Ustad Gamay Khan

Gamay Khan (1883–1958), whose name is also written Gami, Gameh and Garni Khan, stood at the centre of the Delhi tabla gharana for the first half of the twentieth century. Writers on the tradition — including the ethnomusicologist James Kippen, whose account of the lineage rests on 1984 interviews with Gamay Khan's son Inam Ali Khan and brother Munnu Khan — describe him and Natthu Khan as the two Delhi greats of recent times.

He was born into the hereditary tabla family that traces itself to Sudhar (or Sidhar) Khan Dhari, the earliest tabla player the gharana names, in the first half of the eighteenth century. Sources differ on his immediate parentage: Kippen's informants gave his father as Chote Khan, son of Muhammad Khan and grandson of Shitab Ali Khan, while Sudhir Kumar Misra's Art and Science of Playing Tabla names Kale Khan as the father of Gamay and Munnu Khan. Both accounts place him in the same descent from Sudhar Khan; the discrepancy is recorded here rather than resolved.

His marriage tied the two living branches of the Delhi lineage together. Kippen records that he married a daughter of Wali Bakhsh Khan, whose son was Natthu Khan (1875–1940) — which would make Natthu Khan his brother-in-law. A widely reproduced encyclopaedia entry instead calls Natthu Khan his father-in-law. The two statements are compatible only in the loose sense that the marriage was into Natthu Khan's immediate family; the relation as given by Kippen's informants is the better attested.

As khalifa he was the tradition's principal teacher. His son Inam Ali Khan (1924–1990), who succeeded him as head of the gharana, learned entirely from him and from Munnu Khan. Latif Ahmed Khan began his training under Gamay Khan in about 1953 and, after the Ustad's death in 1958, continued with Munnu Khan and Inam Ali Khan. Misra also names Fakir Mohammad, Mohammad Ahmed, Hira Lal and Gladwin Charles among his disciples; the Hira Lal line in turn passed to Prem Kumar, Sadi Ram and Chandra Mohan, with several of its students later settling in Pakistan.

What he transmitted was the Delhi bandh or "closed" baaj — playing concentrated on the chanti or rim of the daya, a two-finger technique, and a repertoire built on peshkar, qaida and rela whose qaida corpus is treated across the other gharanas as the model of the form. No commercially issued solo recording of Gamay Khan has been located for this archive; his playing is known chiefly through the recorded work of Inam Ali Khan and Latif Ahmed Khan.

Delhi bandh baaj: strokes concentrated on the chanti (rim), closed and articulate rather than resonant, with the qaida-rela-peshkar repertoire at its core.