Pandit Kanthe Maharaj

Kanthe Maharaj was born in 1880 in the Kabir Chaura quarter of Varanasi, the musicians' neighbourhood of the city, to Pandit Dilip (also written Daleep) Mishra, himself a tabla player. He began tabla at about seven or eight with Pandit Baldev Sahai, a close relative and a teacher within the family tradition descending from Ram Sahai, and studied with him for around twenty-three years — an unusually long apprenticeship even by the standards of the guru-shishya system.

That apprenticeship included a journey. When Baldev Sahai left for Nepal to take an appointment at the Nepal Darbar, the boy is said to have travelled there with a neighbour, reaching Kathmandu in five days, and to have stayed four years continuing his training. Kanthe Maharaj later served as a court musician in Nepal himself, and spent much of his working life in Calcutta.

His reputation rests on accompaniment. Over roughly seventy years he played for most of the leading singers and kathak dancers of his time, and his name is attached in particular to the Benares line's close relationship with kathak. Hindi-language accounts credit him with being the first to present devotional stuti through tabla playing, and record that in 1954 he played continuously for two and a half hours in a widely reported feat of stamina. He was known for command of gat, paran, chhand and tehai, and for solo recitals that ran for hours.

He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1961.

His teaching line is the reason the name recurs across Benares biographies. He adopted his younger brother Hari Maharaj's son, Kishan Maharaj, after Hari Maharaj's death, and trained him; Kishan Maharaj became the best-known Benares soloist of the later twentieth century. Other disciples recorded include Badri Maharaj, Nanku Maharaj, Ashutosh Bhattacharya, Krishna Kumar Ganguli, Ramnath Misra, Nanhe Sahai and Sital Misra. Some listings also name Samta Prasad among his students; that is not the account followed here, where Samta Prasad's training is recorded under Bikku Maharaj, and the claim is noted rather than adopted.

A specialist accompanist's hand rather than a soloist's alone: the Benares open strokes, but deployed for singers and above all for kathak, where the tabla has to answer footwork phrase for phrase. Descriptions emphasise stamina and control of gat, paran, chhand and tehai over display.