Khayal vocal

Khayal is the dominant vocal form of Hindustani classical music. The name is an Urdu word of Arabic origin meaning imagination, thought or reflection, and it names the form well: a khayal singer is given a short song of two to eight lines and builds an hour of music out of it. A performance typically unfolds a raag through a slow composition (vilambit) followed by a faster one (drut), with extensive improvisation between and around them.

The song itself, the bandish, is in two sections: the sthayi, set in the lower and lower-middle register, and the antara, which climbs into the upper register and carries denser text. Around this the singer improvises in several distinct ways. Alap introduces the raag gradually, either in free rhythm to vowel sounds or in metre using the words of the bandish. Taans are fast virtuosic runs, usually on the vowel "aa"; when sung to the words of the song they become boltaans. Bolbant uses those same words for rhythmic play against the tala, the metrical cycle. How much of each a singer uses, and in what order, is where individual and gharana identity lives — the tradition offers the materials, not a fixed script.

Khayal is sung in hundreds of raags and in about seven talas. Tilwada, Jhumra and Rupak are the usual slow-tempo cycles; Ektal serves slow, medium and fast; Jhaptal is a medium-tempo cycle; Tintal, once reserved for fast rhythmic display, is now used at every tempo. Bandishes are most often in a form of Hindi-Urdu, sometimes in Persian, Bhojpuri, Rajasthani or Marathi, on subjects ranging from romantic and divine love to the seasons and the exploits of Krishna.

Khayal is where most Hindustani gharanas define themselves, each with its own preferences of tempo, voice production, ornament and repertoire. The Gwalior gharana is generally described as the oldest of the khayal gharanas, and it illustrates how these lines actually work: the founding family's own descent is extinct, and the tradition is carried on by a different hereditary family that the founders trained. Descent and teaching succession are separate things, and in khayal it is usually the teaching that survives.

Khayal is often said to have been invented by the poet-musician Amir Khusrau (1253-1325), but the evidence is insufficient and most scholars instead describe a gradual development within the Delhi Sultanate, building on older prabhanda composition types — particularly the eclectic sadharani and the improvisatory rupakalapti, which already combined alap, raag and tala. The Sharqi rulers of Jaunpur were significant patrons of the form in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Under the Mughals, khayal was cultivated by named musicians in Akbar's time but did not receive the royal patronage dhrupad enjoyed, and remained somewhat outside the court mainstream; Faqir Ullah's Raga Darpan lists only two khayal performers among Shah Jahan's musicians. The decisive shift came under Muhammad Shah, whose court musician Niyamat Khan — trained in dhrupad and the veena, and titled Sadarang — gave khayal a majestic slow-tempo treatment comparable in weight to dhrupad. From that point it was taken seriously by leading musicians and rulers alike, and it steadily displaced dhrupad as the principal concert vocal form. The collapse of Mughal power and the colonial period removed much of that patronage, leaving khayal dependent on a smaller number of princely courts before the concert and broadcasting era.