Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan

Abdul Wahid Khan was born in 1871 at Kirana in Uttar Pradesh, a town settled by families of court musicians who had left Delhi after 1857. He learned vocal music and sarangi first from his father, Abdul Majid Khan, and at about the age of twelve moved to Kolhapur to study with Langde Haider Baksh Khan, a disciple of the beenkar Bande Ali Khan.

With his cousin Abdul Karim Khan — who had married his sister Ghafooran Bibi — he is named as a founder of the Kirana gharana in the late nineteenth century. The two families later fell out, when Abdul Karim Khan left Ghafooran Bibi and married his student Tarabai Mane. Abdul Wahid Khan's hearing was impaired, and he was known as Behre Wahid Khan.

He had been a prodigy of the Kolhapur court, unchallenged there after a public début at eighteen, but he had little appetite for court or concert life. Accounts of him describe a devout and reclusive existence, singing in the company of holy men and at the tombs of Sufi saints and appearing in public only occasionally. He forbade the recording of his performances, to prevent imitation. Three survive, of the ragas Patdip, Multani and Darbari Kanada, with Chatur Lal on tabla — a 1947 radio broadcast recorded without his knowledge by the producer Jivan Lal Mattoo, two years before his death, so that something of his singing would remain. He died in 1949 at Saharanpur.

Where he died is contested. Wikipedia gives Saharanpur, near Delhi, in 1949. Amal Das Sharma's Musicians of India, reproduced in the Rajan Parrikar archive, says instead that "he left Bombay and settled in Lahore, where he died in 1949". Both accounts agree on the year and on nothing else about the place; the archive records the disagreement rather than choosing.

Sharma also supplies the clearest description of the singing. Wahid Khan sang "with a full-throated voice and was an unparalleled alapiya", and developed what Sharma calls the Mirkhandi manner of alap — a slow permutational unfolding of the notes that he relates to the Khandameru, the swara-prastar-kriya of the older musicology, and finds "somewhat similar to that of Karnatak music". Amir Khan, Sharma notes, "though not his disciple, absorbed the individual characteristics of his style to such an extent that Waheed Khan was highly pleased and blessed him" — which is how the ati vilambit manner reached the next century without a teaching line to carry it.

The devotional life was not incidental to this. Sharma describes him as a devotee of Pir Hazrat Ali Nakki, from whom he sought approval for every engagement and performance before accepting it. The teaching, by contrast, was open-handed: Sharma names Begum Akhtar, Hirabai Barodekar, Pran Nath, Shaqur Khan and Sureshbabu Mane among those he trained.

He is credited with extending the raga recital from roughly twenty minutes to as much as an hour, an expansion of the slow khayal that he and Abdul Karim Khan developed together and that Amir Khan later cited in forming his own ati vilambit manner. The near-absence of recordings means his style is known mainly through his students, who included singers, a film music director and the sarangi player Ram Narayan.