Like his greatest mentor – Pt. Kumar Gandharva, he was born with an uncanny capacity to reproduce the music of the great masters. This talent together with the musical exposure he received in his father, the eminent musicologist Pt. Vamanrao Deshpande’s house soon established him as a child prodigy.

Satyasheelji decided to devote himself fully to the study of music under the guidance of Kumarji, with whom he lived in Devas in the true spirit of a disciple. Satyasheel knew that Kumarji’s guidance was only the beginning of a hard yet fascinating journey that he would have to undertake alone. He thus began to lay the foundations of his own style, constantly gathering compositions from traditional sources, trying at once to be true to its essence and re-interpreting it to suit his personal temperament.

He is a recipient, among many other such accolades, of the Homi Bhabha fellowship for research, the Kumar Gandharva Emeritus fellowship from the Department of Culture, Govt. of India and the Raza award and fellowship for creativity from the SH Raza Foundation, Delhi.

Satyasheelji has been performing in major music festivals all over the country and abroad, and has also occasionally sung for films, his most remembered performance being that in ‘Lekin’ with Smt. Asha Bhosle. Other films have also seen him singing with Bharat Ratna Lata Mangeshkar. He has released two groundbreaking albums – ‘Kahen’ and ‘Thumri Katha’. Kahen is a collection of bandishes, both traditional and those composed by Satyasheelji himself, that takes a fresh new look at the latent creative potential of classical music. Lataji released the album and also graced it with a few words of her own, bringing out the significance of ‘Kahen’ as a musical statement. ‘Thumri Katha’ is Satyasheelji’s attempt at reinterpreting the tradition of thumri singing. Each thumri on this album comes from a different part of the country and has a different aesthetic, its own character and - consequentially - a different style of presentation.

Satyasheelji is a man who possesses as thorough a grounding in the Hindustani tradition as it is possible to have in modern times; and yet for all his deep-rootedness in the tradition, he has allowed himself to emerge organically; spreading himself like a tree in all directions, putting forth new branches and leaves, and shedding what he no longer feels necessary, without forgetting even for a moment his connection with the rich soil from which he derives his creative strength. He has thus achieved an enviably precarious balance between the demands of the tradition he has internalised so profoundly and those of his own imagination and personality.

For more information, as well as audio and video recordings of Satyasheelji’s music, visit   www.satyasheel.com

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