Hindustani music is taught person to person. Browse the traditions by voice, instrument or place, and open one to read who is documented within it.
The names of these traditions — gharana, bani, teaching line, regional style — describe different things, and each entry says which it is. Where a teaching link is shown, a sentence in a named source supports it. Where it is not, we say so, and the claim stays unpublished.
This is growing research rather than a complete map. Not every instrument organises itself into gharanas, many musicians here do not yet have a page of their own, and dates, founders and teaching links are left out wherever a source has not yet settled them. Additions are read by an editor before they appear. Carnatic traditions are a later phase.
5 traditions
Places recorded with a source: where a tradition grew, and the later centres it moved to. A musician's current home is never used.
The oldest surviving layer: dhrupad singing, the rudra veena that shadows it, and the pakhawaj that keeps its time. These pass down as banis and family lines rather than as city-named houses.
gharana · Rudra veena, Dhrupad
The rudra veena players of the Rajput courts, whose teaching later fed into Rampur and into several twentieth-century instrumental lines.
Jaipur, Alwar, Rajasthan · 2 musicians documented
bani · Dhrupad vocal, Rudra veena
The best known surviving dhrupad line: long, slow alap in which the raga is built note by note, sung and played on the rudra veena.
Jaipur, Udaipur, Mewar · 11 musicians documented
Sitar, sarod, bansuri, sarangi, shehnai, santoor, violin and harmonium. Some are full gharanas with their own baaj; others are teaching lines, where the transmission is documented but no house name is claimed.
teaching lineage · Sarangi
The sarangi grew up accompanying singers, and its teaching lines follow those households rather than one founding name. Solo sarangi is a twentieth-century development.
Delhi, Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh · 7 musicians documented
teaching lineage · Sitar, Surbahar
The older, dhrupad-leaning sitar line behind the Masitkhani gat: slow, weighty compositions and a plectrum style kept apart from the dominant twentieth-century schools.
Delhi, Jaipur · 6 musicians documented
Drumming lineages, each with its own bols, hand technique and solo repertoire. A city name here belongs to a tabla line, not to the vocal gharana of the same town.
gharana · Tabla
The oldest tabla gharana and the source of the others: a closed, two-finger technique and a repertoire built for delicate accompaniment.
Delhi · 5 musicians documented