Ravi Shankar: A Profile By MOHAN NADKARNI The Illustrated Weekly of India, September 25, 1955 RAVI SHANKAR, the famed sitar-player, ranks among the great musicians of today who have devoted their lives to the revival and enrichment of our traditional music with fresh inspiration. Scion of an aristocratic Bengali Brahmin family, 35-years-old Ravi Shankar is the youngest brother of the world-famous dancer, Uday Shankar....
By MOHAN NADKARNI The Economic Times, August 21, 1988 Gurudev Tagore had a world view of life. His genius therefore spanned a truly phenomenal range in creativity. And that is what rightly made him the most celebrated pioneer of creative music in modern times. Though Tagore’s music did fall outside the rigid traditional domain, it was certainly not wholly non-classical. What he conceived and...
Bhimsen Joshi is 75 MOHAN NADKARNI The Rediff.com Special, February 1996 He has never cared to hog the limelight. Quite to the contrary, the limelight keeps hogging him. A tribute to Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, the doyen of Hindustani classical music, on his 75th birthday, by Mohan Nadkarni, his biographer and wellknown critic. A jubilee year is rightly and understandably an event for rejoicing as much...
By MOHAN NADKARNI The Economic Times, December 24, 1989 What is it that makes most of us hail Ali Akbar Khan as the greatest living instrumental maestro in the Hindustani tradition? What is it that makes his music so individualistic? Having heard the maestro for more than three decades, I am firmly convinced that it is the subjective element of intuition or, rather the...
Bal Gandharva: On the sands of time (Parts I-VIII) By MOHAN NADKARNI The Economic Times, June 21, 1987 Bal Gandharva: On the sands of time—I He was hailed as “Nat-Samrat”, the King of Thespians. His was a fabulous career that spanned an almost unbroken period of four decades during which he ruled supreme on the Marathi musical stage as much by his striking presence,...