Vilayat Khan: The Sitar That Learned to Sing
In 1964 the government of India offered him the Padma Shri. He refused it. In 1968 it offered the Padma Bhushan; he refused that too, on the grounds that the awards committee was "musically incompetent to judge him." When the Padma Vibhushan arrived in 2000 he called it an insult, objecting that junior and less deserving sitar players had been decorated ahead of him. The only titles Ustad Vilayat Khan kept were the ones that arrived without a committee attached: Bharat Sitar Samrat, from the Artistes Association of India, and Aftab-e-Sitar — Sun of the Sitar — conferred by President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed.
The Sixth Generation
He was born on 28 August 1928 at Gouripur in Mymensingh, then East Bengal, now Bangladesh, into a family that had been making music professionally for six generations, a line the Imdadkhani gharana — also called the Etawah gharana — traced back to the Mughal era. His grandfather Imdad Khan was a leading sitarist. His father Enayat Khan was a master of both sitar and surbahar, the bass sitar on which the slow, meditative alap unfolds. His uncle Wahid Khan played the same pair of instruments. On his mother's side the inheritance was vocal: his maternal grandfather Bande Hassan Khan was a singer, and his mother Bashiran Begum sang. The household also carried a submerged Hindu ancestry — the family had once borne the name Nath Singh, and Vilayat used Nath Piya as a composer's pen name and acknowledged the Rajput name Kahan Singh as his own.
An Orphan at Ten
Enayat Khan died when his son was ten, and the boy who might have grown up in his father's shadow instead had to be assembled by the rest of the family. Wahid Khan took over the instrumental instruction; his mother, his maternal grandfather and his maternal uncle Zinde Hussain supplied the rest. Vilayat's own instinct was to sing. It was his mother who steered him back to the sitar, on the argument that the family legacy had to be carried by someone. He had already cut a 78-rpm disc at the age of eight, for the Megaphone Company. He practised, by his own account, eight to fourteen hours a day.
Making the Wire Sing
The idea that would define him was that a plucked string should behave like a throat. Hindustani vocal music lives in the connective tissue between notes — the slides, the ornaments, the melisma — and a plucked instrument, which produces a sound and then watches it die, is badly equipped to reproduce any of it. Vilayat Khan's answer was to work almost entirely on what happens *after* the pluck. He developed a left-hand technique that pulled the string sideways across the fret to bend a single strike into a whole phrase, sustaining and shaping the note long past the point where it should have decayed, and he imported the fast decorative *murki*-s of khayal singing onto the fingerboard. The approach is called *gayaki ang*, the singing style, and while it was a family project — Imdad Khan, Enayat Khan and Vilayat's younger brother Imrat Khan all contributed — it was Vilayat who took it furthest and whose after-effects every later sitarist absorbed. He had, in the phrase used of him, transformed his instrument to resemble the human voice.
Remaking the Instrument
A new technique needs new hardware. Through the 1950s he worked with the Calcutta sitar makers Kanailal and Hiren Roy on modifications to the instrument itself, and he was bold enough to perform without the tanpura drone that virtually every Hindustani recital rests on. He was equally free with the repertoire. He re-read established ragas such as Bhankar and Jaijaivanti and gave hard, personal readings of the great standards — Yaman, Shree, Todi, Darbari, Bhairavi. He also composed new ragas outright, among them Enayatkhani Kanada, Sanjh Saravali, Kalavanti and Mand Bhairav.
Sixty-Five Years on Stage
His first concert, at the All Bengal Music Conference in Kolkata, put him beside the formidable tabla player Ahmed Jan Thirakwa. A 1944 appearance at Mumbai's Vikramaditya Sangeet Parishad earned the headline "Electrifying Sitar." In 1951 he became, in all likelihood, the first Indian musician to perform in England after independence, and he spent the next half-century touring South Asia, China, Africa, Europe and the Soviet Union. He recorded for more than sixty-five years, from the childhood 78 to an ambitious and sometimes wilfully eccentric CD series for India Archive Music in New York in the 1990s. He wrote for the cinema too: Satyajit Ray's *Jalsaghar* (1958), which took a Silver Medal at the first Moscow International Film Festival; Merchant-Ivory's *The Guru* (1969); and *Kadambari* (1976), which gave Kavita Krishnamurthy her first film song. He kept homes in Kolkata, Dehradun and Princeton, New Jersey, and played his last concert in 2004, at seventy-five.
The Refusals
The rejections were not a pose. He organised strikes with musicians' unions over the wages paid to performers, and after Broadcasting Minister Morarji Desai treated him dismissively he swore never again to play for All India Radio — a boycott of the country's dominant musical platform by the country's most celebrated sitarist. He accused the Sangeet Natak Akademi of running on "lobbying, politics, and favouritism," refused its 1995 award, and accepted only its Fellowship, the highest honour it gives. "I don't want to be a president or any pop star," he said. "I want to be in my own shell. Yet I want to know that in my own shell, I am the pearl."
Why Vilayat Is Called a Genius
The honest place to start is that the claim rests on craft and ear rather than on ideas. Vilayat Khan wrote no theory and founded no school of thought; what he did was solve a physical problem that had defeated his instrument for centuries. A sitar string, once struck, is dying. He worked out — through the deforming, decade-long labour of eight to fourteen hours a day at the fingerboard — how to hear the interval a singer would sing and then bend the dying string into it, so that a single pluck could carry an entire vocal phrase. That is a fusion of two skills rarely found together: a vocalist's internal model of how a melodic line should breathe, and a mechanic's grasp of what a wire under tension can be made to do. He then went further and had the instrument rebuilt around the technique.
The word was used of him in his lifetime. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee called him a child prodigy; *The Hindu* framed the field as "many greats and there is Vilayat Khan"; many judged him the finest sitarist of his age. The counter-case is real. His refusals and his radio boycott made him a difficult figure, and the accusation that he was ranking himself against his colleagues is hard to dismiss when he objected to an award chiefly because others had received one first. He fell out irreparably with his brother Imrat, once his duet partner. His later recordings divided even admirers. And *gayaki ang* was a family inheritance he perfected rather than invented — a distinction his own claims did not always make.
Legacy
He died of lung cancer in Mumbai on 13 March 2004. The line held: his sons Shujaat and Hidayat play sitar, his daughter Zila sings Sufi music and was formally initiated as his student in 1991, and his nephews Rais, Nishat and Irshad Khan all took up the instrument. His disciples ranged from Arvind Parikh and Hasu Patel to the English session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan. India Post issued a commemorative stamp in his honour in September 2014. The wider inheritance is simply that no sitarist since has been able to play as though the note stops at the pluck.
