Farrukhabad gharana

The Farrukhabad gharana is a tabla lineage associated with the town of Farrukhabad in Uttar Pradesh and, with Lucknow and Benares, one of the three schools grouped as purbi baj — the eastern way of playing. It is best known for the sheer size and inventiveness of its composed repertoire, especially its gats.

Its players have written pieces for virtually every form in the traditional solo repertoire, and those compositions act as a bridge between the closed, less resonant bandh baj of the western schools and the open, ringing khula baj of the east (Scroll.in, "Listen: Tabla maestros of the Farrukhabad gharana seamlessly blend styles").

The gharana is traced to Vilayat Ali Khan (1779-1826), often named Haji Vilayat Ali Khan, who was the son-in-law and disciple of Miyan Bakshu Khan of the Lucknow gharana — so the school begins as an offshoot of Lucknow rather than an independent invention. The line continued through his son Hussein Ali Khan, through Nesar Hussain Khan (1824-1877), Nanhe Khan (1847-1902) and Masit Khan (1872-1974), whose son Karamatullah Khan (1917-1977) was among its most recorded twentieth-century voices.

A second current runs through Munir Khan of Laliana (1863-1937), a Farrukhabad disciple who also trained in the Delhi, Ajrada and Lucknow styles and is said to have learned from twenty-four gurus. The lineage of players he taught is often called the Laliana gharana, or the Bambai gharana, because he trained many of his disciples in Bombay. Through him and through Faiyaz Khan Moradabadi the tradition reached Ahmed Jan Thirakwa (1892-1976) and Amir Hussain Khan (1899-1969).

In Bengal the school was carried by Jnan Prakash Ghosh (1909-1997), a disciple of Masit Khan who also studied with Firoz Khan of the Punjab gharana, and after him by Shankar Ghosh, Shyamal Bose, Kanai Dutta and Anindo Chatterjee. Wikipedia names Sabir Khan as the thirty-third and current khalifa of the gharana; the figure is widely repeated but the archive has not yet found independent documentation of the count.

Farrukhabad playing belongs to the open, resonant eastern manner. It makes extensive use of ringing strokes on the sur of the dayan, close in feeling to the pakhawaj, while also cultivating unusually delicate strokes — the two extremes sit side by side within a single solo.

The repertoire leans towards gat, chalan and rela compositions rather than the kayda and peshkar that dominate elsewhere, and it makes prominent use of open bayan strokes and of characteristic syllable groups such as dhere-dhere, kita-taka and takita-dha. Because its composers wrote across the whole solo repertoire, a Farrukhabad soloist can move between the closed and open styles of playing within one recital.