Pandit Budhaditya Mukherjee | Raag Todi
Filmed on location
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14m
A stunning rendering of morning Raag Todi set in the ground of The Rajbari Bawali near Kolkata. Mukherjee is revered for his extraordinary command of the sitar and surbahar - at age 22 veena maestro S Balachander described him as the ‘sitar artist of the century’. He first started learning from his father Pandit Bimalendu Mukherjee, an eclectic multi-instrumentalist.
The Todi raga family is central to the Hindustani tradition, overflowing with musical ideas not found anywhere else on the planet. Musicologist Rajan Parrikar describes Todi as “the most profound, finespun idea in melodic music...from ecstasy to frolic to pathos to bathos to melancholy - every conceivable human emotion has refracted through the Todi prism.” Many hear an unsettling, existentially anxious mood, while others see it has having “the playfulness of a newborn lying in bed content, smiling and playful”. A Sikh writer considers the raga to “explain things that we may be aware of, but fail to ponder upon”. Suffice to say, it is a versatile, ambiguous raga, to connect with on a deeply personal level.
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