Prof. Bharat Gupt
Vice-Chairman, NSD, New Delhi
Prof. Bharat Gupt, a retired Professor from the University of Delhi, is a well known figure in the field of arts. He is a classicist, theatre theorist, sitar and surbahar player, musicologist, cultural analyst, and newspaper columnist. His writings have altered the perception of ancient Greek drama as the ‘origin of Western theatre’ and established its utter closeness with ancient Indian theatre as part of an Indo European construct. He is known as an international authority on the Natyashastra and classical Greek theatre.
He has expounded extensively on classical Indian Sanskrit texts including the Dharma Shastras and the need to include Arts in modern curriculum.
He is trained in both, Western and traditional Indian educational systems. Apart from his degrees from premier institutions in the country and from North America, he has studied in the traditional style the classical Indian texts from famous gurus. Hence his writings expound upon the essential values of both the Eastern and the Western philosophical systems. Not only a theorist and an academic, he is an accomplished sitar and surbahar player who was formally trained under eminent musicians. He was trained in sitar by Pt. Uma Shankar Mishra and was taught the classical texts by Swami Kripalvananda and Acharya Brihaspati.
For more than thirty five years now, he has lectured extensively at Universities in India, North America, Europe, and Greece on Indian Music and theater theory and taught courses on these subjects there. He was a Visiting Professor to Greece and has been a member of jury of the Onasis award for drama.
He has been serving on the Visiting Faculty at the National School of Drama, Delhi, and been a resource scholar at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts where he is currently a Trustee and Executive Member. He has been teaching and speaking at several other major centers and academies of the arts in India such as Satyajit Ray Film Institute in Kolkata, Music Academy Madras, India International Centre, Habitat Centre, Kalakshetra Chennai, and Vivekanand International Foundation.
His major published books include: Dramatic Concepts Greek and Indian (1994, 1996, 2006, 2012 & 2016), Natyasastra, Chapter 28: Ancient Scales of Indian Music (1996), Twelve Greek Poems into Hindi (2001), India: A Cultural Decline or Revival?(2008).
He is a proficient user of Hindi, English, Sanskrit and Greek languages for his scholarly studies and writings and is an excellent speaker in Hindi and English. His 285video lectures can see on Youtube. More information can gathered from his website, http://www.bharatgupt.com