Pandit Jasraj

Jasraj was born on 28 January 1930 at Pili Mandori, a village in the Hisar district of Haryana, into a family of classical singers. His father, Pandit Motiram, died in 1934, on the day he was to have been appointed state musician at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad; Jasraj was four. His eldest brother, Pandit Maniram, took over his musical instruction, and another brother, Pandit Pratap Narayan, started him on tabla at the age of seven.

He spent his youth in Hyderabad and travelled often to Sanand in Gujarat to study with musicians of the Mewati gharana, performing for and receiving training from Thakur Jaiwant Singhji Vaghela, the Thakur Sahib of Sanand, himself a vocalist and beenkar. At fourteen he gave up tabla in reaction to the way accompanists were then treated and turned to singing, practising for long hours each day. In 1946 he moved to Calcutta, where he began singing classical music for radio, and in 1952, at twenty-two, gave his first stage concert as a vocalist at the court of King Tribhuvan Bir Bikram Shah in Kathmandu.

In 1962 he married Madhura Shantaram, daughter of the film director V. Shantaram; they had a son, Shaarang Dev Pandit, and a daughter, Durga Jasraj. From 1972 he organised the annual Pandit Motiram Pandit Maniram Sangeet Samaroh in Hyderabad in memory of his father and brother.

He founded schools of Indian classical music in Mumbai, Kerala and across North America, spending part of each year teaching in the United States and Canada, and was still teaching international students at ninety. He died at his home in New Jersey on 17 August 2020 of cardiac arrest, and was cremated in Mumbai with state honours.

Although the Mewati gharana is known for traditional khayal, Jasraj sang khayal with a marked flexibility, drawing in lighter elements including thumri — a borrowing for which he was criticised early in his career. He devised a form of jugalbandi he called Jasrangi, built on the older system of moorchhana, in which a male and a female vocalist sing different ragas at the same time, and was known for presenting rarely heard ragas such as Abiri Todi and Patdeepaki. He also worked to popularise Haveli Sangeet, semi-classical devotional singing performed in temples.