Beats of Change: 'The Tabla Guy' Nikhil Paralikar on Fusion and the Fight for Dignity

He still remembers the boxes in his childhood home, the ones he would drum on while his father hummed a tune. “Apparently, the beat used to go really well with what he sang,” Nikhil Paralikar says. He was five when his mother noticed “a knack” for percussion, and she offered him choices: drums, congas, Western instruments. “I don’t know why,” he says, “but I really loved the tone of the tabla, the richness, the versatility. I think I was too young to judge, but somehow it happened.” 

He began formal tabla lessons alongside his regular schooling, the instrument following him through adolescence, university, and beyond. After graduating with a B.Tech in engineering from Vellore Institute of Technology, he realised he was not cut out for a corporate job. “Music was always my passion,” he says. “I thought, why not turn it into a career?” 

Paralikar had long been listening to techno and EDM alongside Hindustani classical, a juxtaposition that became the foundation of his artistry. “I thought, why not mash it up and see the kind of soundscape it could create?”. Early experiments ranged from English commercial covers to Bollywood songs to ambient techno, posted online. The internet noticed. His tabla-accented covers began circulating widely, and what began as an exploration quickly solidified into a full-time career. 

If his training in Hindustani classical gave him the precision and discipline of a purist, his artistic temperament steered him towards fusion, which is a space often viewed with suspicious by the classical establishment. “Frankly, I’m a purist,” he says, “but fusion is nothing but mixing two things the right way. Mixing tabla with another genre doesn’t mean the essence of tabla or classical music is lost. I make sure that if I’m playing alongside a Bollywood song, an English commercial track, techno, EDM, or even psychedelic trance, I’m still playing the bandishes I learned from my guru.”

For Paralikar, the tabla itself demands this openness. “It’s so vast a subject that it can be infused with any genre of music,” he says. He points to precedents set by masters like Ustad Zakir Hussain, Pandit Ravi Shankar, and Alla Rakha Qureshi, whose collaborations with jazz musicians decades ago were seen as daring. “Fusion is not new,” he says. “I took inspiration from such big maestros and started my own thing.”

It’s no accident that he references Hussain and Shankar, two musicians who made Indian classical instruments “cool” for a wider audience. “Tabla is already cool,” Paralikar insists. “It’s just that some people don’t understand it. I’m trying to bring that out to the younger generation.” 

That mission has taken shape most concretely in The Tabla Guy Collective, his latest project. Conceived as a touring ensemble of nine musicians — handpicked from Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Hyderabad — it is, in his words, “a proper Indian classical–folk–global act.” In its sets, Rajasthani and Gujarati folk meet techno, and multiple percussion traditions converse with each other. “I’ve invested a lot of energy in this,” he says. “I want to take it to a global stage. Tabla is not just about rhythm. It’s about emotion. It can be as expressive as any melodic instrument. With enough tablas tuned to different surs, you can play an entire song. That’s called tabla tarang.” 

Paralikar has built his career in the din of the social media age, which brings its own pressures: virality, metrics, algorithms. But he shrugs off the anxiety. “For people who’ve already established their base, virality is not such a big concern,” he says. “It’s not about virality all the time. Content alone doesn’t make an artist; it’s your music that does the magic. If your music is a thumb-stopper, people will watch you.” 

It’s a philosophy that has allowed him to evolve beyond the internet novelty phase, retaining a loyal following while experimenting with new performance formats. “The family, the followership is growing,” he says. “People are accepting different formats of performances, and it’s been a great journey.” 

As for legacy, he hesitates. “That’s a difficult one,” he admits. “I’ve never really thought about what I want to leave behind. For me, it’s about being in the moment and creating the best I can. But yes, I’d like to be remembered as the guy who helped bring change to classical fusion using the tabla and hopefully the guy who brought some dignity to it.”