Staff profile

Budhaditya Bhattacharyya is a Hindustani classical musician, music historian and an ethnomusicologist. At Durham, his doctoral project, supervised by Professor Martin Clayton FBA and Professor Laura Leante, has entailed writing the first music history of Bengali Britain. Through simultaneous engagement with oral histories, newspapers, memoirs, ephemera, and governmental records, Budhaditya's work, primarily involving Sylheti, Bengali, and English, complicates the musical citizen in the backdrop of evolving political, social, and cultural realities in desh (home) and bidesh (away).

After graduating with a BSc (Hons) in International Relations from the University of London, Budhaditya went on to read for an MA in Music in Development at SOAS, studying with Professor Richard Widdess FBA, Dr Richard Williams, Professor Angela Impey, Professor Rachel Harris, Dr Nick Gray, and the late Dr Caspar Melville.

Budhaditya is a specialist in khayal, alongside continued training in dhrupad, dhamar, sadra, thumri, dadra, and raga-allied Bengali songs, with solo vocal recitals to his credit in India, and the UK, besides continental Europe and Thailand. Initiated into music by his mother from the age of 3, Budhaditya went on to learn from different teachers. Budhaditya is a senior disciple of Pandit Ajoy Chakrabarty, having joined his tutelage in 2010. In June 2019, he enjoyed a stint at the China Conservatory of Music in Beijing as an invited lecturer in raga music. Under the guidance of the musicologist, Ustad Mehfooz Khokhar, Budhaditya is preserving a virtually unheard repertoire of ragas and talas, passed down by Baba Inayat Ali Sultani of the Talwandi gharana. In collaboration with Khokhar, he is also involved in reviving ragas that arguably have their roots in the Islamicate world. 

Currently, he is a Research Consultant with the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, a part of the Aga Khan Development Network. Budhaditya has also been on the Editorial Board of Sonic Scope, a peer-reviewed academic journal on audiovisual culture, co-published by Goldsmiths, University of London/MIT Press. In 2022, he conceived and co-founded RASAD (Raga Appreciation Society at Durham). The impact of his work concerns translation, including for the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, and as an advisory Board Member of the East London-based secular Bengali cultural organisation, Swadhinata Trust. The findings of his ongoing side-project on tanpura ecology have found coverage in The Statesman and Mid-Day; he has commentated as a music critic for The Tribune/The New York Times; his composition, Jwale Pran, is now archived in the British Library Sound Archive. As a participant in the 2019 CAA-NRC protests, Budhaditya's music activism was aired in the BBC and featured in The Telegraph (India).

Budhaditya is now shaping his future research involving the domains of music, rhythm, affect, psychology, history, and health, and what it means to be musically "human".

When not pretending to be working, he can be found marvelling at ragamala miniatures or musing on a Malhar.

Budhaditya was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in 2019.

Awards/grants (selected)

• Winner (Hindustani Classical Vocals, Senior Category) of the 6th All India Indian Classical Music Competition, organised by the Bharat Sanskriti Utsab in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, 2013
• Durham Doctoral Studentship, 2019
• British Institute at Ankara Residential, 2019
• British Forum for Ethnomusicology Fieldwork Grant, 2022

Teaching and other roles

• Guest lecturer for MUSI2771 The Music of India.
• Co-lecturer for joint sessions of MUSI42960 Ethnomusicology in Practice and Theory, and MUSI43160 Contemporary Musicology. 
• Senior representative of the Board of Studies, the Postgraduate Committee, and the Postgraduate Student Staff Consultative Committee. Organised the 2020/21 departmental postgraduate research seminars.

Journal Article

• The Changing Ecology of the Kolkata Tanpura
  
  Bhattacharyya, B. (2022). The Changing Ecology of the Kolkata Tanpura. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 45(6), 1095-1111. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2022.2118480