Ustad Ahmed Jan Thirakwa

Ahmed Jan Khan, known everywhere as Thirakwa, was born in Moradabad into a family of musicians. Sources disagree about the year: Wikipedia and Darbar give 1892, while the Rajan Parrikar Music Archive records 1891. Obituary writing that calls him "a near-centenarian" is hard to reconcile with either date, and the archive leaves the disagreement standing rather than choosing for you.

He came to the tabla sideways. His first lessons were in vocal music, and his father Hussain Bakhsh — a well-known sarangi player, as was his elder brother Mia Jan — taught him sarangi before concluding the tabla suited him better. He studied first with his uncles Sher Khan, Faiyaz Khan and Baswa Khan, and then, from about the age of twelve, was taken to Bombay and placed with Ustad Munir Khan of the Farrukhabad–Laliyana lineage. That tutelage is usually described as lasting twenty-five years, sustained by practice sometimes put at sixteen hours a day. The name "Thirakwa" was not his own: it came from his guru's father, Kale Khan, for the way his fingers seemed to dance.

He made his debut around sixteen in Khetwadi, Bombay, toured with Bal Gandharva's theatre company, and in 1936 was appointed a court musician at Rampur, a position he is said to have held for some thirty years. The court years put him in daily contact with vocalists and instrumentalists of the Agra, Jaipur, Gwalior and Patiala gharanas. He accompanied four generations of performers — among them Imdad Khan, Rajab Ali Khan, Mushtaq Hussain Khan, Bhaskarbuva Bakhale, Allauddin Khan, Hafiz Ali Khan and, much later, Rais Khan.

When princely patronage ended he moved into institutional teaching: a professorship at Bhatkhande Music College in Lucknow, where he became head of faculty and professor emeritus, and later visiting professor at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Bombay, where he was also the inspiration behind Pandit Nikhil Ghosh's school of music. Disciples named in published accounts include Nikhil Ghosh, Lalji Gokhale, Bhai Gaitonde and Rashid Mustafa.

He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1954 and the Padma Bhushan in 1970. He had returned from Bombay to Lucknow, the city he had said he would never leave, when he collapsed in a rickshaw on the way to Charbagh station on 13 January 1976 and died.

Thirakwa is credited with helping move the tabla out of the accompanist's seat and onto the concert platform as a solo instrument — a shift that shaped every tabla recital that followed. He was equally regarded in sangat, and contemporaries wrote about the two halves of his work as though they were one skill.

He is usually placed among the leading exponents of the Farrukhabad khula baaj, the open, resonant style whose strokes are allowed to ring. But because Munir Khan had gathered material from more than one lineage, Thirakwa carried several traditions at once, and is commonly described as commanding the repertoires of Delhi, Ajrada, Lucknow and Farrukhabad rather than a single house style.

His own view of the map was narrower than the textbook one. In a filmed interview from the mid-1960s he told his interviewer that there were essentially two gharanas — Purab, covering Lucknow and Farrukhabad, and Delhi — and declined to treat Punjab as a tabla gharana at all, calling it a pakhawaj tradition. That opinion is not the consensus today, and is recorded here as his, not as fact.

Little of his playing survives in authorised digital form, which is itself part of the story of how Indian classical recordings were kept — and not kept — in the twentieth century.