Sharan Rani

She was born Sharan Rani Mathur on 9 April 1929 in the walled city of Old Delhi, into a conservative Hindu family of businessmen and educationists with no musicians in it. She learned the sarod as a girl from Ustad Allauddin Khan and his son Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, against considerable family opposition: at that time a musical career belonged either to hereditary gharana families or, in the public mind, to courtesans, and not to the daughter of a respectable household. She also studied Kathak with Achhan Maharaj and Manipuri dance with Nabha Kumar Sinha, and took an M.A. at Delhi University in 1953.

She began giving recitals in the late 1930s and continued for some seven decades. She was among the first Indian musicians to record for UNESCO and to release records with major companies in the United States, Britain and France, and among the earliest artists of All India Radio and Doordarshan. Nehru called her India's cultural ambassador; she was widely known as Sarod Rani.

She taught in the guru–shishya manner and never charged a fee, with students living in her house for years at a time. In 1992 she published a history of her instrument, The Divine Sarod: Its Origin, Antiquity and Development, with a second edition in 2008. Her collection of 379 instruments, dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, was given to the National Museum in New Delhi, where it is displayed as the Sharan Rani Backliwal Gallery of Musical Instruments. She died on 8 April 2008, the day before her seventy-ninth birthday.

She belonged to the Maihar-Senia gharana through Allauddin Khan, and was the first woman to take up the sarod as a concert instrument and the first Indian woman instrumentalist to win an international following. Concerned that the dhrupad tradition was fading, she had some of her recitals accompanied by pakhawaj as well as tabla. Yehudi Menuhin wrote that he hastened "to add my voice to the many admiring and grateful ones which would try to express the love and respect we feel for this great artiste", and Zakir Husain, the President of India, said she had "achieved perfection in music". She was made Padma Shri in 1968 and later Padma Bhushan, and received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award, the Delhi government's Sahitya Kala Parishad award and the Rajiv Gandhi National Excellence award; the government also gave her the title National Artist. In 1998 India Post issued a set of four postage stamps showing instruments from her gallery. She died at her Delhi home on the morning of 8 April 2008 after some time with cancer, a day before her birthday, survived by her husband, the businessman Sultan Singh Backliwal, and their daughter Radhika.

Concerned that the dhrupad inheritance in instrumental music was thinning out, she sometimes had her recitals accompanied by pakhawaj as well as tabla — an unusual choice for a sarod soloist of her generation, and a deliberate one.