Pandit Uday Bhawalkar

Uday Bhawalkar was born on 5 February 1966 in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh. He came to classical music through an elder sister, and at fifteen won a scholarship to the Dhrupad Kendra in Bhopal. He then spent more than twelve years living and studying in the guru-shishya tradition with Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar, a vocalist, and Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, the rudra veena player — two central figures of the Dagar line.

He gave his first performance in Bhopal in 1985. In 1987 Ustad Nasir Aminuddin Dagar, the eldest of the Dagar family, heard him for the first time and gave him a gold medal. He has since performed and taught across India, Europe, North America and Asia. Pandit Suresh Talwalkar and Sukhvinder Singh Namdhari have accompanied him on tabla; Ustad Zakir Hussain accompanied him on pakhawaj at the Prithvi Music Festival in Mumbai.

Teaching is a substantial part of his work. He is based in Pune, takes students in the traditional residential format, and has taught through the ITC Sangeet Research Academy in Kolkata, Bengal Parampara Sangeetalaya in Dhaka, the Asian Music Circuit in London and as a visiting artist at the University of Washington. In 1992 he helped establish the Veena Foundation in memory of Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, which supports dhrupad through concerts, scholarships and teaching.

He has also sung on film soundtracks, including Mani Kaul's Cloud Door, Aparna Sen's Mr & Mrs Iyer and Amol Palekar's Anahat, and has worked with the dancer Astad Deboo and with Ensemble Modern in Germany.

His singing is described in terms of slow, extended alap, clarity of individual notes, and a concern with raga bhava — the emotional weight of a raga — over display. He talks about the idea of darshan: that when a singer is fully inside a note, the self recedes and the music stands on its own.