Buddhadev Dasgupta is famous for playing which of the following musical instruments?

Correct — B. Buddhadev Dasgupta played the sarod, the fretless plucked lute of the Senia Shahjahanpur gharana he was trained in.

The four choices are four different instrument families — a bowed string, a plucked string, a bamboo flute and a drum.

Placing the artist means knowing which family he sat in, and for him it is the plucked sarod, option (b).

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  Sarangi — Sarangi is bowed, not plucked, and is stopped with the fingernails against the strings. It is a different family from the sarod.
• (c)
  Bansuri — Bansuri is a side-blown bamboo flute — an aerophone with no strings at all, so no string player is associated with it.
• (d)
  Mridangam — Mridangam is the double-headed barrel drum of Carnatic percussion. Dasgupta worked in the Hindustani tradition and played a string instrument.

The sarod is a short-necked, fretless plucked lute with a polished metal fingerboard. With no frets, the player slides along that steel plate to glide between notes, which gives the instrument its heavy, sliding sound.

It is played with a plectrum called a jawa, traditionally cut from coconut shell.

Buddhadev Dasgupta belonged to the Senia Shahjahanpur gharana, one of the older lineages of sarod playing.

Key facts

• Buddhadev Dasgupta was a sarod player of the Senia Shahjahanpur gharana.
• The sarod is fretless with a metal fingerboard and is plucked with a coconut-shell plectrum called a jawa.
• Ali Akbar Khan and Amjad Ali Khan are also sarod players.
• Sarangi is bowed, bansuri is a bamboo flute and mridangam is a Carnatic drum — three separate instrument families.

Common traps

• The near-identical name of a well-known Bengali film director pulls candidates away from the musician.
• Sarod and sarangi differ by one syllable and get swapped under time pressure.

No directly related past PYQ was found.