View source for Joydeep Mukherjee

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[[Category:India |M ]]
[[Category:Music |M ]]

=Sur singar=
[https://epaper.timesgroup.com/article-share?article=16_04_2023_017_013_cap_TOI Sharmila Ganesan, April 16, 2023: ''The Times of India'']


Stay low key. Not everyone needs to know everything about you,” reads the WhatsApp status of a Kolkata musician whose name the PM uttered on national radio two months ago. 

 “Can you identify 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 don’t crack any practical 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 did not know that I had won 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 was flying out with the instruments for a show. The cops thought I was transporting Covid victims’ 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 ruled the classical music scene in North India till the 1940s” 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 “very good 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 afresher sound and a smaller sursingar had led him to fit a wooden deck with an advanced string bridge from the sitar, around 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 immediate disciples played 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 history, of when an instrument was invented, why it was invented and how 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 decades since these sounds were heard. Audiences, musicians, concerts, sound systems — all have changed. To keep up, the mohan veena must sound superior to the sarod and the sursingar must sound better 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 finetune his elevator pitch. “Most performers of today perform with one instrument but I am able to give organisers a unique offering by playing multiple instruments,” says Mukherjee, who could not believe the sound his name made when the PM uttered in February. “I was happy that my name came after people got to hear the sursingar,” he says, living up to his WhatsApp status.