Ustad Rashid Khan

Rashid Khan was born on 1 July 1968 at Sahaswan in Budaun district, a great-grandson of Ustad Inayat Hussain Khan, who founded the Rampur-Sahaswan gharana.

As a child he showed little interest in music. His uncle, Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan, noticed his ability and taught him briefly in Bombay, but his real training came from his maternal grand-uncle Ustad Nissar Hussain Khan — a hard taskmaster who had him at swara practice from four in the morning and on single notes for hours at a stretch.

He gave his first concert at about eleven and sang at an ITC event in Delhi in 1978. In April 1980, when Nissar Hussain Khan moved to the ITC Sangeet Research Academy in Calcutta, the fourteen-year-old went with him. He was recognised as a musician of the academy in 1994 and taught there in the following years.

He built an audience unusually large for a classical singer, performing heavily through the 1990s and 2000s, and worked outside the classical concert too — the Sufi fusion album Naina Piya Se, collaborations with the pianist Louis Banks, jugalbandis with Shahid Parvez, and playback singing for Hindi films.

He was made Padma Shri in 2006, the same year as his Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, and Padma Bhushan in 2022. He died in Kolkata on 9 January 2024, aged fifty-five, after a long illness.

Rashid Khan's signature was the slow khayal. Where much of the concert world had drifted toward shorter, faster expositions, he would hold a vilambit composition open for forty minutes or more, turning over a single phrase until it gave way, and only then moving on. The Rampur-Sahaswan training behind that — full-throated production, medium-slow tempo, exact sargam work — gave him the resources to sustain it.

He was also a fine singer of tarana, delivering it in a vocal rather than an instrumental manner, and he spoke of emotional content as the point of the exercise rather than a by-product of technique. He acknowledged Amir Khan and Bhimsen Joshi as influences without imitating either. What he did more than any contemporary was carry the full-length classical khayal to listeners who had never intended to sit through one.