Pandit Debu Chaudhuri

Devabrata Chaudhuri — known throughout his life as Debu Chaudhuri — was born in Mymensingh, in what is now Bangladesh, in 1935, and began playing the sitar at four. As a boy he presented himself at the Delhi home of Ustad Mushtaq Ali Khan and asked to be taken as a disciple; the Ustad, by one published account, initially refused, but Chaudhuri persisted and became one of his principal students.

His first All India Radio broadcast was in 1953, at eighteen, and he broadcast and performed regularly from then on, building a career alongside contemporaries such as Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan, Nikhil Banerjee and Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan. He was educated at the University of Calcutta, joined the University of Delhi as a reader in 1971, and served as Dean and Head of its Faculty of Music from 1985 to 1988. He was a visiting professor at Maharishi International University in Iowa from 1991 to 1994.

He wrote six books, composed eight new ragas, and founded the UMAK Centre for Culture in Delhi in memory of his guru, organising concerts there for many years. He received the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award. He died in Delhi on 1 May 2021 from Covid-19; his son, the sitarist Prateek Chaudhuri, died of related complications days later.

Chaudhuri's playing is remembered for a sweet, ringing tone and for the clarity of his technique, both inherited from the austere Senia manner his guru practised. He kept the emphasis on the unhurried exposition of the raga rather than on display, and much of his written work concerns how that approach can be taught systematically rather than only absorbed by ear.