Pandit Ram Narayan

Ram Narayan was born on 25 December 1927 near Udaipur, in the princely state of Mewar, into a family of musicians. He began on the sarangi as a child under his father, Nathuji Biawat, and later studied with the dhrupad singer Uday Lal and the khayal singer Madhav Prasad.

In 1944 he joined All India Radio in Lahore as an accompanist, a post that placed him behind many of the leading vocalists of the day. The Partition of 1947 took him to Delhi, and afterwards to Bombay, where he worked as a studio musician for the film industry while continuing to play classical music.

The sarangi at that time was understood as an accompanying instrument, and one carrying a social stigma from its long association with the courtesan tradition. In 1956 Narayan stopped accompanying altogether and set out as a soloist. The decision was regarded within the profession as reckless.

It worked. He built a solo repertoire and a technique to support it, and from the 1960s toured Europe and America, where audiences heard the instrument on its own for the first time. Recordings followed, and with them a generation of younger sarangi players who could imagine a career on the concert platform.

He taught throughout his later years; his son Brij Narayan plays sarod, his daughter Aruna Narayan and grandson Harsh Narayan the sarangi. He died in Mumbai on 9 November 2024, aged ninety-six.

Narayan's achievement was less a matter of invention than of proof. The sarangi, bowed and fretless, is the instrument closest to the human voice, and precisely for that reason had been kept in a supporting role. He showed that it could carry the full arc of a raga alone.

To do that he reworked the fingering and bowing the instrument had used for accompaniment, finding ways to sustain the long unmetered lines of alaap and to shape a solo development that did not lean on a singer. In doing so he also helped lift the social stigma the sarangi had carried, and made it possible for the next generation to be heard as soloists in their own right.