Annapurna Devi

She was born Roshanara Khan at Maihar in 1927 — the exact day is disputed in the sources — the daughter of Ustad Allauddin Khan and Madan Manjari, and the sister of Ali Akbar Khan. The Maharaja of Maihar gave her the name Annapurna; she took it formally on her marriage.

Her father was her only teacher. She began with voice, moved to sitar after a tonsillectomy affected her singing, and finally to the surbahar, the bass sitar, on which Allauddin Khan passed her the Wazirkhani beenkari repertoire he had received from Ustad Wazir Khan of Rampur.

In 1941 she married Ravi Shankar, a fellow pupil at Maihar. Their son Shubhendra was born the following year. Between 1946 and 1957 she performed surbahar and sitar duets with her husband in Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta, and by all accounts was formidable. Then she stopped. They separated in the 1960s and divorced in 1982; she married Rooshikumar Pandya later that year.

From then on she refused to perform in public and refused to be recorded. She held that taking money for the music would be selling Saraswati. She taught instead, briefly at the National Centre for the Performing Arts and thereafter from her flat in Mumbai, without fees, to a small number of students at a time.

She died in Mumbai on 13 October 2018, aged ninety-one. Almost no recordings of her playing exist.

In 2015 she founded the Annapurna Devi Foundation, a registered private trust. Its stated objects include supporting musicians in need, preserving the musical heritage of the Maihar Senia gharana and commemorating the work of her father and guru, Allauddin Khan. Her disciple the flautist Nityanand Haldipur is its managing trustee.

Her year of birth and her mother's name both differ between the family's own account and the published record. The Annapurna Devi Foundation's biography states that she "was born in 1926 at Maihar" to Allauddin Khan and Madan Manjari; The Hindu's obituary and Wikipedia give 1927, and The Hindu names her mother Madina Begum. The naming is less disputed: the Foundation records that she was named Annapurna, after the goddess of plenty, by Maharaja Brijnath Singh of Maihar.

The Foundation also explains why she was very nearly not taught at all. Her elder sister Jahanara, married into a family hostile to music, was abused for continuing with it and died in her mother's arms ten months into the marriage; the loss made Allauddin Khan wary of teaching another daughter. The decision was reversed by accident. Returning home one day, he heard Annapurna — five years younger than Ali Akbar, and not formally initiated — correcting her brother's practice from outside the room. Baba, an exacting teacher by every account, came to liken her to the embodiment of Saraswati.

That she taught rather than performed is the fact most often repeated about her, and the Foundation's account of her father's teaching explains what she was holding: the Maihar method produced Ali Akbar Khan on sarod, Ravi Shankar on sitar, Pannalal Ghosh on flute, Nikhil Banerjee on sitar and V. G. Jog on violin, and she carried the surbahar line of it out of public hearing and into her students.

What Annapurna Devi preserved was a way of playing rather than a body of recordings. The Wazirkhani beenkari style she held is dhrupad in origin — slow, unhurried, weighted toward the alaap and the lower register, and rooted in the been rather than in the sitar's later, more brilliant idiom. The surbahar is the instrument that suits it, and she was the only woman of her century known to have mastered it.

Her contribution was made through her students. Nikhil Banerjee, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Aashish Khan, Bahadur Khan, Nityanand Haldipur and others carried her father's teaching out into the world in her place. She is, in that sense, audible in a great deal of twentieth-century Hindustani music and present in none of it under her own name.