Ustad Enayat Khan

Enayat Khan was born in 1894 in the North-Western Provinces of British India, the son of Ustad Imdad Khan, who taught him sitar and surbahar in the family manner known as the Imdadkhani or Etawah gharana. He married Bashiran Begum, daughter of the khayal singer Bande Hussain.

The family lived in Calcutta, where his father trained him and his brother Wahid Khan; between the two brothers the sitar went to Enayat and the surbahar to Wahid. After Imdad Khan's death at Indore in 1920, Enayat Khan returned to Calcutta and made his career there.

Bengal shaped the second half of his short career. Banglapedia records that he was engaged at twenty-eight as household musician to Birendra Kishore Raychowdhury, the zamindar of Gouripur, and that although he was not a Bengali he settled permanently at Gouripur, where he popularised the sitar-surbahar tradition developed by his father. He taught widely there and in Kolkata; among the students named are his patron Birendra Kishore Raychowdhury, Bimalakanta Raychowdhury, Birendra Mitra, Srinibas Nug, Jitendramohan Sengupta, Jyotishchandra Chowdhury, Dhrubatara Joshee, John Gomes and Renuka Saha. The same account describes him as at home in dhrupad, khayal and thumri as well as on his own instruments.

He died in 1938, aged forty-three. His sons Vilayat Khan and Imrat Khan continued the line, as did his grandson Rais Khan, and some of his recordings were later reissued on the Great Gharanas: Imdadkhani compilation in RPG/EMI's Chairman's Choice series.

He developed further the gayaki ang — the sitar line modelled on a singing voice — that he had received from his father, and he was known for rapid multi-stroke taan work that his own son is said to have deliberately left alone. He also changed the instrument: he standardised the sitar's dimensions and added the upper resonating gourd now common on concert instruments, though his own descendants have not used it.

The account kept by his descendants credits him with a distinct baaj: the jhala developed into an independent movement within raga exposition rather than a closing flourish, careful placement of tihais in the mukhda and in amad, a vocal model for taan patterns, and the surbahar established as an integral first half of a surbahar-and-sitar recital. That page also describes his particular role in drawing the Bengal aristocracy into music as students rather than only as patrons. It is a family source and is cited here as such.

Rabindranath Tagore was a musical collaborator and friend.