Prof. Swapan Siva
Tabla · Her father & guru
Rimpa trained under her father in the Farukhabad gharana from her earliest years — the daily, lifelong transmission of the guru-shishya tradition, carried on within one household.
She was a child when the world first called her the Princess of Tabla. Tonight, one of the very few women to command the solo tabla stage brings the Farukhabad gharana to a living room in Chevy Chase.
The Evening
We are thrilled to welcome Rimpa Siva for an evening of solo tabla. Her performances open with a long, meditative peshkar that gradually gives way to an electrifying solo — moving through gats, tukras, and relas with a clarity that makes the most intricate rhythm feel inevitable.
She is accompanied by Shreyes Ravi on the harmonium, whose held melodic line gives the tabla its sky to move against. Come early, settle in, and let the cycles of rhythm carry the room.
“The tabla in her hands is not accompaniment — it is the full voice of the evening.”
The Artist
The Artist
Rimpa Siva
Born in 1986, Rimpa Siva is among India’s most celebrated tabla artists — and one of remarkably few women to have made the solo tabla her own. She was the subject of the 1999 French documentary Rimpa Siva: Princess of Tabla, the film that gave her the name she is still known by.
A prodigy, she gave her first stage performance in Kolkata at the age of eight and was touring the United States while still a schoolgirl, with later concerts across the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. She holds a master’s degree from Rabindra Bharati University, and has been honoured with the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award and the Indian Music Academy’s President Award.
Her playing is marked by a rare combination of technical precision, spontaneity, and sheer expressive power — the tabla, in her hands, is not an accompanist’s instrument but the voice that carries the evening.
Sangeet Natak Akademi AwardIndian Music Academy President AwardShanmukha Sangeet Shiromani Award
The Lineage
Farukhabad GharanaRimpa Siva plays in the Farukhabad gharana — one of the six great schools of tabla, prized for its melodic, composition-rich repertoire. She learned it from within her own family, and grew up to transform a tradition that had rarely made room for women.
The Instrument
On the Tabla
The tabla is a pair of hand drums — the wooden dayan under the right hand and the metal bayan under the left — capable of an extraordinary vocabulary of timbre and pitch. A solo recital is its own architecture: it opens with a slow, expansive peshkar, then builds through composed and improvised forms — gats, tukras, and relas — each a study in rhythm, surprise, and resolution.
The Farukhabad gharana, Rimpa Siva’s school, is known for the beauty and breadth of its compositions and for a flowing, melodic touch. In a room this small, every stroke is audible — the whisper of the fingertips as clearly as the thunder of the full hand.
In Performance
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