The living raga: Indian classical music today

Indian classical music today sounds on instruments its old masters never held. A mandolin plays a Carnatic kriti. An alto saxophone carries the gamakas of the South. A guitar laid flat across a musician's lap sings a Hindustani alap under a steel bar. Each of these performances still follows a raga and a tala. Each instrument still passes from teacher to student by ear.

In the first article of this seven-part series, I wrote that "classical", in this music, means continuous creation. This final article shows that creation at work now. It looks at the instruments the raga has adopted, the stages it shares, the classrooms that now span continents, and the place KalaSudha takes in that work. It closes the series.

Instruments the raga adopted

Mandolin and saxophone

The violin of the third article entered Carnatic music from abroad and became its own. Two more Western instruments followed that path in the South. U. Srinivas (1969 to 2014) began on his father's mandolin as a small child. Real World Records describes the electric instrument he later played: it resembles the Western mandolin, but carries five single strings in place of the usual double courses and a contact microphone.

Kadri Gopalnath, who died in 2019 at the age of 69, took the alto saxophone. C. V. Aravind, writing in The News Minute after his death, records that his father, Thaniyappa, was a nadaswaram player and his first teacher. A visit to the Mysuru Palace, where he saw a saxophone in the palace orchestra, turned him towards the instrument. Aravind writes that it took him more than two decades to master it for Carnatic music.

Albums with the wider world

Srinivas played the Berlin Jazz Festival as a teenager and the Barcelona Olympic Arts Festival in 1992. Real World Records released his album Rama Sreerama in 1994, and Dream, made with the guitarist Michael Brook, in 1995. A Carnatic kriti on an electric mandolin had reached listeners far from Chennai.

Gopalnath's path ran through the nadaswaram. The instrument he heard at home is the great double reed of the South Indian temple, from the last article but one. The saxophone he chose is a reed instrument too, played with the same breath and the same need to bend a note.

Piano and the raga

The piano, with its fixed tuning, poses a harder problem. Its strings are struck by hammers, so it cannot bend a note the way a sitar string or a singer's voice can. Several of the artists KalaSudha works with have taken up that challenge. Deepak Shah, a pianist and composer from Mumbai, plays Indian classical ragas on the grand piano. He was first taught by his grandfather, Shantilal Shah, and by Mohan Junior, and he has performed in India and abroad for about twenty-five years. He has also scored more than thirty films in Bangla, Gujarati, Punjabi and Bhojpuri.

A London pianist

Rekesh Chauhan, a London-based British Indian pianist and composer, received the British Empire Medal in the 2023 King's Birthday Honours for music and mental-health advocacy in the British Asian community. His debut album, Beyond Roots, appeared on Milapfest in 2015. With KalaSudha he has worked with Pandit Ajay Prasanna and Ustad Shahbaz Hussain.

The slide guitar enters the raga

Kabra's landmark recording

Andre Elias wrote his doctoral study on the slide guitar in India. He names Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra of Jodhpur, born in 1937, as "the first individual credited as an inventor" for adapting the slide guitar to Hindustani classical performance. Kabra studied with Ali Akbar Khan, and Elias calls his 1967 recording Call of the Valley a landmark.

A guitar played like a sarod

Elias also records the family condition behind it. Kabra's father, a businessman and a veena player, allowed him to keep the guitar only if he played Hindustani classical music on it. Andy Ellis, writing in Premier Guitar, describes the approach that followed. Kabra sat on the floor in the manner of Indian musicians, held the guitar flat and played it with a bar and his fingers. The fretless sarod of his teacher gave him the sound to aim for. Elias adds that Kabra promoted it as an Indian classical slide guitar and declined to name it after himself. The Sangeet Natak Akademi gave Kabra its award for 2005, for Hindustani instrumental music on the guitar.

The line continues

Pandit Debasis Chakroborty, born in Calcutta in 1961, is the senior-most disciple of Brij Bhushan Kabra, and his playing reflects Kabra's style. He belongs to the Senia-Maihar gharana and joins the gayaki ang, the singing style, with the tantrakari ang, the style built on the plucked string. He is an Associate Professor of Music at Mangalayatan University, and he has been an artist-in-residence at Monash University and a visiting artist at California State University, Fresno. He has also played the Melbourne International Jazz Festival.

Learning the slide guitar

He teaches the Indian Slide Guitar course, built by Pandit Debasis Chakroborty with KalaSudha. It has three levels, and beginners start at Foundation. Kabra's way of playing now reaches learners through his senior-most disciple.

Elias's profile of Pandit Debasis Chakroborty, in the same study, records what that training meant. He moved to Jodhpur in the mid-1990s. Kabra told him he would first teach him to be a good human being. He urged him to add a chikari, the drone strings that mark the pulse, and taught him compositions of the Senia-Maihar tradition.

Shared stages

Shakti and the Grammys

Zakir Hussain (1951 to 2024), whose American debut appeared in the last article, played much of his life on shared stages. The National Endowment for the Arts records his part in Shakti, a group that also included the Indian violinist L. Shankar, and that his 1992 album with the drummer Mickey Hart, Planet Drum, earned a Grammy Award.

At the 66th Grammy Awards, he won three more. The Recording Academy lists Pashto as Best Global Music Performance and As We Speak as Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, both with Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Rakesh Chaurasia. Shakti's This Moment won Best Global Music Album.

Our artists on mixed bills

Our own artists cross over too. Giuliano Modarelli, an Italian guitarist and composer based in London, took a jazz degree at Leeds College of Music in 2003. He then studied Indian music with Dharambir Singh on the sitar and with Buddhadev Dasgupta and Prattyush Bannerjee on the sarod. He founded the ensemble Kefaya, and with Pandit Debasis Chakroborty he plays duets of Indian slide guitar and guitar, which KalaSudha has presented as Raga Unison concerts at Southampton and Edinburgh.

Kayam Hussain, a British tabla player who lives near Rochdale, is the son and student of Ustad Shahbaz Hussain. He has played tabla with Gorillaz, and he accompanies visiting artists at KalaSudha's concert series in London.

The guru in a new room

Guru-shishya online

The first article described the guru-shishya bond: a teacher passing music to a student in person, phrase by phrase. That bond now also works online. The KalaSudha Academy teaches every discipline of Indian classical music and dance online, in structured courses and live one-to-one lessons with a teacher, from foundation to advanced. Each instructor builds their course with KalaSudha, and educationists vet the structured courses.

KalaSudha awards its own certificates and diplomas at each taught level, earned skill by skill. The site and the Academy work in English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, Urdu, Malayalam, French and German. Course material is translated, and teachers teach live in their own language.

Teachers far from home

Our artists often learned far from home. Vinay Desai, a santoor player, studied science and pre-law in Delaware before he turned to music. He learned from Shivkumar Sharma himself in the master's final years, until his death in May 2022. He lives at Shanti Mandir, an ashram in Walden, New York, and runs Journey of 100 Strings, which sets classical music beside kirtan and meditation. He has played Lollapalooza Argentina and the Jaipur Literature Festival.

A sitar in the singing style

Adnan Khan, a sitar player from Delhi, plays in the gayaki ang. His maternal grandfather, Zafar Ahmed Khan, first taught him, and he trains with his father, Saeed Khan. From 2009 to 2013 he studied at the ITC Sangeet Research Academy in Kolkata under the khayal singer Mashkoor Ali Khan. His sitar features on Sounds of Kumbha, nominated for Best Global Music Album at the 68th Grammy Awards. He has also recorded Shuddha Kalyan with Ustad Akram Khan, whose Ajrada kaydas appeared in the fourth article.

Where KalaSudha stands

Concerts and recordings

KalaSudha presents Indian classical music and dance in concerts, festivals and tours, in the UK, Europe and India. As a label, we record in the studio and live in concert, and we release albums, tracks and video releases worldwide. KalaSudha members stream live concerts and recordings on its own platform.

Instruments

Our instruments are built by makers who work in close collaboration with us, delivered worldwide and priced in rupees for buyers in India. We service and repair every instrument we sell, wherever it was bought, and supply strings, parts and cases. Every instrument on our instrument pages is sold this way, by quote or made to order.

Seven parts, one tradition

Looking back

This series began with the stillness before a raga. It set the Hindustani and Carnatic streams side by side, then followed the strings, the drums and the breath. It traced the musicians who took the raga to Paris, London and New York. This last part has followed the raga onto the mandolin, the saxophone, the piano and the slide guitar. As I wrote in the first article, classical means continuous creation.

Where to begin

KalaSudha Tanpura is our own browser tanpura, with kattai numbers and control over each string, so you can set the drone for your own voice or instrument.

Book a first lesson at the KalaSudha Academy, or open the KalaSudha Tanpura and tune to Sa.