Ustad Imrat Khan

Imrat Khan was born in Calcutta on 17 November 1935, the younger son of the sitar and surbahar player Ustad Enayat Khan and grandson of Ustad Imdad Khan. His father died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his mother, Bashiran Begum, and her father, the singer Bande Hassan Khan, who gave him his first training in voice and surbahar. In 1944 the family moved to Bombay, where he and his elder brother Vilayat Khan studied sitar with their uncle Ustad Wahid Khan. The brothers settled together in Calcutta in 1952 and performed as a duo for many years, travelling in 1956 with the first Indian cultural delegation to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

From 1961 he performed and recorded on his own, on both sitar and surbahar, and toured widely in Europe, North America and Asia. He played at the Cannes Film Festival in 1970, and his music was used in films by Satyajit Ray and James Ivory. He taught at Dartington, at the Academy of Arts in Berlin and for many years at Washington University in St. Louis, where he lived for the last two decades of his life.

He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1988 and was named for the Padma Shri in 2017. He died in St. Louis on 22 November 2018, aged 83.

His work was centred on the surbahar, the bass sitar, which he treated as a full solo instrument rather than an introduction to the sitar. He carried the gayaki ang — the instrumental line modelled on the singing voice — that he had from his family, and was known for slow, deliberate alap and for rarer ragas. He kept to classical repertoire and declined fusion work.