About
Kamalini Mukherji
Kamalini Mukherji
Vocalist · Curator · Dramaturge · Artistic Director
Kamalini Mukherji is a New York-based vocalist, curator, dramaturge, and artistic director whose work brings Rabindranath Tagore into contemporary global cultural discourse through commissioned works, new repertoire, and intercultural collaborations. For more than twenty years she has performed extensively throughout Europe, North America, and South Asia.
A Gates Cambridge Scholar with a Master's degree in English Literature from the University of Cambridge, her work is distinguished by the unique combination of performance, literary scholarship, dramaturgy, and cultural curation.
Co-curator of a 2025 OPUS KLASSIK-winning production, her work has brought together Grammy-winning, Grammy-nominated, and OPUS KLASSIK-winning artists from India, Europe, and the US in world-premiere productions commissioned by the Duisburger Philharmoniker, one of Germany's leading symphony orchestras.
Her collaborators include some of Europe's and India's most celebrated contemporary musicians, among them Avi Avital, Alissa Margulis, Asya Fateyeva, Bickram Ghosh, Bijayini Satpathy, Concerto Köln, Kala Ramnath, Patri Satish Kumar, José Quevedo “Bolita,” and the Aris Quartett.
Kamalini’s music academy, Ahir, is dedicated to teaching Rabindrasangeet, emphasizing a deep understanding and interpretation of Tagore’s poetry while preserving its melodic integrity.
Kamalini’s music academy, Ahir, is dedicated to teaching Rabindrasangeet, emphasizing a deep understanding and interpretation of Tagore’s poetry while preserving its melodic integrity.
Eigenzeit Festival
Photo: André Symann
Photo: André Symann
Photo: Marie Laforge
Curated by Kamalini Mukherji, Eigenzeit – Music of Now explored the extraordinary diversity of Indian music and culture through the spirit of Rabindranath Tagore’s internationalism and artistic synthesis. Bringing together leading artists from India and Europe, the month-long festival created encounters across Indian classical and folk traditions, Western classical music, dance, film, visual art, literature, and food. From Bijayini Satpathy, Kala Ramnath, Parvathy Baul and Bickram Ghosh to Avi Avital and the Aris Quartett, the festival placed India’s living artistic traditions in dialogue with the wider world, celebrating music beyond borders.
Duisburg · April–May 2026
Tagore and Rabindra Sangeet
Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941) is one of the most remarkable cultural figures of the modern era: a poet, composer, novelist, playwright, essayist, educator, painter, and social thinker whose humanism and internationalism are deeply relevant today. The first non-European recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913), Tagore profoundly shaped the cultural life of the Indian subcontinent while engaging in an extraordinary dialogue with the wider world.
His music, known as Rabindra Sangeet, a body of more than 2,200 songs, constitutes one of the world's great living traditions of vocal music, remarkable for its scale, sophistication, and enduring cultural presence.
Throughout his life, he travelled extensively across Europe, forging friendships and intellectual partnerships with artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. His writings were translated, championed, and celebrated by figures including W. B. Yeats, Romain Rolland, André Gide, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Boris Pasternak, and Pablo Neruda, placing him at the centre of some of the most important cultural conversations of the twentieth century.
Today Tagore's humanism resonates with particular urgency at a time when questions of identity, migration, coexistence, and cultural exceptionalism occupy the centre of public discourse. An internationalist to the core, he warned against the excesses of nationalism even at the height of India's independence movement, advocating instead a form of patriotism grounded in cultural openness, intellectual freedom, and shared humanity.