Partha Chatterjee

Bio

 Partha Chatterjee’s fascination for Raga Music started when he was in high school. This led him to learn vocal music from his mother, Smt. Rama Chatterjee, a regular artiste on All India Radio and Doordarshan. His father, Late Sri Prabir Kumar Chatterjee, an amateur sitar player, gave him his initial lessons in sitar and subsequently took him to the sitar maestro, the Late Pandit Nikhil Banerjee, who accepted his young student only after some days of tests and trials.

For over twelve years, he was privileged to remain under the guidance of this great musician. After the sudden demise of his Guru in 1986, the legendary Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, who was also Nikhilji’s teacher, affectionately offered to accept Partha as a disciple. From 1991 to 1998, Khanshahib taught Partha intensively and gave him the opportunity to come to the United States every summer to study with him and to teach in his school. He also affectionately tied the ganda to give an official seal to the guru-shishya bond on 6th July, 1991.

He is also greatly indebted to Pandit Buddhadev Dasgupta for the guidance he received from him on several occasions.

His son Purbayan Chatterjee is a world-renowned Sitar maestro and some of his students have also made a name as solo instrumentalists. 

Career and Tours

Partha Chatterjee had gone ahead in his career as a concert artiste and a teacher, engaged in promoting the cause of Indian Raga Music all over the world. He started giving public performances on a professional scale in 1980 and started touring abroad in 1982, starting with Switzerland. He has performed in all of the major cities of India, namely Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Delhi, etc., and toured extensively in Europe and the United States. He has performed on Radio, Television, and in many music festivals in India, South Asia, Europe, and the United States, including the prestigious Festival of India held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1987 and the Broadway Theatre, New York. 

He has worked with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) in South Asia, Government of India and has played a key role in projecting the image of Indian Music as a musical ambassador to Indonesia, Malasiya, Thailand, Singapore.

Teaching

He has also taught for many years under the auspices of the Saraswati Project, Germany and as a visiting faculty at the Ali Akbar College of Music, U.S.A, giving innumerable lectures and demonstrations at universities, museums and centers for study of Asian art and culture.

In 2000 he was appointed as a faculty member of the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was instrumental in introducing a course on Indian Music for the first time. In 2007 he taught a course on the “Music of India” at the Department of South Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Closer to home, Partha has been a visiting lecturer at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata in the Department of Instrumental Music.

Partha joined ITC Sangeet Research Academy, a premier institute of Classical Music India as a member of its Expert Committee in the year 2010. He has been serving ITC SRA as a Guru of the Institute since 1st January 2011.

Awards

Recieving the Aluddin Puraskar

With Jogen Chowdhuri, Indranil Sen and Bratya Basu

My ITC SRA page 

From my student, Joanna Mack

My Short Bio (PDF)

PPC Bio.pdf