Vanraj Bhatia


Vanraj Bhatia is an Indian composer best known for his work in Indian New Wave cinema. He is also one of the leading composers of Western classical music in India.
Bhatia is a recipient of the National Film Award for Best Music Direction for the television film Tamas, the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Creative and Experimental Music and India’s fourth-highest civilian honour, the Padma Shri.

Biography

Early life and education

Born into a family of Kutchi businessmen, Bhatia attended the New Era School in Bombay and learnt Hindustani classical music as a student at Deodhar School of Music. On hearing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 as a teenager, he became interested in Western classical music and studied the piano with Dr. Manek Bhagat for four years.
After earning his M.A. from Elphinstone College, University of Bombay in 1949, Bhatia studied composition with Howard Ferguson, Alan Bush and William Alwyn at the Royal Academy of Music, London, where he was a recipient of the Sir Michael Costa Scholarship. After graduating with a Gold Medal in 1954, Bhatia won a Rockefeller Scholarship as well as a French Government Scholarship that allowed him to study with Nadia Boulanger at the Conservatoire de Paris for five years.

Career

On returning to India in 1959, Bhatia became the first person to score music for an advertisement film in India, and went on to compose over 7,000 jingles, such as Liril, Garden Vareli and Dulux. During this time, he was also a Reader in Western Musicology at the University of Delhi from 1960 to 1965.
Bhatia’s first feature film score was for Shyam Benegal’s directorial debut Ankur, and he went on to score almost all of Benegal’s work, including the song “Mero Gaam Katha Parey” from the film Manthan. Bhatia predominantly worked with filmmakers in the Indian New Wave movement, such as Govind Nihalani, Kundan Shah, Aparna Sen, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Kumar Shahani, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Vijaya Mehta and Prakash Jha. In the 1990s, he also composed background scores for mainstream films such as Ajooba, Damini and Pardes.
Bhatia has scored television shows such as Khandaan, Yatra, Wagle Ki Duniya, Banegi Apni Baat and the 53-episode Bharat Ek Khoj based on Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India, as well as numerous documentaries. He has also released albums of spiritual music on the Music Today label, and composed music for trade fairs such as Expo '70, Osaka and Asia 1972, New Delhi.
Bhatia is the best-known composer of Western classical music in India. His most frequently performed works are the Fantasia and Fugue in C for piano, the Sinfonia Concertante for strings, and the song cycle Six Seasons. His Reverie was performed by Yo-Yo Ma at a concert in Mumbai in January 2019, and the first two acts of his opera Agni Varsha'', based on Girish Karnad’s play of the same name, premiered in New York City in 2012 in a production by soprano Judith Kellock.

List of compositionsRachel Woolf, ''https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1248444/m2/1/high_res_d/WOOLF-DISSERTATION-2018.pdf Uncovering Aspects of Western And Indian Music in Vanraj Bhatia’s Night Music For Solo Flute, And Selected Other Works'', pp. 96-100. Retrieved April 1, 2020.

Music for solo piano