Chandrika Prasad Dubey was an outsider in Gaya. He hailed from Pawai, a small village, near Gaya, and belonged to a sect of Brahmins called Vrittiya who did religious duties along with performing music. He began training in kheyal singing, and then focused on learning the esraj from Hanumandas. By the 1920s, he was one of the most popular musicians of the region and had also found employment as a court musician to Birkeshwar Prasad Narayan Singh at the fort of Pandui, one of the numerous landed Rajput estates in the area. During the 1940s, Dubey was believed to be the greatest esraj player to have ever lived, a period in history when biographies about musicians were in vogue. He was elaborately written about. Kanhaiyalal had passed away about half a century before, and had become a legend. Hanumandas was reclusive. So, the limelight was focused on Dubey only and he shone in it magnanimously, earning the moniker “Esraj-e-Hind”. He was probably the only esraj player of the period to have been recorded, but the record seems untraceable. Even his Pawai estate is inaccessible, owing to property disputes.
Several lineages of esraj players remain, but most modern day esraj players bear relations to the town of Bishnupur, in West Bengal, which lies nearer to Calcutta (nowadays Kolkata). Bishnupur used to be a hub of dhrupad classical music. Bishnupur followed the path of Gaya and embraced the esraj when Gaya was already at its peak as the cultural heart of the esraj. In 1930, when Rabindranath Tagore proclaimed that the esraj should be the principal accompanying instrument to his Rabindrasangeet over the All India Radio (AIR), the instrument became an area of studies at Santiniketan, Tagore’s school.
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