Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar

Zia Fariduddin Dagar was born in Udaipur on 15 June 1932. His father, Ustad Ziauddin Khan Dagar, was court musician to Maharana Bhupal Singh of Udaipur and taught him dhrupad voice and veena; after his father's death he continued under his elder brother Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, with whom he often performed. The pair were known as Chhote Ustad and Bade Ustad.

He taught at the Dhrupad Kendra in Bhopal alongside his brother, and worked in Madhya Pradesh as a music teacher during the 1980s. By 1980 he was also largely based in Austria, teaching at the Innsbruck conservatory and giving dhrupad instruction there and in France, mainly Paris. He held a visiting professorship until the period of the Babri Masjid riots, after which he settled at his brother's gurukul at Palaspe near Panvel.

The filmmaker Mani Kaul studied with him and asked him to provide the score for The Cloud Door (1994). Among his best-known students is Pandit Uday Bhawalkar.

He received the Rajasthan Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1987, the Tansen Samman of Madhya Pradesh in 1993, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Hindustani vocal music in 1994, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the North American Dhrupad Association in 2005. He died at Panvel on 8 May 2013.

He is the singing voice of Mani Kaul's Dhrupad (1982), the Films Division documentary in which he and his brother demonstrate alap, taan and bandish; the Kaul connection continued with the score for The Cloud Door twelve years later. Besides the Bhopal Kendra, which the brothers ran together for some twenty-five years, he taught at the Palaspe gurukul and at Dhrupad Sansar at IIT Bombay. Among his other students were Pandit Ritwik Sanyal, Pandit Nirmalya Dey, Pushparaj Koshti and the Gundecha Brothers.

ThePrint's profile of him described a musician whose performance was "as much whim as tradition" — within the strict grammar of Dagar vani alap he was known for unpredictability rather than fixed set-pieces. A 1970s United Nations concert on which he sang Raag Bhairavi with his brother went unrecorded, his nephew Bahauddin Dagar has said, because the sound engineers forgot to start the tape.