Ustad Sultan Khan

Sultan Khan was born in 1940 into a family of hereditary Muslim musicians from Sikar in northern Rajasthan, who had performed at the courts of Rajput princes. Sources differ on the details: The Guardian gives his birthplace as "Sikhar, near Jodhpur", Wikipedia and most Indian obituaries say Jodhpur, and sarangi.net gives his dates as 1941-2011 rather than 1940-2011. His father, Ustad Gulab Khan, was his first and principal teacher in both voice and sarangi; he also learnt from his uncle, the sarangi player Azim Khan. He is said to have played before the All India Music Conference at the age of eleven.

His professional career began at the All India Radio station in Rajkot, Gujarat, where he worked for about eight years. According to The Guardian, his break came when Lata Mangeshkar visited Rajkot and asked him to accompany her; he then moved to Bombay and worked in film soundtracks alongside his concert career. He was also a trained khayal singer and sang in public, and his 1994 vocal album Sabras was widely liked; his reputation as a singer was such that some listeners assumed he was a vocalist who also played.

Abroad he became one of the best-known Indian instrumentalists of his generation. He toured with Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Alla Rakha, including the 1974 Dark Horse tour with George Harrison, and played the sarangi passages in Ravi Shankar's score for Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982), heard in the assassination and funeral scenes. With Zakir Hussain and the producer Bill Laswell he was a founding member of the fusion group Tabla Beat Science. He played at Buckingham Palace in 1997 and at a Sufi music festival at the White House in 1998.

He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award twice - unusual - and the Padma Bhushan in 2010. He died of kidney failure on 27 November 2011, aged seventy-one; obituaries differ on whether he died in Mumbai or in a hospital in Jodhpur. His son Sabir Khan continues the family's sarangi playing.

The sarangi is bowed and fretless, and for most of its history it sat beside a singer rather than in front of an audience. Sultan Khan was central to changing that: obituaries credit him with helping the instrument be accepted as a solo concert instrument in its own right. Even so, The Guardian noted that when he accompanied a well-known vocalist he was careful to remain exactly that, an accompanist.

His playing carried the gayaki manner into the bowing - wide gamaks, notes approached in a circling motion rather than struck, and long unhurried barhat in slow khayal - an approach the sarangi player and scholar Nicolas Magriel traced in part to his listening to Ustad Amir Khan. Magriel also describes traits he shared with other Sikar-gharana players: a thick, vocal tone produced by setting the strings very high, so that they are stopped with the skin above the nails rather than with the nails themselves, and robust arm movement in place of finger work. Alongside that he was among the first Indian classical musicians to work seriously in electronic and global fusion contexts, which put the sarangi in front of listeners who had never heard one.