Encounters with two experts

The last few days have seen two interesting incidents in my journey of documenting my music teacher's gharana. The first was meeting Dr Pradip Chakravarty, a noted musicologist and sitarist. I had contacted him through his son, who is an old friend of mine, after I got to know that his uncle had learnt sitar from a student of Kaukubh Khan. Kaukubh Khan, whose actual name was Asadullah Khan, was the brother of Keramatullah Khan, a well-known sarodia of the Senia gharana, and the primary guru of my teacher's teacher's teacher. Coming back to the story of my meeting -- I saw that the old man was a walking encyclopedia of music in early 20th century Bengal! I lapped up story after story about Harendranath Seal, about Keramatullah Khan, and many other musicians around the same time. By the time I left I had already learnt about a new part of my teacher's teacher's teacher's lineage.

The second incident was meeting Moloy Ghosh, a expert in digitisation of and sound restoration from vinyl and shellac. I have recently bought some 78 rpm discs of my teacher's teacher's teacher. Finding them was a journey in itself. I was lucky to get them from some sellers on ebay. I met Mr Ghosh for digitising the records. We had a long talk on what we found was our common passion -- digitising India's music recordings from the era before compact discs came. He is doing the work, I just wish people did more of it! There are a lot of old recordings lying in various university libraries, and government institutions. Maybe there are many rare cassettes lying unused in people's homes. We are passing through a time where we could have saved them for posterity, but we are not doing that enough.