Vinay Desai

Vinay Desai plays the santoor, a shallow walnut box strung with about a hundred strings and struck with two light curved mallets held between the fingers. It comes from Kashmir, out of the sufiana mausiqi the valley has played for centuries, and older Indian sources call it the Shatatantri Veena, the hundred-stringed veena. The strings run in courses, three or four to a note, so one stroke sets several moving at once and the sound arrives with a shimmer around it. A struck string cannot be bent the way a plucked one can, so everything expressive has to come from where the strokes fall and how they are spaced.

The santoor reached the classical stage through one family. Pandit Uma Dutt Sharma, a vocalist and tabla player from Jammu, went looking for an instrument that could carry a full raga, settled on one that most people then heard as a folk instrument, and set his son to learn it. That son gave the first Bombay concert on the santoor in 1955, an hour of Yaman, and spent the next six decades showing what the instrument could hold. He became Padma Vibhushan Pandit Shivkumar Sharma, and Vinay Desai learned from him.

He came to this without a family tradition behind him. His first teacher was Shafiq Rahman, who gave him voice, harmonium and tabla in his teens. He then read pre-pharmaceutical science and pre-law in Delaware, finished both, and left them for music. In 2011, on Shivkumar Sharma's own instruction, he began santoor under Takahiro Arai, continued in the United States with Kunal Gunjal, and Shivkumar Sharma then took him on directly. He studied with the maestro through his final years, until Sharma's death in May 2022. He has also learned from the late Pandit Ramesh Mishra, Parthasarathi Chatterjee, Jay Gandhi and Suryaksha Deshpande.

A Vinay Desai concert opens slow. The first stretch carries no beat at all, one note laid against the next until the raga has a shape and the room has gone quiet, and only then does the tabla come in and the exchange start. The close is fast. A set runs about seventy-five minutes of classical music, with devotional pieces after it. He has recorded Bageshri with the tabla player Vivek Pandya, with whom he also made the album Chidaksha. Anirudh Alva Changkakoti and Anubrata Chatterjee have both sat beside him, and he has shared the stage with Pandit Anindo Chatterjee, Ustad Tari Khan and Ustad Sukhvinder Singh Pinky. He works outside the classical repertoire too, in film music, jazz and theatre.

He lives at Shanti Mandir, an ashram in Walden, New York, and runs a programme of his own called Journey of 100 Strings, which sets classical music beside kirtan and meditation and has run at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music and at the Sivananda ashram in the Bahamas. He has played across the United States and Hawaii, Canada, Argentina, Australia, the Bahamas and India: the Adelaide Fringe, Mona Foma in Tasmania, the Jaipur Literature Festival, SwarZankar in Pune, and Lollapalooza Argentina, where he was among the first to put the santoor in front of an orchestra. In November 2026 he tours the United Kingdom with KalaSudha on A Hundred Strings, beside Adnan Khan on sitar and Ustad Akram Khan on tabla.