Jaipur beenkar gharana (Khandarbani)

The Jaipur beenkar gharana is a hereditary family lineage of rudra veena players, not a khayal singing school. Its musicians served as court musicians at Jaipur and later at Alwar and Rampur, and played dhrupad in the khandar bani, one of the four banis or stylistic schools of dhrupad. Its best-documented modern representative, Ustad Asad Ali Khan (1937-2011), described himself as the seventh generation of veena players in his family.

Published accounts trace the family to court service in the eighteenth century at Rampur in Uttar Pradesh and Jaipur in Rajasthan. Asad Ali Khan's great-grandfather Rajab Ali Khan is recorded as head of the court musicians at Jaipur. His grandfather Musharraf Khan, who died in 1909, was a court musician at Alwar and performed in London in 1886. His father Sadiq Ali Khan worked for the Alwar court and for the Nawab of Rampur over some thirty-five years, and taught Asad Ali Khan from early childhood. Sources describe Asad Ali Khan as the last surviving master of the khandar school of dhrupad; after his death in 2011 the line continues chiefly through his students rather than through court patronage.

The khandarbani manner is described by players and writers as austere and rigorous in the treatment of raga grammar, with weight given to a slow, fully developed alap and to jor and jhala passages on the unfretted sustain of the rudra veena. Asad Ali Khan kept to a comparatively small group of ragas in concert, among them darbari, lalit, todi, multani, marwa, shri, puriya and chandrakauns, and was noted for combining exact formal design with devotional expression.