ABSTRACT
Dhruba Ghosh is a different sarangi player. A determined and independent-minded musician of a younger generation (born 1957), he belongs to a family of musicians, but at the same time stands apart from the hereditary lineages of sarangi players. Hailing from Bengal, his uncle was the superb flutist and musical innovator Pannalal Ghosh, who had introduced the flute to classical Hindustani music. His younger brother Nikhil Ghosh, Dhruba’s father, was one of the great tabla players of his generation as well as a thoughtful and dedicated scholar of music. In Bombay, Nikhil Ghosh established the renowned music conservatory Sangit Mahabharati (Great Indian Music). Most remarkably, he pioneered an important encyclopedia project for Hindustani music and proposed a notation system for ragas. 1 Dhruba’s mother comes from a Maharashtrian (Konkani speaking) family of music lovers and patrons.
