Ustad Allauddin Khan

His birth year is genuinely unsettled. Sources give 1862, 1869, 1871 and 1881; the weight of evidence favours around 1881, in Shibpur village in the Brahmanbaria district of East Bengal. His father, known as Sadhu Khan, was an amateur sitarist and a maternal uncle of Ustad Wazir Khan of Rampur — a family connection that mattered a great deal later.

He left home at about eight with a travelling jatra troupe and reached Calcutta in his teens. There the vocalist Gopal Chandra Bhattacharya, known as Nulo Gopal, took him on and taught him for some seven years until his death. Khan then turned to instruments, studying for a further seven years with Amritlal Dutta (Habu Dutta), and taking lessons in violin and Western notation, in shehnai, and in mridangam, pakhawaj and tabla from other teachers in the city.

Hearing Ustad Ahmad Ali Khan play Todi, he asked to become his disciple, and served him for four years. The two later travelled to Rampur, where Khan sought out the beenkar Ustad Wazir Khan. He waited six fruitless months at the palace gates before a petition reached Nawab Hamid Ali Khan, whose interest secured him an audition and then a formal nara ceremony. Wazir Khan accepted him on the condition that he learn sarod, rabab and sursringar only — the been was reserved for the family — and that he never teach the repertoire to courtesans.

Around 1918 he became court musician and personal tutor to Maharaja Brijnath Singh of Maihar State. Refusing a salary for teaching, he was granted land instead. He lived at Madina Bhavan in Maihar from 1918 until his death, and it was there that the teaching for which he is remembered took place: students lived with him, were forbidden to hear outside music or to perform, and were held to a discipline his own pupils described as merciless. He taught largely by singing a phrase and expecting it back instantly on the student's instrument, and he shaped each student differently — he deliberately kept Nikhil Banerjee's training away from anything that would make him sound like Ravi Shankar.

He died on 6 September 1972 at Maihar.

Khan carried into the sarod and the sitar what belonged to the been, the rabab, the sursringar and the surbahar: sustained meend, long linear tans, weight in the lower register. Before him, instrumental playing leaned heavily on right-hand stroke patterns. He rebuilt the sarod itself, giving it fifteen sympathetic strings, four lower and five upper strings, all five melody strings fully playable, and a deep brass string for the bass-heavy ragas; he added a thick kharaj string to the sitar for the low Sa.

He composed new ragas — Hemant, Hem-Bihag, Haimanti, Manj-Khamaj and Madan-Manjari, named for his wife. In 1918 he formed the Maihar Band from children orphaned in the influenza epidemic, inventing instruments for them, among them the nal tarang made from gun barrels and the chandra sarang played with a bow. In 1935 he toured Europe with Uday Shankar's troupe.