Raja Chhatrapati Singh Judeo

Chhatrapati Singh Judeo was born in 1919 into the royal family of Bijna, a small state in Uttar Pradesh near the Madhya Pradesh border. His father Raja Himmat Singh and an earlier Raja Mukund Singh were patrons of music who kept court musicians, and he took up the pakhawaj himself as a boy.

Accounts of his training differ in an important way. A biographical sketch says he met Swami Ramdas, a pakhawaj player, during a pilgrimage to Ayodhya with his father at about the age of ten or twelve and became his student, and places Ramdas in a line of transmission from Kudau Singh through Madan Mohan. An encyclopaedia entry instead names both Kudau Singh and Swami Ramdas as his teachers directly. Since Kudau Singh belongs to a considerably earlier generation, the indirect account is the more plausible of the two, but this page records both rather than choosing between them.

He accompanied the senior Dagar Brothers — a 1964 record survives with Nasir Moinuddin and Nasir Aminuddin Dagar, with only tanpura and his pakhawaj — as well as Pandit Ram Chatur Mallick and other dhrupad singers, and was a senior artist of All India Radio. He is also reported to have taught and performed at the University of Washington School of Music in 1975–76, and to have been given the title "Professor of Pakhawaj" at Banaras Hindu University in 1951 by Pandit Omkarnath Thakur.

He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1991. Outside music he was interested in wrestling, mathematics and chess, and wrote a treatise on the knight's move called Ashwa Nirupan Granth. His daughter Chandra Singh and son Raja Surya Pratap Singh both play the sitar. He died in 1998.

His playing is described in terms of virtuoso solo pakhawaj as well as dhrupad accompaniment; he is credited with devising an extended taal scheme called Chaturanga, though the descriptions of it available here come from a single secondary account.