Pandit Ram Sahai

Ram Sahai was born in 1780 in Kashi, now Varanasi, into a family with roots in Gopalpur village in Jaunpur; his father Prakash Sahai and grandfather Siya Sahai were musicians, and an uncle, Prayag Sahai, served at the court of the Nawab of Ayodhya and later in Lucknow. His siblings Janki, Gauri and Ishwari Sahai were kathak dancers, which places the family squarely in the performing world of the city rather than in tabla alone.

He began tabla with his father at about five. At nine he was sent to Lucknow as a disciple of Modhu Khan of the Lucknow gharana. Sources disagree on the teacher's name: the Wikipedia account and Shawn Mativetsky's Benares lineage page both give Modhu Khan, while Aneesh Pradhan, writing for Scroll.in, records the teacher as Makkhu Khan and notes that some accounts place Ram Sahai in a different Lucknow lineage altogether. The disagreement is about the name, not about the Lucknow training.

The story every account repeats is his court debut. Wazir Ali Khan, newly installed as Nawab, asked to hear him; Modhu Khan agreed on condition that the young player not be interrupted. Ram Sahai is said to have played for seven consecutive nights. His age at the time is given as seventeen in most retellings and as twenty-one in the sleeve notes to Pandit Sharda Sahai's recording The Art of the Benares Baj, reproduced on Mativetsky's page.

He returned to Benares, and after a period of performing there withdrew into roughly six months of seclusion to rebuild his playing. What emerged was a style conceived around versatility: one hand capable of a full solo recital, of the softness khayal singing needs, and of the heavier attack that dhrupad and kathak dance call for. The technical centre of the change was the Na stroke, played with a curved ring finger on the dahina so that the drum rings for as long as possible — still the audible signature of a Benares player.

Ram Sahai composed extensively in the established forms — gat, tukra, paran — and is credited with introducing forms now specific to this gharana: the uthan (an opening piece), the Benarsi theka, and the fard. He died in 1826, in his mid-forties.

The tradition continued through his family, including his son Bhairav Sahai, and through teaching lines that reached beyond it. Later summaries describe two branches — a family or "pure Benares" line, and a line shaped by Kanthe Maharaj that became closely tied to kathak accompaniment. Family descent and teaching succession are not the same thing here, and the gharana's best-known twentieth-century soloists, among them Anokhelal Mishra, Samta Prasad and Kishan Maharaj, entered it as students rather than as relatives.

The sleeve notes to Pandit Sharda Sahai's The Art of the Benares Baj, by Bob Becker, Neil Craig and Dr Frances Shepherd, fill in what the new style actually changed. Ram Sahai's teacher Modhu Khan is described there as a grandson of Sidhar Khan of Delhi and a musician at the court of Nawab Asafuddaula, and the apprenticeship as lasting twelve years — long enough to carry away both a large repertoire and the art of improvising at length on a given theme. The style he built afterwards rested on the position of the hand on the drum and a more efficient use of the fingers, above all a curved ring finger for the stroke Na so that the dahina rings freely. To the existing forms he added compositions of his own and new types altogether: the uthan, the Benarsi theka and the fard. The aim was breadth — a baj delicate enough for khyal and weighty enough to stand in for the pakhawaj behind dhrupad and kathak.

His teaching passed down inside the family. Frances Shepherd's account, given on Shawn Mativetsky's lineage page, records that when Ram Sahai fell ill he handed his disciples to his brother Janaki Sahai and went on teaching only the five-year-old Bhairav Sahai, who after his death completed his training with Janaki. The relationship is recorded differently in different places — the Becker notes list Bhairav Sahai as his son, Shepherd as his nephew, the son of another brother, Gaori Sahai — and both readings are left standing here.

The Benares baaj as Ram Sahai left it is an open, resonant style. The Na is taken with a curved ring finger on the lao so the right drum rings; Din is similarly favoured; runs that Delhi players take with alternating single fingers are often played full-handed, which gives the phrase more body. Solo playing is unusually developed, drawing on more than twenty compositional types, several of which — uthan, Benarsi theka, fard — are attributed to him directly.