Ustad Mohi Bahauddin Dagar

Bahauddin Dagar did not grow up expecting to be a musician. He has said he wanted to be a painter, that until sixteen his listening was rock and jazz from a Bombay school upbringing, and that although music filled the house he did not understand what alap was. He began the veena with his father at sixteen; his father died when he was twenty, and his uncle Zia Fariduddin Dagar mentored him from then on.

He describes his father's teaching as deliberately indirect: a student would be given a few key phrases holding the soul of a raga and asked to work at them until the raga opened of its own accord. He has spoken of the veena as an instrument that sets the pace rather than obeying one — once it is tuned to a raga's requirements there is no turning back, and "a beenkar must never be in a hurry".

He performs frequently without accompaniment, in the unhurried manner of dhrupad before amplified concert life, and teaches widely within the international veena community. In recent years he has performed at the Ravenna Festival in Italy in 2017 with the vocalist Pelva Naik, in a concert curated by Darbar marking seventy years of Indian independence, and gave a solo recital at the Darbar Festival in London's Purcell Room the following year.

He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2012.

How his generation is counted varies with where the count begins: he is described as the twentieth generation of the Dagar line when it is traced to Nayak Haridas Dagar in the sixteenth century, and as the eighth when traced to Baba Gopal Das, who became Baba Imam Baksh on converting to Islam in the eighteenth century.

His own account of the training begins earlier than the veena. He started at seven on the sitar with his mother, Smt. Pramila Dagar, before turning to his father's instrument. The rhythmic clarity he brings to alap, jor and jhala he attributes to the Saadharani school reintroduced by his great-grandfather Ustad Zakiruddin Khan and his grandfather Ustad Ziauddin Khan, and to the joining of veena and voice. He held the Nana Shirgaokar Research Professorship at the University of Goa between 2013 and 2015, has designed the Ras Veena — an adaptation of the Saraswati veena for dhrupad — and teaches at the gurukul near Panvel that his father founded in 1982.

He has argued publicly that in the Dagar tradition beenkars stood on equal footing with singers, the instrument sharing the aesthetic values of the voice: in his words, the instrument "complements the voice, beautifies the swara phrases, brings about exactness". He is unhurried about change — belonging to an established musical family, he has said, brings the responsibility of retaining the essence of the tradition rather than licence to vary it drastically.