Rimpa Siva

Rimpa Siva was born in 1986 in Kolkata, the daughter of Professor Pandit Swapan Siva, a Farrukhabad gharana tabla player and one of the city's most sought-after teachers. She has said she was drawn to the instrument at three, sitting beside her father while he taught his students, and that he had assumed she would take up voice or another instrument before he saw how persistent the interest was. He became her only guru.

She gave her first stage performance in Kolkata at eight, and went on to play in the United States while still in school, followed by Holland and the United Kingdom. A French documentary about her, Rimpa Siva: Princess of Tabla, was filmed in Kolkata over twenty-six days; the film is dated 1998 in her own account to The Hindu and 1999 in several later listings. By her early twenties she had appeared on around fifty recordings.

She played a full-length teentaal solo at the Darbar Festival in Leicester in April 2007, with Sandeep Mishra on sarangi — a recital Darbar's own account describes as the point at which she was recognised internationally. She continues to perform solo and in jugalbandi, and speaks directly about being one of very few women to have made tabla a profession, while declining to treat that as the interesting part of her work.

Her father's line runs through Ustad Karamatullah Khan of Farrukhabad; his other well-known disciples include Pandit Subhankar Banerjee.

Siva's solos follow the classical Farrukhabad shape — an unhurried peshkar opening that establishes tone before anything fast happens, then qaidas with their expansions, relas, tukdas and gats. What listeners and reviewers tend to single out is clarity at speed: the bols stay separately audible rather than blurring into a run. Her Darbar recital closed with a bol-laden gat attributed to Ustad Abid Hussain Khan, one of the Farrukhabad compositions her father's line carries.