Sounding the Depths : Sharmistha Mohanty and Bahauddin Dagar

Rudra veena maestro Ustad Bahauddin Dagar and poet Sharmistha Mohanty move together through an evening of dhrupad and poetry. Their artistic friendship of three decades creates the ground from which their dialogues rise. The occasion is the publication of Mohanty’s new work, Book One.

About the artists:

Sharmistha Mohanty

Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of three works of prose, Book One, New Life, and Five Movements in Praise. Her work pushes the boundaries of fictional prose, moving it towards the prose poem. Mohanty’s writing has been deeply impacted by the varied pasts of India, especially the most remote, and her work claims these pasts as contemporary, as a belief in time being untamed. Her writing holds the past and the now and the experimental equally, where varied elements move towards or away from each other with a great velocity and every compositional framework is created anew. The Gods Came Afterwards, a book of poems, is a recent work, followed by Extinctions, a book of prose poems that appeared in August, 2022. A new edition of Book One, her very first work, has been released in Dec. 2023.

Bahauddin Dagar 

Bahauddin Dagar has had his initial training on the sitar under the tutelage of his mother Smt Pramila Mohiuddin Dagar. At age 16, he began his training under his father, the Rudraveena maestro Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar and also learnt vocals from his uncle Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar a Dhrupad vocalist He now continues to get able guidance under Pandit Pushpraj Koshti. He is an top grade A.I.R artist and also the recipient of the The Sangeet Natak Akademi Award. He presently resides at Dhrupad , a residential traning space where he teaches students for voice, veena and other instruments in the Guru Shishya Parampara method.