts, the first sitarist to present tappa on the instrument, an idea he credits to the vocalist Jagdish Prasad. From 1995 he turned seriously to the surbahar as a recording instrument, including an album in tribute to his father.