Zakir Hussain, the peerless tabla player and multiple Grammy award winner, is critical and in a US hospital over serious heart-related ailments, his family said on Sunday.

"My brother is deeply ill at this time. We are asking for all his fans around India and around the world to pray for him, to pray for his health. But as India's greatest ever exports, do not finish him off just yet," Zakir Hussain's sister Khurshid Aulia told news agency PTI amid multiple reports that her brother had died.

"I just want to request all the media not to follow wrong information about Zakir's passing. He is very much breathing at the moment. He is very very critical, but he's still with us. He has not yet gone.”

“So, I will request (the media) not to spread this rumour by writing or saying that he has passed away. I feel so bad watching all this information on Facebook which is very wrong," she added.

"He is unwell and admitted in the ICU right now. We all are worried about the situation," said Zakir Hussain's friend and flautist Rakesh Chaurasia.

His manager, Nirmala Bachani, said he was admitted to a hospital in San Francisco for the last two weeks.

"I am Zakir Hussain nephew and he has not passed away. We ask for prayers for my Uncle's health. Can you please remove this misinformation. He is in a serious condition and we ask for all his fans around the world to pray for his health," said Ameer Aulia on X.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting of India, which posted about the artist's death, later deleted its post on X.

Zakir Hussain, born on March 9, 1951, to Ustad Alla Rakha Qureshi, showed an early aptitude for the tabla, performing with his father at just seven years old.

Hussain played with legendary artists like Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and co-founded the fusion band Shakti with John McLaughlin, broadening the tabla's global appeal.

Honoured with the Padma Shri (1988), Padma Bhushan (2002), and Padma Vibhushan (2023), Hussain's work earned him a Grammy Award in 2009 for his album ‘Global Drum Project’. He has received seven Grammy nominations, winning four, including three in 2024.

He was also awarded the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship by the US National Endowment for the Arts.

Source: With inputs from NDTV