Vidushi Manju Mehta

Manju Mehta was born Manju Bhatt on 21 May 1945 in Jaipur, into a family of musicians; her parents were Hindustani vocalists and her brothers were the sitarist Shashi Mohan Bhatt and the Mohan veena player Vishwa Mohan Bhatt. Her first sitar teacher was her elder brother Shashi Mohan, himself a student of Pandit Ravi Shankar.

After winning state and central government scholarships she studied in the guru-shishya manner with the Jodhpur-based sarod player Pandit Damodar Lal Kabra, a disciple of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, and she often described the long hours of riyaz of that period. She took a master's degree in music and competed in the All India Radio competition, later holding top grade as an AIR instrumentalist. At a performance she met the tabla player Nandan Mehta, of the Banaras gharana and a student of Kishan Maharaj; they married and had two daughters, Poorvi and Hetal, who play sitar and tabla. In 1980, after some years away from the concert platform, she was accepted as a student by Ravi Shankar.

With Nandan Mehta she co-founded the Saptak school of music and the annual Saptak festival in Ahmedabad, launched in 1980 and now among India's largest classical music festivals. She died in Ahmedabad on 20 August 2024.

Mehta's playing is associated with the Maihar-derived teaching line she came through, by way of Damodar Lal Kabra and Ravi Shankar: an unhurried alap followed by carefully structured development, with the phrasing habits of that school rather than the gayaki manner of the Imdadkhani players. Obituaries described her as an artist of the Senia-Maihar tradition, a label used here as the sources use it rather than as a separate classification.