Pandit Sharda Sahai

Sharda Sahai was born in Benares in 1935, the third of Pandit Bhagvati Sahai's four sons and a direct descendant of Pandit Ram Sahai. He began learning from his father, and when Bhagvati Sahai died in 1946 he became a disciple of Pandit Kanthe Maharaj — who had himself been a student of Sharda Sahai's grandfather, Pandit Baldev Sahai. The teaching thus returned to the family after a generation outside it.

He started performing professionally at nine and made his major public debut at sixteen at the Italee Music Conference in Calcutta, alongside the sarod player Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. All India Radio graded him an A-grade artist in 1965, the same year he founded the Pandit Ram Sahai Sangit Vidyalaya in Benares, a school for classical music and dance later extended to the United Kingdom. As an accompanist he worked with Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan, Nikhil Banerjee, Ali Akbar Khan, Amjad Ali Khan and the violinist V. G. Jog, and with the Kathak dancers Gopi Krishna, Birju Maharaj and Sitara Devi.

A 1970 tour of Europe and North America with Amjad Ali Khan led the same year to an appointment as artist-in-residence in the World Music Program at Wesleyan University, where he stayed five years while also teaching at Brown University and the Berklee College of Music. In Britain he was a senior lecturer at Dartington College of Arts for six years and later taught at Leeds and Oxford. He also worked well outside the classical concert circuit, performing jugalbandi with the mridangam players Umayalpuram Sivaraman, T. Shakaran and R. Raghavan, and collaborating with the violinist L. Shankar, the composer John Cage and the percussion ensemble Nexus.

Because the Benares family repertoire was closely guarded and passed down within the household, his playing is often treated as the reference model for the style — particularly the solo form, in which the Benares baj is at its most developed.

In December 1997 the Canadian percussionist Russell Hartenberger, of the ensemble Nexus and one of his Wesleyan students, interviewed him at Southall in London about rhythm and teaching. Sharda Sahai described beginning every student with time kept in the body before anything else — clapping one against one, then two, then four, always spoken in bols rather than numbers, and adding cross-rhythms as the pupil was ready rather than naming them as fives or sevens in the southern manner. He allowed a metronome for a while where a student's time would not settle, but not for long: Indian music, he said, is not very much like a metronome. He was made a Fellow of Leeds College of Music in November 1997.

A soloist's command of the Benares baj: resonant Na and Din strokes, full-hand tete patterns and the long solo architecture of uthan, gat, tukra, paran and fard inherited directly through the family.