Vidushi Anuradha Pal

Anuradha Pal was born and raised in Mumbai, in a family with no hereditary musical line. She began classical vocal training at six and took up tabla alongside it, learning first from the Benares gharana players Manikrao Popatkar and Pandit Madan Mishra. She has said that her first tabla teacher initially refused her on the grounds that a girl would lack the strength for the instrument.

She began giving tabla solos on All India Radio and Doordarshan at nine and was accompanying vocalists and instrumentalists by thirteen. She later trained for many years under Ustad Alla Rakha and Ustad Zakir Hussain, and is described as a torchbearer of their Punjab gharana line. The Limca Book of Records named her India's first professional female tabla player in 1991 — a description she qualifies herself, naming Aban Mistry as the first woman tabla player chronologically and her own claim as resting on the scale of professional work.

In 1996, on International Women's Day, she founded Stree Shakti, an all-female Hindustani and Carnatic ensemble. She composed the score for M. F. Husain's film Gaja Gamini (2000), and leads the cross-genre project Recharge. She has taught and lectured at Harvard, MIT, Berklee and the New England Conservatory, where she was artist-in-residence in 2006, and runs a tabla academy in Andheri, Mumbai. In December 2018 she led 175 students and 40 teachers in a mass tabla tribute to Alla Rakha's centenary in Nagpur. Honours include the President's First Ladies award (2018) from the Ministry of Women and Child Development.

Pal's solo work draws on the repertoire of more than one gharana — Benares from her first teachers, Punjab from Alla Rakha and Zakir Hussain — and she has spoken of integrating Carnatic rhythmic material as well. Her solos are shaped like a slow unfolding rather than a display: open tonal exposition, then compositions and improvisation building to a fast close. In accompaniment the qualities most often noted are tonal clarity and balance — audible weight on the bayan without covering the melodic line. She also performs self-jugalbandis, playing both sides of a rhythmic dialogue.