About the Artist

Some instruments are inherited. This one had to be invented.

Sameer Inamdar grew up around music the way most of us grow up around language — absorbing it before he understood it. Based in Pune, India, he has spent his life inside Dhrupad, one of the oldest surviving traditions of North Indian classical music, a music built on patience, breath, and the space between notes rather than the notes themselves.

But Dhrupad was written for the voice and for instruments that could bend a note the way a singer bends a phrase. The bansuri, the traditional bamboo flute, was never quite built for it — the micro-tonal slides at the heart of Dhrupad simply didn’t exist on a straight flute. For years, he felt that gap between what he wanted to express and what his instrument would allow.

So, after years of research, he built something new.

The Instrument

The Dhrupad Curved Flute

He invented the Dhrupad Curved Flute — a bansuri reshaped to carry the delicate micro-notes of Dhrupad across four octaves on a single instrument, for what he believes is the first time in the flute’s history. He also made the Pavan Venu, the smallest flute. Both earned Limca Book of Records National Records — the Pavan Venu in 2010 and an earlier version of the curved flute in 2013, before it was upgraded to its present four octaves — and he holds a registered design for his work. But he’ll be the first to tell you the records matter less than what the instrument makes possible: a flute that can finally speak the full language of Dhrupad.

The Dhrupad curved flute → See all the instruments →

The School

Teaching What Was Nearly Lost

He founded Dhrupad Gurukul in Pune to pass this on — not as a museum piece, but as a living practice. He teaches vocal Dhrupad as well as the traditional bansuri and the Dhrupad curved flute, online and in person, and runs Naad Yoga workshops internationally, working with students from complete beginners to serious performers. His students have gone on to perform with the Dhrupad Sansthan in Bhopal, one of the tradition’s most respected institutions.

What draws people to Dhrupad isn’t always what you’d expect. A scientist. A twelve-year-old discovering Sanskrit. A sound healer halfway across the world. Different lives, pulled toward the same quiet thing — an ancient music that asks you to slow down and actually listen.

That’s the thread running through everything he invents, teaches, and builds: an instrument, a school, and now, a series of stories about the people this music finds.

Meet the Secret Sounds series →

In the Press