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Stay low key. Not everybody must know every thing about you,” reads the WhatsApp status of a Kolkata musician whose name the PM uttered on national radio two months ago.
“Can you establish the instrument?” Narendra Modi‘s voice had asked in the February episode of his show ‘Mann Ki Baat’, before introducing a deep, silken sound as ‘sursingar’ and its deep, silken maker as Joydeep Mukherjee.
2019 saw the software engineer-turned first-generation Hindustani classical musician not only winning his wife’s permission to quit his marketing consultant job to strum traditional Indian hardware full-time but also Sangeet Natak Akademi‘s Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar.
“Please do not crack any sensible jokes,” this self-confessed ‘silent worker’ had said to the friend who had phoned him in 2022 to congratulate him on earning the prestigious award for playing two extinct ancestors of the sarod and the surbahar: sursingar and Radhika mohanveena.
Owing to a two-year Covid-induced delay in the announcement of the prestigious award, “I didn’t know that I had received in 2019,” says Mukherjee, who has come down to Mumbai with the two large cases that the West Bengal border police and Kolkata cops had mistaken for coffins one day in mid-2020.
“I used to be flying out with the devices for a present. The cops thought I used to be transporting Covid victims’ our bodies illegally,” recalls Mukherjee about the two custom-made fibreglass cases containing resurrected wooden corpses.
Rendered obsolete by the lack of players and makers, the sursingar is “an 18th Century instrument developed by Tansen’s descendant Jaffer Khan which dominated the classical music scene in North India until the Forties” while the Radhika mohanveena bears the post-Independence fingerprints of Pandit Radhika Mohan Maitra, his guru’s guru.
Smitten young by sarod maestro Amjad Ali Khan’s “high-speed phrases”, Mukherjee – whose mother was a “excellent guitarist”, whose father was a vocalist and whose paternal aunts and uncles used to play sarods and sitars non-professionally – was barely four years old when he found himself under the watchful gaze of sarod master Pandit Pranab Kumar Naha, disciple of the legendary plectrum-wielder Maitra of the Senia Shahjahanpur Gharana.
In 1948, Maitra’s search for a fresher sound and a smaller sursingar had led him to fit a wooden deck with an advanced string bridge from the sitar, a round resonator on the neck from the veena and a fretboard from his sarod. After touring the world, the instrument died with its creator in 1981. “None of Pandit Maitra’s quick disciples performed it,” says Mukherjee, who felt a moral tug to restore the mohan veena and the sursingar.
Each remaking took two to three years of ‘trial and error’. The process began with “an in-depth understanding of historical past, of when an instrument was invented, why it was invented and the way it sounded”. Since law prevents the purchase of teakwood or ivory for personal use, Mukherjee had to look for modern wooden substitutes for their rebirths.
“It has been many a long time since these sounds had been heard. Audiences, musicians, live shows, sound methods – all have modified. To sustain, the mohan veena should sound superior to the sarod and the sursingar should sound higher than or on par with sitar,” decided Mukherjee, who then enlisted the help of skilled artisans to reinvent old sounds.
The process of remaking historical acoustic hardware has helped the musician fine-tune his elevator pitch. “Most performers of at present carry out with one instrument however I’m able to give organisers a singular providing by enjoying a number of devices,” says Mukherjee, who could not believe the sound his name made when the PM uttered in February. “I used to be joyful that my identify got here after folks obtained to listen to the sursingar,” he says, residing as much as his WhatsApp standing.
“Can you establish the instrument?” Narendra Modi‘s voice had asked in the February episode of his show ‘Mann Ki Baat’, before introducing a deep, silken sound as ‘sursingar’ and its deep, silken maker as Joydeep Mukherjee.
2019 saw the software engineer-turned first-generation Hindustani classical musician not only winning his wife’s permission to quit his marketing consultant job to strum traditional Indian hardware full-time but also Sangeet Natak Akademi‘s Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar.
“Please do not crack any sensible jokes,” this self-confessed ‘silent worker’ had said to the friend who had phoned him in 2022 to congratulate him on earning the prestigious award for playing two extinct ancestors of the sarod and the surbahar: sursingar and Radhika mohanveena.
Owing to a two-year Covid-induced delay in the announcement of the prestigious award, “I didn’t know that I had received in 2019,” says Mukherjee, who has come down to Mumbai with the two large cases that the West Bengal border police and Kolkata cops had mistaken for coffins one day in mid-2020.
“I used to be flying out with the devices for a present. The cops thought I used to be transporting Covid victims’ our bodies illegally,” recalls Mukherjee about the two custom-made fibreglass cases containing resurrected wooden corpses.
Rendered obsolete by the lack of players and makers, the sursingar is “an 18th Century instrument developed by Tansen’s descendant Jaffer Khan which dominated the classical music scene in North India until the Forties” while the Radhika mohanveena bears the post-Independence fingerprints of Pandit Radhika Mohan Maitra, his guru’s guru.
Smitten young by sarod maestro Amjad Ali Khan’s “high-speed phrases”, Mukherjee – whose mother was a “excellent guitarist”, whose father was a vocalist and whose paternal aunts and uncles used to play sarods and sitars non-professionally – was barely four years old when he found himself under the watchful gaze of sarod master Pandit Pranab Kumar Naha, disciple of the legendary plectrum-wielder Maitra of the Senia Shahjahanpur Gharana.
In 1948, Maitra’s search for a fresher sound and a smaller sursingar had led him to fit a wooden deck with an advanced string bridge from the sitar, a round resonator on the neck from the veena and a fretboard from his sarod. After touring the world, the instrument died with its creator in 1981. “None of Pandit Maitra’s quick disciples performed it,” says Mukherjee, who felt a moral tug to restore the mohan veena and the sursingar.
Each remaking took two to three years of ‘trial and error’. The process began with “an in-depth understanding of historical past, of when an instrument was invented, why it was invented and the way it sounded”. Since law prevents the purchase of teakwood or ivory for personal use, Mukherjee had to look for modern wooden substitutes for their rebirths.
“It has been many a long time since these sounds had been heard. Audiences, musicians, live shows, sound methods – all have modified. To sustain, the mohan veena should sound superior to the sarod and the sursingar should sound higher than or on par with sitar,” decided Mukherjee, who then enlisted the help of skilled artisans to reinvent old sounds.
The process of remaking historical acoustic hardware has helped the musician fine-tune his elevator pitch. “Most performers of at present carry out with one instrument however I’m able to give organisers a singular providing by enjoying a number of devices,” says Mukherjee, who could not believe the sound his name made when the PM uttered in February. “I used to be joyful that my identify got here after folks obtained to listen to the sursingar,” he says, residing as much as his WhatsApp standing.
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