Pandit Kishan Maharaj

Kishan Hari Maharaj was born on 3 September 1923 at Kabir Chaura in Banaras, into a Brahmin family of hereditary musicians. His father was Hari Maharaj and his mother Anjora Devi. Hari Maharaj began teaching him, but died when the boy was about six; his father's childless elder brother, Pandit Kanthe Maharaj, then adopted him and took over his training. Kanthe Maharaj was a disciple of Pandit Baldeo Sahai, grandson of Ram Sahai, the founder of the Banaras baaj — so Kishan Maharaj stood four generations from the source of the style. "Music was the only education allowed in my family," he once said.

He was performing publicly by about eleven. In 1944 he moved to Bombay, where the early going was hard; he played tabla for Sitara Devi in the film Badi Maa (1945) and appeared in others including Neecha Nagar and Aandhiyan. Within a few years he was sharing platforms with Faiyaz Khan, Omkarnath Thakur, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Bhimsen Joshi, Girija Devi, Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan and Vilayat Khan. He also gave sangat to the leading Kathak dancers of the day — Shambhu Maharaj, Sitara Devi, Gopi Krishna and Birju Maharaj — an important strand in Banaras accompaniment that is easily overlooked.

His Taal Vadya Kacheri performances with the Carnatic mridangam player Palghat R. Raghu were among his most admired work, setting the two percussion traditions in direct conversation. He toured widely, including the Commonwealth Arts Festival in Edinburgh in 1965, and shared stages with fellow tabla masters Samta Prasad — a relative through the Banaras families — Alla Rakha and Karamatullah Khan.

He chose to remain in Varanasi rather than settle in Bombay, taught there for decades, and was publicly active in the city's cultural life, at one point going on hunger strike to press for a Doordarshan centre in Banaras. His students include Kumar Bose, Sandeep Das, Sanju Sahai and Balkrishna Iyer, as well as his son Puran Maharaj.

He was admitted to hospital in Varanasi on 29 April 2008 after a paralytic attack and died there on 4 May 2008, aged eighty-four, survived by his wife Beena Devi, three daughters and his son. He had received the Padma Shri in 1973 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2002.

The Benares baaj is the open style — khula baaj — struck with the flat and full hand rather than worked with the fingertips, and descended in large part from the pakhawaj. Kishan Maharaj was its leading exponent in the second half of the twentieth century: enormous volume and attack, but with each stroke left distinct rather than smeared into the next.

What listeners singled out was his handling of cross-rhythm and of the tihai — a phrase repeated three times so that its final stroke lands exactly on the sam. He would set a pattern running against the cycle, hold it through calculations that sounded impossible to keep track of, and arrive home precisely; audiences often recognised the resolution a beat before it came, which is part of the pleasure.

He was also a noted player of the bayan, the bass drum, shaping its pitch under the heel of his hand until phrases seemed to speak. He drew freely on the bols of Kathak dance and of the pakhawaj, widening the solo repertoire and making the case, concert by concert, that the tabla could hold a stage on its own.