Benares gharana (tabla)

The Benares tabla gharana is the drumming tradition of Varanasi, and should not be confused with the Banaras vocal gharana of the same city. It was shaped a little over two hundred years ago by Pandit Ram Sahai (1780-1826), who trained in the Lucknow tradition and then built a style deliberately capable of everything: a full solo recital, the delicate accompaniment khayal singing needs, and the heavier pakhawaj-like weight that dhrupad and kathak dance call for.

Ram Sahai began tabla with his father and at nine went to Lucknow as a disciple of Modhu Khan, described in the Benares lineage literature as a grandson of Sidhar Khan of Delhi and a musician at the court of Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula. Accounts of his famous debut differ even within a single source: tabla player and researcher Shawn Mativetsky's lineage page says Wazir Ali Khan invited him to play when he was seventeen, while the biographical note on the same page, drawn from the sleeve notes to Pandit Sharda Sahai's recording The Art of the Benares Baj, gives his age as twenty-one. Both agree on the substance of the story — that he played solo for seven consecutive nights without repeating a composition.

Back in Varanasi, in mid-career, Ram Sahai withdrew from public performance for roughly six months and worked out the fingering and hand position that became the Benares baj. He composed widely in the existing forms (gat, tukra, paran) and introduced forms now associated specifically with this gharana: the uthan, the Benarsi theka and the fard. The line continued through his family — his brothers Janaki, Ishwari and Gaori Sahai, and his son Bhairov Sahai — and in the twentieth century the gharana became known through soloists including Anokhelal Mishra, Samta Prasad and Kishan Maharaj, and through Sharda Sahai, a direct descendant of Ram Sahai who taught extensively in Britain and North America.

Note that family descent and teaching succession are not the same thing here: the Sahai family carried the tradition by blood and by instruction, but several of the gharana's best-known twentieth-century players came into it as students rather than as relatives.

The tradition also reached western India through teaching institutions: Nandan Mehta, described by his own trust as an exponent of the Benares gharana tabla, was a founding trustee of Saptak in Ahmedabad in 1980, where an annual all-India tabla and pakhawaj competition has carried his name since 2012 (saptak.org).

Benares belongs to the purbi (eastern) group of tabla styles along with Lucknow and Farrukhabad, and within that group it is the most openly resonant. The style favours the ringing strokes — Na, played with a curved ring finger on the lao (the outer rim area of the right drum) so the dahina rings as long as possible, and Din. Where Delhi players alternate single fingers for a run of Te Te, Benares players tend to use the full hand, giving the phrase more body; both techniques exist in the repertoire, but the preference is audible.

The result is a sound usually described as powerful, though the same players can accompany a soft thumri without overwhelming it — versatility was the point of Ram Sahai's redesign. Solo playing is unusually developed here, drawing on more than twenty distinct compositional types, and the gharana's long association with kathak dance in Varanasi shaped its taste for emphatic, dance-ready phrasing.