Western string meets Eastern note

How Pt. Debashish Bhattacharya has integrated the slide guitar into Hindustani music

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.