Timir Baran
Timir Baran Bhattacharya was a sarod player and composer — reportedly Allauddin Khan's very first accepted disciple in the 1920s, alongside fellow students Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar — who went on to become the resident composer for Uday Shankar's touring dance company and, later, part of New Theatres' celebrated Calcutta film-composing trio alongside R.C. Boral and Pankaj Mullick, scoring the landmark 1935 Hindi Devdas. His touring years in Europe left him fascinated by Western orchestras, and he's remembered as the "Father of the Indian symphony orchestra" for training dozens of musicians to play Hindustani material in a Western-style ensemble format.
Baran became Khan's first accepted disciple in the 1920s, training in Maihar-gharana discipline alongside (and ahead of) fellow students Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar, before carrying that rigor into his own orchestral composing career.
listen forCompare Khan's own patient, alap-driven Raag Basant with Baran's Raga Bhairavi — both let the melody breathe slowly before any rhythm enters, the Maihar gharana's signature unhurried opening.
Sources on Timir Baran's early training name Radhikaprasad Goswami as the Calcutta teacher who taught him his first sarod technique, before he moved on around the early 1920s to become Allauddin Khan's first formal disciple. (Note: this is a distinct, thinly documented figure — not to be confused with the better-known Bishnupur-gharana vocalist Radhika Prasad Goswamy, 1852–1925, whose own biography makes no mention of Baran.)
listen forNo recording survives of this teacher; what carries forward is a settled, unshowy sarod technique — Baran's own Raga Todi already sounds like an instrumentalist with firm grounding, well before his years under Allauddin Khan's more demanding regimen.