Kalyan Mukherjea

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Kalyan Kumar Mukherjea is an authority on Indian classical music, particular the Senia Shahjahanpur Gharana (school) of Sarod. He is also a noted mathematician.

1 Early life
2 As a Mathematician
3 As a Musician
4 Paralytic Stroke and Other Problems
5 Prof Mukherjea Today
6 Publications
7 References
8 External links
9 Similar Artists

[edit] Early life

Mukherjea was born in Calcutta in 1943. His father, A K Mukherjea, was a successful barrister who rose to become a judge of the Supreme Court of India.^[1] Justice Mukherjea was also a scholar of Indian philosophy, and had made significant contributions to Navya-Nyāya literature.^[2] Kalyan thus grew up in a milieu that placed considerable significance on erudition and culture.

Justice Mukherjea's close friends included eminent musicians like the sarod maestro Radhika Mohan Maitra. Young Kalyan began training under him in 1956. He also studied with the eminent sitarist, vocalist and composer, Prof D T Joshi.

Kalyan Mukherjea's musical education continued uninterrupted throughout his performing career, but there were periods during which he was not under the direct tutelage of a master (1962-1965 and 1967-1976). These years spent in relative isolation from the Indian music scene, Mukherjea believes, contributed as much to his growth as a musician as did his formal training. Mukherjea has had a unique experience, doubling as a mathematician and an uncompromising classicist on the sarod.

[edit] As a Mathematician

Kalyan took his undergraduate degree from Cambridge University, followed by a doctorate in mathematics from Cornell. In 1968, he joined the mathematics faculty of UCLA. He remained at UCLA until 1976, when he returned to India to take up a professorship at the Indian Statistical Institutes in Delhi and Calcutta.

His research interests primarily concern topology. He has to his credit authoritative publications in Fredholm manifolds^[3] and coincidence theory.^[4] In collaboration with his erstwhile research student Rajendra Bhatia, he has also contributed to matrix analysis.^[5] According to the American Mathematical Society collaboration distance calculator, his Erdös number is 4.

Notably, his work has spawned a significant body of further research, by his erstwhile students as well as colleagues and contemporaries.^[6] ^[7] He has also mentored several significant contributors to the field,^[8] including Rajendra Bhatia, Basudeb Datta, Siddhartha Gadgil, Amritangshu Prasad, Mahan Mitra, and Kingshook Biswas.

[edit] As a Musician

Prof Mukherjea's contribution to music is considerable if unconventional. He has been recognised as a pedagogue, theorist and performer of merit. But this recognition has been sporadic in coming, although his own involvement with music remained fairly consistent across different stages of his life.

While at UCLA, Kalyan served as an instructor of Hindustani instrumental music in the newly-formed ethnomusicology department, and collaborated closely with Nazir Jairazbhoy in the early days of the program. His students include Dr. Peter Manuel, Professor of Music at Hunter College, CUNY, who has acknowledged his debt to Prof Mukherjea in several publications.^[9] ^[10]

Professor Mukherjea has never had what one would consider a typical performative career. His 25-year span as a performing artist saw him play about fifty concerts in all. It was entirely by chance that he encountered Lyle Wachovsky of India Archive Music, New York, who gave his music a global audience by publishing a full-length CD of Ragas Shuddha Kalyan and Shukla Bilawal. Most of Kalyan's concerts have been recorded, and if one manages to get past the often poor recording quality, he has much to offer to the connoisseur of Indian raga music. Additionally, from 1983 to 1990, Kalyan was a regular broadcaster on All India Radio, Delhi.

Kalyan's music is difficult to categorise under usual taxonomic classifications. While rooted in tradition, it does not rigidly adhere to convention. As befits a thinking man, his approach values logic and aesthetic sensitivity above other considerations. A good example of this is his approach to interpreting the controversial Raga Shuddha Kalyan, which finds mention in an article by Deepak Raja on the issue.^[11]

[edit] Paralytic Stroke and Other Problems

In May 1995, whatever Prof. Mukherjea had of a musical career came to a sudden end, as he suffered a paralytic stroke, and lost mobility of the left side of his body. Research in topology continued for a number of years, but waned eventually as Kalyan's eyesight, already a matter of concern at the time of his stroke, began to deteriorate very rapidly. He is now completely blind.

[edit] Prof Mukherjea Today

Kalyan Mukherjea leads an active life for a person of his physical limitations. He is deeply involved in the community of visually impaired computer users, and has assisted several such individuals in setting up the "Audio Desktop" of Emacspeak. Additionally, he continues to play an inspirational role in the lives of a number of young mathematicians.

On the musical front, other than providing occasional guidance to other disciples of Radhika Mohan Maitra's gharana (e.g. Sanjoy Bandopadhyay, Prattyush Banerjee, Jon Barlow etc), he has a number of his own pupils, including Anirvan DuttaGupta and Arnab Chakrabarty.

[edit] Publications

[edit] Journal Articles: Mathematics

Bhatia, Rajendra & Mukherjea, Kalyan K (1994), “Variation of the Unitary Part of a Matrix”, SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications 15 (3): 1007-14, <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=181246.181269>

Mukherjea, Kalyan K (1970), “The Homotopy Type of Fredholm Manifolds”, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 149 (2): 653-663, <http://www.jstor.org/pss/1995419>

Mukherjea, Kalyan K (1972), “New Methods in Coincidence Theory”, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 34 (2): 615-20, <http://www.jstor.org/pss/2038417>

Mukherjea, Kalyan K & Sankaran, Parameswaran (1996), “Invariant points of maps between Grassmannians”, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 124 (2): 649-53, <https://www.ams.org/proc/1996-124-02/S0002-9939-96-03152-8/S0002-9939-96-03152-8.pdf>