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Trustees

Basant Madhur

Auckland-based tabla maestro Basant Madhur founded and directs the Sargam School of Indian Music, training hundreds of students and building a pipeline of young performers across Aotearoa.
His ensembles and teaching have anchored Indian classical music in local festivals and community stages, often placing emerging Kiwi talent beside seasoned artists. Basant’s projects regularly fuse traditions—e.g., “East meets West”-style collaborations and bills alongside NZ classical/jazz players—to draw diverse audiences into the same room. He has also performed with internationally renowned artists, further lifting New Zealand’s intercultural music profile. These efforts—schooling, stages, and bridges—have helped knit Auckland’s migrant and mainstream communities together through music.
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Deepak Madhur

Elder brother to Basant, Deepak is an Auckland musician-educator who teaches tabla, harmonium, and vocals through Sargam, where he’s been active since moving to New Zealand in 2008.
His low-key, community-first approach has inspired scores of students to take up Indian music, and he frequently appears in multi-act evenings that mix classical recitals with collaborative sets. As a teacher-performer, he helps newer migrants and Kiwi-born kids find cultural confidence on public stages—often sharing line-ups with artists from different countries and traditions. These concerts become informal cultural exchanges, attracting non-Indian audiences and widening appreciation for South Asian arts. Deepak’s steady presence across workshops and shows has tangibly grown Auckland’s cross-cultural music scene.

Ashish Ramakrishnan

An Auckland vocalist and organiser, Ashish has fronted fusion projects with classical and orchestral musicians, including NZ Herald-covered “East meets West” collaborations with APO artists.
In 2022 he co-organised New Zealand’s first Bollywood concert with a live symphony orchestra—45 musicians on a mainstream stage—explicitly designed to welcome all communities into Bollywood’s soundworld. Media and community-outreach around that show highlighted the concert as a meeting point for migrants, longtime Kiwis, and younger audiences discovering Hindi cinema music. Beyond headline events, Ashish’s work often pairs Indian forms with Western ensembles, normalising intercultural bills across Auckland venues. Through curation and performance, he’s helped make Bollywood and Indian classical idioms feel like shared local culture, not niche.
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