Sangeetacharya Gokul Nag

Gokul Nag was born in Bankura, in Bengal, into a family in which music had been practised since his great-grandfather Nafar Chandra Nag; his father was Gobinda Chandra Nag. According to his son, Pandit Manilal Nag, he was heard playing sitar in public as a boy by Ram Prasanna Bandyopadhyay, who then accepted him as a disciple.

Ram Prasanna Bandyopadhyay had learned the surbahar from Sajjad Mohammed Khan, and that inheritance shaped Gokul Nag's playing: he applied surbahar stroke technique to the sitar. He played sitar, surbahar and veena, and taught his son Manilal, through whom the family line continues to his granddaughter Mita Nag.

He is remembered in Kolkata through the Gokul Nag Memorial Foundation, founded by Mita Nag in 2002. Biographical dates for him are not established in the sources consulted here and have been left blank rather than estimated.

Gokul Nag played the sitar with two mizrabs, worn on the index and middle fingers, sounding the chikari strings with his little finger — a method drawn from surbahar practice rather than from ordinary sitar technique. His son has pointed out that other players trained by surbahar and sursringar masters, such as Pannalal Bajpai of Varanasi, used a comparable approach, and that the resulting sound is fuller than single-mizrab playing.