Instruments

The sitar is a long-necked plucked lute, usually around four feet in length, built from seasoned toon or teak with a large gourd resonator — the tumba — fixed beneath the neck. Many instruments carry a second, smaller gourd near the pegbox, which adds resonance and helps balance the instrument across the player's foot.

What gives the sitar its unmistakable voice is a combination of three things. The frets, called parda, are curved metal bars tied to the neck with thread; because they are movable, the player can retune them for a particular raga, and because they arch above the fingerboard, a string can be pulled sideways across them to bend a note through five or more scale degrees in a single unbroken gesture. That bend, meend, is the heart of the instrument's expressiveness. Beneath the main strings run eleven to thirteen sympathetic strings, the tarab, which are never struck but vibrate on their own, surrounding every note with a soft halo. And the bridge, the jawari, is deliberately shaped with a shallow curve so the string grazes it as it vibrates, producing the shimmering, overtone-rich buzz that distinguishes the sitar from every other lute in the world.

The player sits cross-legged with the instrument angled across the body, stopping strings with the left index and middle fingers and striking with a mizrab, a curl of wire worn on the right index finger. Of the six or seven playing strings, only one or two carry the melody; the rest are drone and rhythm strings — the chikari — struck in fast, ringing patterns that drive the closing jhala section of a performance.

The sitar belongs to a family of long-necked lutes that travelled into the subcontinent from Persia and Central Asia, and its name is generally traced to the Persian sehtar, meaning "three strings." Popular accounts credit its invention to the thirteenth-century poet and musician Amir Khusrau. Most historians treat this as legend: there is no reliable evidence of an instrument resembling the modern sitar before the Mughal period, and the attribution may instead belong to a later musician of the same name at the eighteenth-century Delhi court. The honest position is that the sitar emerged gradually rather than being invented.

By the eighteenth century the instrument had taken recognisable form in northern India, and its repertoire began to be codified. Two composed forms still anchor sitar performance today and carry the names of the musicians associated with them: the slow masitkhani gat, after Masit Khan, and the faster razakhani gat, after Raza Khan. Through the nineteenth century the instrument grew — more sympathetic strings, a wider neck, a heavier gourd — as players sought greater volume and sustain for larger halls.

Two broad approaches to the instrument developed and remain distinct. The Imdadkhani lineage cultivated the gayaki ang, the "singing style," in which the sitar imitates the ornaments and phrasing of the human voice; Vilayat Khan was its towering twentieth-century exponent. The Maihar tradition, shaped by Allauddin Khan, treated the sitar as an instrument in its own right, with a strongly architectural approach to raga development and a debt to the sarod and the been.

That second stream runs directly into this school. Allauddin Khan taught Nikhil Banerjee, whose playing is widely regarded as one of the most complete realisations of the Maihar approach on the sitar, and it is through Nikhil Banerjee and Partho Chatterjee that our own lineage descends. When the sitar reached a global audience in the 1960s it did so largely through musicians of this same tradition — a moment that brought enormous visibility, and with it a lasting popular misunderstanding of the music as exotic decoration rather than a rigorous classical discipline.