Western string meets Eastern note

The melody emanating from Pt. Debashish Bhattacharya’s slide guitar during a recent online concert struck a note of hope amid despair. Through exhaustive research and performance of over 50 years, the Hindustani musician has designed and patented 34 guitars, with names like Chaturangi, Gandharvi, Anandi and Pushp Veena, for raga music. And he has travelled around the country and the world playing these guitars and creating a niche for himself.

Intrigued by this unusual concert, which opened with the antara (the latter half) of the famous bandish, ‘Ab mori baat, maan le piharva…’ in raag Shuddha Sarang, (although his sensitive ‘vistar’ (elaboration) did full justice to the raag), I had a long conversation with the artiste about this concert in particular and the interesting facets of his musical journey. He laughed at the mention of his concert starting with the antara and said that it was just a clip from the YouTube premiere of his concert ‘Mangalacharan’ in memory of Pt. Arun Bhaduri, one of the seniormost disciples of Pt. Jnan Prakash Ghosh. Bhaduri, a well-known vocalist, taught at the ITC-Sangeet Research Academy, Kolkata for many years and groomed many vocalists and instrumentalists. The concert was organised by one of his disciples, Indrani Mukherjee, and her tabla artiste husband Apoorva Mukherjee.

Initiated into Hindustani music by his parents, Sunil Kumar and Manjushri Bhattacharya, Debashish further trained under stalwarts like Acharya Gokul Nag, Acharya Maharaj Bandopadhyaya, Pt. Ajoy Chakrabarty, Pt. Brij Bhushan Kabra and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. He began to experiment with strings, creating a range of guitars. He performed live and released records in collaboration with Pt. Ravi Shankar, Ustad Zakir Hussain, John McLaughlin, Mandolin Shrinivas, Jerry Douglas, Derec Trucks and many others.

Having played more than 3,000 concerts and trained over 1,000 students, Debashish has redefined Hindustani music on the slide guitar. The repertoire he has created for the instrument shows his determination to elevate its position in the classical music world. Many young musicians have been benefited by his approach to music and teaching.

With the pandemic posing one of the biggest challenges to performing arts, Pt. Debashish Bhattacharya has been curating the ‘Call of the soul’ series of concerts to seek support and aid for his guitar manufacturing company, the luthiers and their families, and young musicians, accompanying artistes and students of music.

One of the concerts in this series that left a lasting impression featured Pt. Debashish with his son Suryadipta, playing raag Kirwani comprising alap-jod-jhala and compositions set to medium tempo rupak and faster teentaal on Chaturangi Veena, an improvised 22-string guitar for the khayal ang treatment of a raag. They were accompanied by Archik Banerjee (son and disciple of Pt. Shubhankar Banerjee) on the tabla.

Suryadipta Bhattacharya with Archik Banerjee on the tabla