Ustad Mushtaq Ali Khan

Mushtaq Ali Khan was born in Banaras in 1911, the son of Ustad Ashiq Ali Khan, who taught him sitar and surbahar from about the age of six. Ashiq Ali Khan had learned from Barkatullah Khan, a descendant of Masit Khan of Delhi, after whom the slow Masitkhani gat is named; through this line Mushtaq Ali Khan's music is described as belonging to the Senia tradition.

He served for a time as a court musician at Jaunpur before leaving to build an independent career. He began broadcasting for All India Radio in 1929 and performed at the Allahabad Sangeet Sammelan in 1931. Following the death of Enayat Khan and before the rise of Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan and Nikhil Banerjee in the mid-1950s, he was regarded as the foremost sitarist in the country.

He declined to adopt the innovations of his younger contemporaries, and his public standing gradually narrowed even as his reputation among musicians remained very high; at his death in 1989 he was often called a musicians' musician. He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1968. His disciples include Pandit Debu Chaudhuri, who founded a centre in Delhi to continue his teaching.

His playing was deliberately spare. He avoided much of the ornamentation common in modern sitar technique, building his alap along dhrupad lines and drawing his jod and jhala from rudra veena practice. Although he descended musically from Masit Khan, he rarely played Masitkhani gats in public, preferring the faster Razakhani gats — by his own account because he did not wish to see the slower form devalued before inattentive audiences. On the surbahar he used a been-ang approach with three mizrabs.