Like many gharanas with mofussil roots, classical music started leaving Moradabad in western Uttar Pradesh sometime at the turn of the last century. With centres of for music dwindling, clans started branching out into metropolitan cities where new patrons and opportunities beckoned. Delhi, less than 200 km away, with its gleaming new arts institutions, its freshly minted akademis and radio station, was an attractive option.
Among the music migrants to the capital city in the mid-1960s was Ghulam Sabir Khan, a sarangiya of the Moradabad gharana and the son of the great Siddique Ahmad Khan, who descended from a long line of fabulous musicians. Today, this lineage has an address in a winding lane in Delhi’s eastern corner, just off the Yamuna, in Lakshmi Nagar – at the home of Ghulam Sabir Khan’s son. Murad Ali Khan is the sixth generation of hereditary sarangi players from Moradabad, now an ustad to the next line of musicians in the family.
You can hear the story of the gharana’s evolution in the sounds of the three exquisite sarangis dating back over a hundred years that sit in his home. They were made in Meerut – an important sarangi-making hub – and Badayun. Wrought from aged wood, embellished with ivory inlay, with the ubiquitous fish motif, the sarangis are as much an antiquarian’s delight as a musician’s.
Of them, one is a toddler sarangi. It is on this that generations of children of the clan have first learned to play the instrument described as the hardest in the Hindustani system. Murad started on this as a child, as did his father Ghulam Sabir Khan and his grandfather Siddique Ahmad Khan and the ancestors before him.
On a muggy high summer day, the bedroom in Murad’s home has been turned into the music room. Youngsters from his family – across age groups and in varying degrees of proficiency – sit around to polish their art. His son Subhan and nephews Shahnawaz, Rehan, Mohammed Ayaan Warsi and Mohammed Tabish all bear the Moradabad mantle now.
While anchored in this family network, the gharana has expanded to embrace a broader circle of disciples, among them women like Manonmani, a noted sarangi player from Chennai, and Prabhjeet Kaur from Punjab.
Gharana advantage apart, Murad tells you, nothing works like hard work. “Kartab ki vidya is how our ancestors described this art – knowledge that comes from sheer practice,” he said. “But it was a play on words – you can take it as kartab meaning a feat or kar tab (meaning, when you do). So in this class, it is the student who strives the hardest who gets ahead. As for genetics, well, maybe it gives you a 10% edge. If you neglect your instrument for days, it will turn its face away from you, no matter who you are. Saz poochhega: ‘Tum kaun ho (the instrument will demand to know who you are)?’”
This Sunday, he is teaching the class the nuances of the sprightly afternoon raga Brindabani Sarang. The sarangi’s proximity to the human voice is almost eerie and it is taught as much as a vocal as instrumental art. Most sarangiyas have impressive vocal expertise and many stalwarts of vocal music have had a strong base in the sarangi – Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Amir Khan and Abdul Karim Khan, among them.
In Murad’s music room, the riyaz for the day is as much the sung bandish as the melody of the khayal Lal mere, chalo mahal mein that everyone lips even as they wrest the same notes from the sarangi. And it is not just the khayal that they have to master, it is also the other variants of sung music in the raga – the tarana, thumri, dadra, sadra, tappa and maybe even a ghazal.
The sarangi’s reputation as a tough instrument is well deserved. But for Murad, far from being flattering, this exclusivity is problematic because it comes on the back of sarangi’s long and troubled social history. “Mushkil hai, namumkin nahin (it is tough, not impossible) – we should not put enthusiasts off with this fear-mongering. As it is, we have to constantly struggle with its image as ghamzada (grief-filled).”
Murad is among the most driven sarangi players of our times, with a strong grip on tradition but also an open and eclectic approach to change and experimentation. He is a highly sought-after soloist and accompanist, and he heads Saurang Parampara, the unique sarangi ensemble his father began.
Earlier this year, he featured in the lecture-demonstration “Narrative, Music, and the Enduring Tradition of the Sarangi” as a part of the Legacy series of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts highlighting traditional learning systems in classical arts. Interacting with him on the evolution of the Morababad gharana, its innovative performance ideas and teaching methodology was tabla musician and scholar Aneesh Pradhan.
Liberal outlook
It has now been decades since the sarangi emerged from its fraught association with the tawaif tradition. More importantly, a huge body of research now exists to show how critical this ecosystem was to conserving classical arts. But the early decades of shaming did slow down the sarangi’s revival in modern times.
In her seminal 2007 book Master Musicians of India: Hereditary Sarangi Players Speak, Regula Qureshi traces the important pockets for sarangi in the north. She describes the fraternity from Moradabad, “the most prominent and numerous bradri of sarangi players that is also identified with the dominant hereditary musical community of Mirasi (inheritors)”. Then there is Rajasthan, which produced the trailblazing Sultan Khan and Ram Narayan. Benares was another important centre, as was Lucknow.
But it was a large tract around Delhi, extending across Uttar Pradesh and Haryana – Sonepat, Panipat, Kairana, Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar, Meerut, Moradabad, Bulandshahr and Jhajjar – that made for the busiest sarangi hub.
When Murad started learning as a child and was shaping up as something of a prodigy, the sarangi was already on its path to finding a new voice. As is the case in most migrating families, his father found early anchorage in the home of a relative – Murad’s maternal uncle and sarangi stalwart Sabri Khan. After seven years of fresh tutelage, he found a job at All India Radio. Much of Murad’s worldview is shaped by his father’s liberal outlook.
“My father wanted us to be open to all influences – he did not encourage rigid gharana loyalties,” Murad said. “He told me, ‘Go imbibe from others and credit them when you play.’ I was like a gayabana shagird (absentee disciple) to many great ustads. I listened and learnt from many – Bundu Khan saheb, Gopal Mishraji, Ram Narayanji, Sultan Khan saheb. I kept my mind open to new learnings from every quarter.”
Just as Murad was beginning to soar high, a command came from Ghulam Sabir Khan: the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra as its sarangi player, primarily for the dance department. “Lehra seekho,” he was told. The lehra is a fixed melody that dancers and percussionists use to display their skills, not exactly the most exciting of creative work for a youngster brimming with ideas. But in a gharana, defiance was not really an option.
Six years followed at the kendra, a time of intense, repetitive musical labour. “My fingers used to go sunn (numb) often. But what those years did was to totally expand my musical horizon – there was nothing I could not handle after that – solo, khayal, dhrupad, ghazal, bhajan, and of course, kathak.”
Gharana ensemble
The sarangi’s decline became marked after vocalists increasingly started replacing it with the harmonium on stage at the turn of the 20th century and the slide gathered pace over the coming decades till it hit an abysmal low by the 1980s. Classical lore is full of colourful stories of masterly sarangiyas who outplayed vocalists, or stole their thunder at dangals (competitive events). There are an equal number of stories of sarangi players who were humiliated on stage by vocalists. With few exceptions, it is pretty rare even today to see the sarangi on stage at a vocal concert.
This complex relationship between the two streams was summed up by the late rudra veena legend Asad Ali Khan while encouraging Saurang Parampara’s experimental ensemble work. “What the vocalist says with the throat, the sarangiya has already imagined in his mind and worked into his fingers so they emerge as one voice,” he said. “To do a hoobahoo nakal (a total imitation) and that in an asal (original) manner is the genius of the sarangi nawaz (expert). It is a pity that vocalists have left them behind, sometimes to cover their own inadequacies and sometimes for their own ease.”
Murad, who was mentored in his early career by two exceptional vocalists, the late Rashid Khan and Shubha Mudgal, believes that the harmonium and the sarangi need not be rivals on the stage at vocal concerts. “Both instruments hold great possibilities,” he pointed out. “Certain junctures of the khayal, like say the aakar, are better embellished with the sarangi and others such as paltas with the harmonium.”
In a post on Instagram after a concert, star vocalist Kaushiki Chakraborty, who is usually accompanied by Murad, said about him: “I have watched him perform with my father [Ajoy Chakraborty] and Rashid [Khan] uncle and for any vocalist it is a dream come true to have him accompany and you on stage.”
It is likely that the most innovative work the family does is with the Saurang Ensemble. A sarangi orchestra of sorts, it provides a more full-bodied experience of the instrument and its tremendous possibilities which often remain untapped.
When Siddique Khan ed away in 2003, Ghulam Sabir Khan thought of a new way to showcase the family’s work. It took him about a decade to put together a gharana ensemble with 12 artistes of the family.
“It is hard enough to get one sarangi to play in tune, so to get 12 to play together in consonance was hugely challenging,” Murad recalled. “I recall that the riyaz would begin at 9 pm at our earlier home on Minto Road because my father did not want to interrupt anyone’s workday and it would go on till 5 am.”
What he now hopes for is another edition of the historic Sarangi Mela held in 1989 by the Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, then headed by Ashok Vajapyee. The event energised the demoralised sarangi community, putting its greats back in the limelight, and revived the discourse around what was often called a “dying” instrument.
“We still need to work on its visibility,” he said. “Sarangi is still not taught at the music departments of universities or even music institutions. It is just us, individual artistes and families, who are holding up its future. Surely that must change.”
Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at [email protected].
