Sitar and surbahar: what changes when the instrument grows

Stand a sitar and a surbahar side by side and the family resemblance is immediate: a gourd body, a long hollow neck, curved metal frets tied on with string, a nest of sympathetic strings running underneath. Then you notice the scale of the second one. The surbahar is over 130 cm long, its neck wider, its gourd cut across rather than down so the body sits shallower and rounder against the bass. It is too big to balance on the player's foot in the usual way, and instruments are often built with a small foot underneath the gourd to carry the weight.

The size is not showmanship. It is the whole argument of the instrument.

What the sitar is built to do

The sitar carries somewhere between twenty-one and twenty-three strings, of which around seven are struck with the *mizrab*, a wire plectrum worn on the index finger. Three or four of those are *chikari* strings, plucked for drone and rhythmic punctuation; the rest carry melody, with one main string doing most of the work. The remainder are sympathetic strings, tuned to the raag and left to ring on their own. Two bridges hold all this: a large one for the played strings, a smaller one for the sympathetics. The frets are curved and tied on, so they can be shifted to suit the notes of a particular raag, and the sympathetic strings pass beneath the arch of each one.

The buzzing shimmer in the sitar's tone comes from those bridges. Their upper surfaces are very slightly curved along the line of the string, so a vibrating string grazes the bridge rather than sitting cleanly on it. The effect is called *jawari*, and the shaping of it is a craft of its own.

The writer and broadcaster Jameela Siddiqi, in Darbar's introduction to the instrument, describes two broad playing approaches: *gayaki ang*, the singing style most associated with Ustad Vilayat Khan, which asks the sitar to imitate the voice, and *tantrakari ang*, the idiomatically instrumental style of the tradition headed by Ustad Allauddin Khan in which Pandit Ravi Shankar trained.

What the surbahar does differently

The surbahar is usually pitched two to five whole steps below a standard sitar, depending on how large the instrument is. Its neck is wider and its frets are fixed rather than movable. That width is the point: with more room to push a string sideways across the fret, a player can bend a single stopped note upward through an interval of as much as a full octave without ever moving the hand to a new fret.

That bend is called *meend*, and it is how Hindustani music joins one note to another — not by stepping, but by sliding, the way a voice does. On a sitar a meend of a few notes is ordinary. On a surbahar the reach is far greater, which means an entire phrase can unfold inside one fret position, without the interruption of a new attack.

Technique follows. The musicologist Suneera Kasliwal, quoted in the Raga Junglism instrument survey, describes the surbahar being played much as the rudra veena is: two plectrums, only inward strokes, and where percussion joins at all it is usually the pakhawaj, the barrel drum of dhrupad, rather than tabla.

Why anyone wanted a bass sitar

The answer given consistently across sources is the *alap* — the opening, unmetred exploration of a raag, played without percussion, where the notes are introduced one at a time and the character of the raag is established before any rhythm arrives. That kind of slow unfolding belonged to the rudra veena and the dhrupad tradition. The rudra veena is heavy, difficult, and played with a different technique from the sitar.

A large, deep sitar solved the problem. Accounts collected on the specialist site surbahars.com and in the Hartenberger World Musical Instrument Collection catalogue describe a practice in which a musician would play the alap, and sometimes the *jod* and *jhala* that follow it, on the surbahar, then set it down and pick up the sitar for the *gat*, the composed piece with tabla. The chandrakantha.com instrument page adds the acoustic reason for the switch: the surbahar's sustain is so long that a fast jhala on it turns indistinct.

So the two instruments were, for a time, two halves of one recital. That is a more useful way to hear the difference than "big sitar, small sitar".

Who invented it: three answers, none settled

This is where the archive has to be careful, because the sources disagree and each one sounds confident.

Ustad Imrat Khan held that his great-great-grandfather **Ustad Sahebdad Khan** — father of Ustad Imdad Khan, of the Imdadkhani or Etawah gharana — made the innovation. A second account credits **Ustad Ghulam Muhammad**, a Lucknow sitarist, working around 1825; the specialist site surbahars.com reports both and notes that recent research favours the second. Ragascape attributes that research to Allyn Miner's 1993 study of the sitar and sarod, though we have not read Miner's book directly and cite it here only as the attribution others make. A third version, again from Kasliwal, credits the *beenkar* Umrao Khan of Lucknow with building a large sitar to teach jod-alap to his students, and naming it surbahar.

Three attributions, two cities, one approximate decade. The honest position is that the instrument emerged in early nineteenth-century north India among musicians already thinking about how to bring veena repertoire onto a plucked lute, and that the individual name is not established.

The players

The surbahar has always been played by few people. Annapurna Devi, daughter and disciple of Allauddin Khan and trained in the Maihar tradition, is described as the only known woman to have mastered the instrument in the twentieth century; she performed in public very rarely, which is part of why her name is less familiar than her reputation among musicians. Imrat Khan, brother of Vilayat Khan, became its best-known modern exponent and carried it onto international stages. Pushparaj Koshti, who took his first surbahar training from his father Ramlal Koshti and later studied with Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, plays it within the Dagar dhrupad line — the older use of the instrument rather than the sitarist's use.

One recording to start with

Darbar's archive holds a performance by Irshad Khan of the Imdadkhani gharana, playing Raag Darbari on surbahar, recorded for Darbar on 4 April 2008 at the Phoenix in Leicester. Darbar's own note on it points to exactly the feature described above: the deep strings bending upward over an octave, letting the player trace the contours of the raag from a single fret. Listen for how long a single note is allowed to last, and how rarely the string is struck again.

For contrast, the same Darbar article carries Mita Nag of the Bishnupur gharana playing Raag Miyan Ki Malhar on sitar. The instruments are cousins; the sense of time is not.

Continue exploring

- Surbahar and sitar in the instruments directory - Annapurna Devi and Ustad Imrat Khan - The Imdadkhani (Etawah) gharana - The instrument she was told not to play: Jyoti Hegde and the rudra veena