Ustad Natthu Khan

Natthu Khan came from the branch of the Delhi tabla gharana descended through a daughter of Bugara Khan, who married Makkhu Khan. James Kippen's genealogy, collected in Delhi in 1984 from Inam Ali Khan and Munnu Khan, traces the line Makkhu Khan – Bare Kale Khan – Wali Bakhsh Khan – Natthu Khan. Sudhir Kumar Misra's Art and Science of Playing Tabla gives a slightly different chain, making him the grandson of Bade Kale Khan through Boli Bakhsh. Both versions place him outside the direct Sudhar Khan–Chote Khan–Gamay Khan descent while keeping him firmly inside the Delhi family; the disagreement over the intervening generation is recorded rather than smoothed over.

He was connected by marriage to the other Delhi branch: Wali Bakhsh Khan's daughter married Gamay Khan (1883–1958), so the two leading Delhi players of the period were brothers-in-law. Some later summaries describe Natthu Khan as Gamay Khan's father-in-law instead. The two accounts cannot both be right, and the family relation as given by Kippen's informants is the better attested.

Misra describes his playing as dexterous and melodious, and writes that he attracted listeners easily; he died in 1940 at the age of sixty-five. His influence ran into the next generation: Misra names Habibuddin Khan, the great Ajrada player, among his disciples, and Kippen's informants treated Natthu Khan and Gamay Khan together as the two Delhi masters of recent memory.

A short recording of Natthu Khan playing the Delhi peshkar — the introductory composition of a solo recital, which opens out into the qaida — was published by the tabla player and historian Aneesh Pradhan in a 2016 Scroll.in feature on Delhi gharana masters. It is the earliest recorded example of the gharana's playing that this archive has been able to identify, and it is linked from the sources below rather than embedded here.

James Kippen has published a close reading of that recording, made in the mid to late 1930s, only a few years before Natthu Khan died. Rebecca Stewart, in her unpublished 1974 dissertation The Tabla in Perspective, held that Natthu Khan was chiefly responsible for popularising the Delhi peshkar and qaida, and older musicians still identify the theme on this record as "Natthu Khan's peshkar". Kippen notes that he takes it at about a hundred beats to the minute — brisk by later standards, when peshkar is played at roughly half that speed — and that he makes no attempt at the bipartite khali-bhari structure modern players expect, though he keeps the khali of tintal itself. Part way through he moves into what is now a famous Delhi qaida, "dha ti dha ge na dha tira kita", and later stacks a triple-time gat on top of it, ending the hundred-and-ten-second performance with a plain tihai. Kippen reads the result as peshkar and qaida with porous boundaries, ordered but not systematically developed — closer to his contemporary Ahmedjan Thirakwa's practice than to the incremental improvisation later advocated by Inam Ali Khan.

One photograph of him is known: a small, worn image given to Kippen by Mr Ishtiyaq Ahmad Qureshi of Pune and published on Kippen's tabla pages in the 2000s. It survives only at thumbnail size, about 100 by 125 pixels, and carries no photographer or terms of reuse, so it is recorded here as a candidate for rights review rather than shown.

The Delhi bandh baaj, described by Misra as dexterous and notably melodious in effect; the surviving recording is of peshkar, the form that opens a Delhi solo.