Pandit Nikhil Banerjee

Nikhil Ranjan Banerjee was born on 14 October 1931 in Calcutta. His father, Jitendra Nath Banerjee, was a sitarist, and the boy's first lessons came at home. At about nine he won the All-Bengal Sitar Competition and began broadcasting on All India Radio.

His early training continued with Ustad Mushtaq Ali Khan. The turn that shaped his life came in 1947, when he sought out Ustad Allauddin Khan of Maihar. Accounts of the meeting agree that Allauddin Khan was reluctant to take another student, and that Banerjee's persistence eventually won him a place. What followed were years of austere, closely supervised practice.

He went on to study with Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and with Annapurna Devi, both children of Allauddin Khan. Alongside the Maihar inheritance he absorbed the vocal manner of Ustad Amir Khan, whose unhurried khayal left a clear mark on the shape of his alaap.

Banerjee toured widely and taught both in Calcutta and at the Ali Akbar College of Music in California, but he kept a certain distance from the public life that came with international success. Listeners and critics returned again and again to the same words for his playing: interior, unhurried, devotional.

He died of a heart attack in Calcutta on 27 January 1986, at fifty-four, shortly after a concert tour that had taken him to New York.

Banerjee's sitar is remembered above all for its alaap — the slow, unmetered opening in which a raga is unfolded note by note. Where others might move quickly to rhythmic display, he stayed, drawing long meend from the strings and letting phrases resolve in their own time.

He brought together the gayaki ang, the vocal manner of playing, with the tantrakari technique proper to the instrument, so that the sitar both sang and behaved like a sitar. Within the Maihar lineage he represents the reflective end of the tradition: no showmanship, and an insistence that the raga itself, rather than the player, is what the audience has come to hear.

He disliked the recording process, feeling it distracted from the inner quality of the music, so high-fidelity concert recordings of him are comparatively rare. He nevertheless made more than two dozen albums, for EMI India and for Sonodisc, Chhanda Dhara, Amigo, Capitol, Connoisseur Society and Raga Records abroad. Among his own compositions is the raga Manomanjari, a combination of Kalavati and Marwa, which he recorded in the studio for Sonodisc in 1976 and which survives in two archival concert issues.