About
Niladri Kumar is one of the most popular sitar players and composers of his generation. The son and disciple of the sitar player Pandit Kartick Kumar, himself a senior disciple of Pandit Ravi Shankar, he began learning at the age of four and gave his first public performance at six. He is also the inventor of the zitar, an electric sitar he devised to reach wider audiences.
Kumar has collaborated with Zakir Hussain, John McLaughlin, Jonas Hellborg and others, and composed for Hindi cinema with A.R. Rahman, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy and Pritam, including the widely loved Life in a... Metro songs on the zitar. He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi's Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar and an MTV Immies award, and continues to perform classical recitals and fusion worldwide, including a return to the Darbar Festival in 2025.
The artistry
Kumar has an extraordinary technical command of the sitar, with dextrous double stops, whispering string bends and rapid, articulate passages, matched by a strong sense of melody. Trained in the family classical tradition, he moves between pure Hindustani recitals and contemporary, cross-genre work, and invented the zitar, an electric sitar-guitar hybrid, to bring the instrument into fusion and popular contexts. His playing marries deep classical grounding with a bold, contemporary sensibility.
Kumar gives a host range: a pure classical sitar recital, or a high-energy zitar and fusion set with strong youth appeal. His film and collaboration profile widens his draw well beyond the classical core. [Atlas Assessment]
Niladri Kumar is a sitar virtuoso who has drawn younger audiences to Indian classical music through the zitar and cross-genre collaboration, while sustaining a serious classical career. By taking the sitar into film, fusion and popular music without abandoning the tradition, he has helped keep the instrument vibrant and visible for a new generation, becoming one of the most popular instrumentalists of his time.