Nasir Aminuddin Dagar

Aminuddin Dagar was born in Indore on 20 October 1923, the second son of Nasiruddin Khan. He had his initial training from his father, and after his father's death in 1936 learnt mainly from Hussainuddin Khan (Tansen Pandey), Ziauddin Khan and Riyazuddin Khan. He regarded his elder brother, Moinuddin, as his principal guru, and formally accepted him as such.

He gave his first performance at the age of eleven. From the 1940s he and Moinuddin rose as the Senior Dagar Brothers, transforming the practice of jugalbandi singing and touring Russia, Japan and, at the invitation of Alain Danielou, Europe under the UNESCO banner, with concerts in Berlin, Venice and Paris in 1964. After Moinuddin's death in 1966 he continued as a solo performer.

He came to Calcutta in January 1966 as founder principal of the Birla Academy's Swar Sangam, and in 1975 founded his own institution, the Ustad Nasir Moinuddin Dagar Dhrupad Sangeet Ashram, named for his brother. He was the subject of a documentary film portrait, The Recluse. He died in Kolkata on 28 December 2000.

At the Kolkata ashram he taught much of the next generation of dhrupad singers in Bengal, among them Samir Kumar Dutta, the cousins Alaka Nandy and Ashoka Dhar, who performed as the Nandy Sisters, and Sujata Moitra. He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1985 and the Padma Bhushan in 1986.

He had a deep, resonant voice and a slightly restrained, devotional manner that made him the ideal duet partner for his more flamboyant elder brother: in performance he would draw listeners into a meditative mood by descending gradually through the lower octaves. He was famous within his family for a prodigious memory and knew more compositions than perhaps anyone else of his generation in the Dagar family; he taught some of them to his students, but most are now lost.