Vijay Raghav Rao

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Pandit Vijay Raghav Rao

November 3, 1925 - November 29, 2011

Pandit Vijay Raghav Rao was at the forefront of classical Indian music for six decades. Vijayji was born in India in 1925 and played the bamboo flute since he was a child. He originally divided his time between classical dance and Carnatic (South Indian) music. However, upon meeting his guru (the illustrious Pandit Ravi Shankar, master of the sitar, with whom he studied and collaborated for 30 years) in 1945, he switched his focus solely to Hindustani Sangeet, the beautiful classical music of northern India. In the six decades since then, Vijayji toured internationally, composed and conducted orchestras, and spent decades as chair of All India Radio's Film Division. He conducted the music for India's Independence celebration at the Red Fort in Dehli in 1947, and scored the music for many films. He toured and recorded with tabla masters such as Ustad Alla Rakha, Pandit Anindo Chaterjee and Sabir Khan, and taught the art of bansuri to many students, including G.S. Sachdev, Ronu Majumdar and Kerry Kriger. He conceived a number of new ragas and wrote thousands of compositions of traditional ragas. He also wrote several books of poetry, and has been the focus of several documentaries.

Vijay Raghav Rao