SOHINI'S EARLY LIFE
Sohini was born in a family of musicians originally from Dhaka, (now the capital of Bagladesh) and was gifted with an innate sense of rhythm and melody.
Her maternal grandmother was the renowned painter Saroma Bhowmik, and Sohini had shown immense talent as a visual artist when she was a child. She was only five years old when some of her paintings were exhibited as a part of her grandmother’s solo exhibition in the Academy of fine Arts, Kolkata and was praised by many renowned art critics of the time.
As she started training with Guru Bipin Singh at the age of seven she was declared to be a child prodigy by her teachers and has never looked back since. Within just six months of her starting training she played the lead role of Krishna in the production ‘Gostha leela’ which was staged in many prestigious venues and was one of the first programs to be telecasted in the Indian National Television.
At the age of ten she was the first student in her school to train in pung, the Manipuri drums, and performed solo ‘Mridang vadan’, playing drums along with dance movements at the age of eleven, something that even adult female artists do not venture to do even today.
At age fourteen noticing her keen intellect Guru Bipin Singh recruited her as his research assistant and she trained in Sanskrit and archaic Bengali. At age twenty-one, while still in college, Sohini conducted the orchestra in prestigious productions like Kalavati Devi’s (wife of Guru Bipin Singh, and a renowned dance guru herself) solo program in the National Television, a task typically taken up only by senior gurus.