Sunidhi Nayak: Best of West Bengal’s Rising Classical Voice

Who Is Sunidhi Nayak?

Sunidhi Nayak is an Indian classical and Rabindra Sangeet vocalist from Asansol, West Bengal, who has spent the last three years building a second identity as a genre-crossing solo artist. Yes, she’s Indian — born and trained in West Bengal — though her career today runs almost entirely along the India-Bangladesh musical corridor, thanks in large part to her marriage to Bangladeshi singer-songwriter Shayan Chowdhury Arnob. She started singing at age three under her mother’s guidance and has spent every year since refusing to stop learning.

Her father worked as an income tax officer by day and a theatre actor by evening, and young Sunidhi tagged along to his rehearsals after school — an early, unglamorous classroom that taught her discipline before it taught her fame. That grounding eventually led her to Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty, the Padma Bhushan–winning Hindustani classical vocalist and founder of Kolkata’s Shrutinandan music academy, who became her guru. “Everything I know about musical grammar — scales, notations — I know from him,” she has said of her training.

Sunidhi Nayak’s Journey From Asansol to Shantiniketan

Sunidhi went on to complete her graduation, master’s, and research at Visva-Bharati University in Shantiniketan — Rabindranath Tagore’s university, and the same institution where she would later cross paths with Arnob, though the two attended at different times. Alongside her voice, she picked up the harmonium and tanpura, and learned the esraj, a bowed instrument central to Rabindra Sangeet, during her Shantiniketan years. She plays a little piano and guitar too, though her instrument has always, first and foremost, been her voice.

Shantiniketan is also where her love story began. By Sunidhi’s own account, the two first met dramatically: Arnob caught one of her university performances, and patted her on the back afterward to praise her singing. They started dating in 2019. When the COVID-19 lockdown stranded Arnob in Shantiniketan rather than back home in Dhaka, the delay turned into an unplanned blessing — the couple registered their marriage on October 28, 2020, at Sunidhi’s family home in Asansol, with only close relatives present, including Arnob’s mother and Sunidhi’s father. The bride had lost her own mother just months earlier, and the small, quiet ceremony reflected that. A formal wedding celebration followed the next year, once travel restrictions eased.

Married to Arnob, But Never in His Shadow

It would be easy to frame Sunidhi as “Arnob‘s wife” and leave it there — she rejects that framing outright. “I think things would have probably been different, or maybe even complicated, if I was married to someone from a different profession,” she has reflected. “We both value and respect each other as artists and are able to prioritize what is important for the both of us.”

It shows in how they work: not as a duo riding on one name, but as two working musicians who occasionally share a stage — and increasingly, a songwriting credit. Arnob, whose own catalogue spans solo albums like “Chaina Bhabish,” “Hok Kolorob,” and “Doob”, has also produced and curated every season of Coke Studio Bangla since it began.

Their most visible collaboration to date is “Shondhatara,” recorded for Coke Studio Bangla Season 2 and composed by Adit Rahman — a Bangla adaptation of the Agra Gharana bandish “Main Waari Waari Jaaungi,” set in Raag Emon, blending sitar and tabla with guitars and synths. Arnob has called the track “a captivating fusion of classic and contemporary music” that “honors both genres while creating something entirely fresh.” It remains one of her most-streamed recordings to date, and it’s the clearest example yet of how her classical training and Arnob’s indie-pop instincts meet in the middle.

“Arale”: Sunidhi Nayak Steps Out on Her Own

After a career spent lending her voice to Rabindra Sangeet and collaborative projects, Sunidhi released “Arale“ — her first-ever solo album — with its lead single “Arale Theko” dropping on February 2, 2024. Rather than a single album drop, Arale was released one song at a time across a month, Netflix-episode style, so that each of its five original tracks got its own moment. The album took roughly a year and a half to make and pulled Sunidhi decisively out of her classical comfort zone into jazz, blues, and pop, built around live trumpets, cello, and percussion. The full album is streaming on JioSaavn and Spotify.

Bold statement, gently made: “This being my first album, I’m not setting my expectations too high. I just hope people listen to my songs and have a good time,” Sunidhi said around its release. The album’s name, she has said, mirrors who she is as a person — someone comfortable working a little out of view, “arale,” while the songs do the talking.

2026: A Bigger Stage for Sunidhi Nayak, Same Roots

Sunidhi hasn’t slowed down. Her 2025–2026 release run includes “Jodi Tare,” “Tobu Jayna Chowa,” and “Jao Na” (from “Mon Maaney Na”), alongside a new EP released in August 2026 — all listenable on her Apple Music artist page.

Her biggest moment of the year, though, came on July 25, 2026, with “Patar Bashori,” a Coke Studio Bangla Season 4 duet with Mukul Mojumder Ishaan, produced by Adit Rahman and filmed amid the historic ruins of Sonargaon. The song’s flute-laced folk-fusion sound and its aching hook — “Chiro Ovagi Tomaro Lagi” — took on a life of its own within days, spinning off dozens of independent lo-fi versions, DJ remixes, and reaction videos from as far as Germany, and racking up hundreds of thousands of plays across streaming platforms.

This August, she and Arnob took that catalogue on the road — performing at Hok Kolorob Canada, a concert organized by the Bangladesh Canada Event Forum at Toronto Pavilion on August 8, 2026, backed by Arnob’s longtime band (Buno on bass, Rahin on flute, Shuvo on percussion). The show was billed as a celebration of Bengali music for Canada’s diaspora community — and it sat inside a wider Canadian tour that also took Sunidhi Nayak through Ottawa.

For a New York or Toronto-based Bengali household, that’s the version of Sunidhi worth knowing: not a name attached to someone else’s fame, but a touring, actively-releasing artist whose next stop could plausibly be a diaspora stage near you.

The Part People Don’t See

Ask Sunidhi about the hardest part of her career and she doesn’t reach for a dramatic story — she reaches for a frustration many working musicians share. “People often think music is just something that we do, but there is so much more to it,” she has said. “Just like any other language, music has its history, grammar, chords — it is hard to explain to somebody with little understanding that music is just not about singing.” It’s a small complaint, but a telling one: years of Shrutinandan-level classical training don’t always translate into audience respect the way a viral moment does.

Sunidhi Nayak’s Advice to the Next Generation

Sunidhi describes Gen Z musicians as “stubborn in some way or the other,” and means it as a compliment — she admires how firmly younger artists hold onto their own style. Her advice sits right alongside that respect, not against it: “It is important to have one’s own style, but it is also essential to understand where we are coming from and stay true to our roots.” Coming from someone who spent a childhood shadowing her father backstage before spending a decade under one of India’s most exacting classical teachers, it reads less like a platitude and more like a lived rule.

Quick Facts: Sunidhi Nayak FAQ

More Musicians Bridging Bengal and the Diaspora

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Sources

1. The Daily Star — Sunidhi Nayak coverage archive
2. The Daily Star — “Arnob, Sunidhi set for Toronto concert this August”
3. The Daily Star — “Shondhatara: Coke Studio Bangla delivers mesmerizing blend of Bandish and Pop”
4. The Business Standard — “Sunidhi to emerge from ‘Arale'”
5. The Business Standard — “Sunidhi Nayak announces first original album ‘Arale'”
6. Dhaka Tribune — “Arnob and Sunidhi get married in Asansol”
7. Wikipedia — Shayan Chowdhury Arnob
8. Wikipedia — Ajoy Chakrabarty
9. Eventbrite — Hok Kolorob Canada, Toronto Pavilion, Aug 8 2026