Artistic Excellence

Pandit Birju Maharaj was a Kathak dancer and choreographer of the Lucknow gharana who began teaching the dance form while still a teenager and carried it through seven decades on stage and in film.

He trained generations of dancers at Delhi’s Kathak Kendra and choreographed celebrated sequences for Indian cinema. He received the Padma Vibhushan, among the country’s highest civilian honours.

Lata Mangeshkar was an Indian playback singer whose recording career ran from the 1940s into the twenty-first century and covered thousands of songs in dozens of languages. She came to be known as the Nightingale of India.

Her voice defined Hindi film music for generations, and she sang for every major composer of her era. She received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1989 and the Bharat Ratna in 2001.

Ustad Bismillah Khan was an Indian musician who carried the shehnai, long a ceremonial instrument, onto the classical concert stage. He played at the Red Fort on the morning of India’s independence in 1947.

He performed across the world while remaining rooted in Varanasi, and his recordings of ragas remain the reference for his instrument. He received the Bharat Ratna in 2001.

Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter, born in Pennsylvania in 1989 and raised in Tennessee, who began writing and releasing country music as a teenager. She has become one of the most-streamed artists in history.

She writes or co-writes her songs and has re-recorded her early albums to own her work. Her honours include multiple Grammy Awards, among them Album of the Year four times.

Jagjit Singh was an Indian singer and composer who carried the ghazal, Urdu poetry set to music, from intimate gatherings to mass audiences. His clear, unhurried baritone defined the genre for a generation.

He recorded dozens of albums and scored films, giving Urdu poetry a household audience in India. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2003.