Ustad Imdad Khan

Imdad Khan was born in 1848 at Agra, the fourth generation of a family of musicians that soon moved to Etawah, the small town outside Agra that later gave the gharana one of its two names. He was taught by his father, Sahabdad Khan, a trained vocalist and self-taught sitar player, and also received training from the beenkar Bande Ali Khan.

The instrumental music of northern India in his lifetime was dominated by the Senia manner, descended from Tansen's line and rooted in dhrupad. Imdad Khan turned instead to khayal as his model, and built a sitar style on the phrasing of a singing voice. Accounts of his youth at Etawah describe a period of some twelve years of secluded practice; when the family later moved to Calcutta they named the house Riyaz, for practice.

He was widely known in his lifetime, served as a court musician at Mysore and at Indore, and was the first sitar player anywhere to be commercially recorded — discs cut in the first decade of the twentieth century. He died in 1920. The line he founded has been continuous since: his sons Enayat Khan and Wahid Khan, his grandsons Vilayat Khan and Imrat Khan, and a fourth and fifth generation including Shahid Parvez Khan, Shujaat Khan and Nishat Khan.

Michael Kinnear's Etawah discography fills in the working life behind those dates. Imdad Khan was a staff musician to Maharaja Sir Jotindra Mohan Tagore in Calcutta and lived in the city for some twenty-five years; he then spent a period in Delhi, entered the service of the Mysore Durbar by 1910, and moved on to Indore, where he remained until his death. The first recordings were taken at Calcutta in late 1904 by the Gramophone & Typewriter recording expert William Sinkler Darby and issued in 1905; further titles were arranged in August 1910 by George Dillnutt, who found him at Mysore at the request of the Maharaja, Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV. Nine of those 1905 and 1910 sides were transferred from the original shellac and reissued by EMI in 1994 in the Chairman's Choice series as Great Gharanas – Imdadkhani.

Darbar records the family account of his practice: a chilla, the ritual forty-day sealed practice retreat, which in his case is said to have been sustained in some form for about twelve years. He was married to Bendo Bibi; besides Enayat Khan (1894–1938) and Wahid Khan (1895–1961) they had four daughters.

The gharana's identifying idea — an instrumental line modelled on the khayal voice, later named the gayaki ang — begins with him. He and his descendants also altered the instruments themselves, and the development of the surbahar as a concert instrument belongs to this lineage. His sons divided the family's two instruments between them: Enayat Khan took the sitar, Wahid Khan the surbahar.