Ustad Wahid Khan

Wahid Khan was born in 1895 at Etawah in Uttar Pradesh, a son of Ustad Imdad Khan. He was still young when the family moved to Calcutta, where they lived in the house of the connoisseur Taraprasad Ghosh and where his father trained him and his brother Enayat Khan on sitar and surbahar. He was first taken through dhrupad, khayal and thumri, and then trained at length on the two instruments; he took the surbahar as his own while Enayat Khan took the sitar.

When Imdad Khan moved to Indore as court musician to the Maharaja Holkar, both sons went with him. After his father's death there in 1920, Wahid Khan was appointed court musician at Indore and held the post for eighteen years. He also served the Patiala court for three years and was a court musician to the Nizam of Hyderabad, and performed regularly on All India Radio. He appeared on the surbahar in a scene of Satyajit Ray's film Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958). He died at Calcutta; the year is not established in the sources read.

He was the surbahar specialist of his generation of the family, in a line that had done much to make the surbahar a concert instrument. His playing belongs to the slow, weighted, alap-centred idiom the instrument suits.