Chaurasia resisted his father's wish that he should be a wrestler or accountant and secretly learnt the art of this deceptively simple-looking instrument. In his 60-year-long career, he has elevated himself to the ranks of India’s most-respected instrumentalists, such as Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan.

 He travels the world to share his meditative music with students and fans alike. In June 2010, World Tracks spoke to him after his morning raga at the World Sacred Music Festival in Fez, Morocco. The concert was one of the highlights in a sparkling debut programme by ethnomusicologist Alain Weber.
 
“When I started learning to play the flute, I thought it was a simple instrument,” Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia reclined in the poolside chair and meditated. The 72-year-old was slowly recovering from an intense morning raga he had performed in the gardens of the Batha museum in Fez.
 
“But you have to cut down proper bamboo that only grows in Assam and Bihar. And you need hundreds of bamboos to make two or three flutes, because the bamboo is not very strong. It is so difficult to cut the bamboo properly. You have to go into the forest, find the right diameter, put them together.”
 
Chaurasia is very much a self-taught artist who learnt to play the north Indian bansuri flute through his own hands-on experiences.
 
He was born into a non-musical family in Allahabad to a father who was a wrestler. Having lost his mother at the age of four, there was great pressure for Chaurasia to learn a profession with fewer risks than those faced in the music world.
 
“Times were so different then,” he said. “There were no concerts, no jobs [in the music world] to earn money with. So everyone pushed us to study things like engineering or business.”
 
At first, Chaurasia went along with his father’s demands. He trained as a wrestler in the Akhada school and became a stenographer.
 
But, in secret, he practiced the flute at a friend’s house. Ironically, his training as a wrestler allowed him to use his lung power and stamina to rapidly progress and he soon become one of India’s greatest classical instrumentalists. For much of his career, he was guided by the great sitarist Annapurna Devi, who still lives in reclusive isolation in Mumbai.
 
Since his difficult beginnings, Pandit Chaurasia has expanded on the expressive possibilities of the bansuri flute. It has allowed him to collaborate with the likes of Yehudi Menuhin, John McLaughlin and Jan Gabarek. At the core of his work is the conscious desire to reach out and expand the audience for classical Indian music. The idea of performing a morning raga in one of Fez’s biggest riads, for example, was his. It was immediately embraced by new festival director Alain Weber.
“Chaurasia did not need to insist on the idea,” Weber said after the 90-minute concert that had left the audience in a trance. “These ragas are closely related to human nature and the elements. Playing it at this time keeps the music in harmony with time and the spirits of the morning.
 
“And just look how happy people are.”
 
Reality, however, has somehow squirmed into this deeply spiritual music these days. Modern demands are transforming the way even traditional Indian artists are performing.
 
“The new generation of Indian musicians are brilliant,” Weber said. “But they don’t have the same spiritual sense they had in the old days. And that means the music doesn’t have the same role in society. Still, the music remains alive and well in India, despite modern pressures.”
 
Pandit Chaurasia remains devoted to the up-and-coming generations of artists worldwide. He has established a school in India which gives children an early induction into the riches of Indian classical music from a very early age. And he runs a World Music department at the Rotterdam Music Conservatory in the Netherlands.
 
Thanks to these activities and the marathon tours he embarks on, the septuagenarian is leaving behind him a remarkable legacy.