Ustad Bundu Khan

Bundu Khan was born in Delhi in 1880 into a family of musicians, and began the sarangi at about eight with his father Ali Jan Khan. His principal teacher was his maternal uncle Mamman Khan, a noted sarangi and sursagar player who was also his father-in-law; Nicolas Magriel, who documented the sarangi world from the 1970s onward, adds his grandfather Sangi Khan among his teachers and notes that Mamman Khan was the eldest of Sangi Khan's four sons - that is, the family was itself the school.

He served as a court musician - Wikipedia records twenty-seven years at Indore, and Magriel adds Rampur - before becoming a staff artist at All India Radio in Delhi, where he played from the station's earliest days in the 1930s. He studied Sanskrit in order to read the older musical literature, and was a friend and informant of the musicologist V. N. Bhatkhande. He planned a twelve-volume encyclopaedia of Indian music but completed only the first volume, published in June 1934 as Jauhar-i-Mausiqi in Urdu and Sangeet Vivek Darpan in Hindi - a book Magriel describes as full of tans and eccentric pronouncements.

Very little of his playing survives. Magriel records two 78-rpm discs, including a Darbari and a Bhairavi, with further material issued on an LP by EMI Pakistan and a set of good-quality tapes held at Radio Pakistan; the writer Sheila Dhar's brother Rajesh Bahadur, a student of his, made an All India Radio National Programme about him in 1977. Though remembered chiefly as a soloist, he was also, in Magriel's judgement, an inspired accompanist.

Two documented students are named: Abdul Majeed Khan, who worked in Jhajjar, Delhi and Bombay, and Sagiruddin Khan of Delhi and Calcutta; something of the style carried on into Masit Khan's playing, Masit Khan having studied with Abdul Majeed Khan.

He emigrated to Pakistan a couple of years after Partition - Sheila Dhar's father arranged and paid for his passage - and lived in Karachi, playing on Pakistani radio until his death on 13 January 1955. His sons Umrao Bundu Khan and Bulund Iqbal Khan continued as musicians. Pakistan awarded him the Pride of Performance posthumously in 1985.

Accounts of his lineage differ: SwarGanga files him under the Delhi gharana, while Wikipedia describes his teacher Mamman Khan as belonging to the Patiala house. Magriel's account, which places Mamman Khan inside Bundu Khan's own Delhi family as the eldest son of his grandfather Sangi Khan, sits awkwardly with the Patiala attribution; we leave both on record.

His sound was deliberately dry. Magriel reports that he let the sympathetic strings of his sarangi break one by one without replacing them, preferring purity of tone to resonance, and that he usually strung the main playing string, the jil, in metal; he also played a bamboo sarangi. The result belongs to an era before the harmonium fixed intonation into equal steps, when drawing rasa out of the fine gradations between notes, the shrutis, was central to the music. His technique was unusual - playing every note with every finger, and rapid alternation of two fingers in any position, closer to sitar fingering than to standard sarangi practice - and Magriel learnt several of these devices from his relative Ustad Mohammed Ali Khan.

He is remembered too for an unusually deep grasp of vocal compositions and for a sensitivity to vocal nuance that later players - including Pandit Dhruba Ghosh - took from his recordings, notably his use of paltas, note-permutation exercises. A technique described as meendh soot ki sargam, in which the player shifts between notes within a recurring melodic line, is also credited to him.