ABOUT

Asit De, a Hindustani vocalist in the khayal form and a scientist, has had nearly 40 years of formal training in Hindustani raga music. The three principal gurus of Asit De in Hindustani raga sangeet are, chronologically, the late Ustad Mohammed Dabir Khan of the Senia gharana, the last well-known daughter-side descendent of the legendary Miyan Tansen and of Shah Sadarang, and then Padmabhushan Pandit Ajoy Chakrabarty of the Patiala-Kasur gharana, and finally, Sangeetacharya Amiya Ranjan Bandyopadhyay of the celebrated Vishnupur gharana of Bengal. He has been fortunate to learn for short durations also from the late Pandit Firoz Dastur, the late Pandit V. R. Athavale and the late Pandit C.P. Rele. By profession, Asit has been a theoretical physicist. He has spent more than 13 years in the US and Europe for his doctoral and post-doctoral research. He has recently taken retirement from his position of senior professor and Head of the Theory Division of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, a research Institute for basic sciences in Kolkata under the Dept. of Atomic Energy, Govt. of India. Asit has a many-faceted interest in music. He has also learnt Carnatik classical music for some years from the Late Smt. Lalitha Swaminathan, a disciple of the legendary Vidwan and vocalist Maharajpuram Santhanam. In addition, Asit has received training in several disciplines of traditional Bengali songs from well-known gurus as well. Although limited by his busy and very demanding professional career as an internationally well-known scientist in his field, Asit has performed quite extensively in Europe and the US, most notably in the Festival of India in the US, and also at several prestigious venues in India. In his youth, he also performed Carnatik music as a solo vocalist as well as for several Bharatanatyam dance programmes. In the US, Asit performed quite a few times on TV and was also interviewed on Indian music. There he composed music for a two-hour long dance-drama based on Ramayana. Asit taught Indian raga music as part of an Ethnomusicology course at the Master’s level at the Ohio State University, USA. For several years he taught also at the Tagore Institute in Bonn, Germany. He has written articles on musicology that are published by reputed publishing houses and well- known periodicals. He has delivered invited lectures on aspects of Indian music at several places including Rabindra Bharati University and the British Council, Kolkata. For many years, along with the late Pandit Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Asit also served as an external expert in the Higher Degrees Committee in the Dept.of Instrumental Music of the Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. For more information, kindly look at https://www.asitde.com