Sitar — A Deep Dive

Ask where the sitar comes from and you will hear a famous story: that Amir Khusrau, the 13th-century poet-musician of the Delhi court, invented it. It is a beloved tale — and most modern scholarship treats it as legend rather than history. What the evidence better supports is this: the name descends from the Persian sehtar ("three strings"), the instrument belongs to a family of long-necked lutes that moved between Central Asia and India, and the sitar as we know it — big gourd, curved movable frets, sympathetic strings, jawari bridge — took its mature shape in the 18th century, with figures such as Masit Khan's circle in the Mughal twilight shaping its music. Its grandest form, the deep surbahar, followed in the 19th century. In other words: the sitar is not one inventor's flash but several centuries of refinement — which is the more Indian story anyway.

A sitar is a conversation between a gourd and a plank of seasoned wood — usually toon (Indian cedar) or teak. Every part has a name a student learns early:

Two details define its voice. The jawari — a bridge with a subtly sloped surface — lets each string buzz-bloom into harmonics (the physics is on the Kala Vijnana page); its grinding and re-dressing is a specialist craft. And the tarab (sympathetic) strings, tuned to the notes of the raga being played, shimmer in reply to everything the main string sings — the sitar's built-in echo of itself.

A concert sitar usually carries six or seven main strings over the frets and eleven to thirteen tarab beneath them. Of the main strings, the star is the baaj — the steel melody string on which nearly everything is played; alongside it sit drone and rhythm companions, ending in the paired high chikari strings the right hand flicks for sparkling punctuation (they ring the tonic, Sa). Exact tuning schemes differ by lineage and even by piece — the Ravi Shankar and Vilayat Khan traditions famously string and tune their instruments differently — so a student simply learns their own guru's scheme first, and the reasons later. What never changes: everything is tuned in relation to Sa, the tonic the tanpura holds, and the tarab are re-tuned to each raga before it is played.

The right forefinger wears the mizrab, a wire plectrum, and its strokes have names a student chants before playing: Da (inward), Ra (outward), and Diri (the two joined, fast). From these grow the bols of instrumental music — stroke-syllable patterns exactly parallel to the dance bols of Kathak's tatkar and the tabla's language. A composition can be spoken before it is played — da dir da ra, da ra da da ra — and in the gat forms below, the stroke pattern is part of the composition's very identity.

The sitar's frets are curved and the strings sit high — and that is the whole point: it leaves room to pull. The glory of the left hand is meend: bending the string sideways across the fret to glide through several notes — commonly up to four or five — without a fresh stroke, the closest strings come to the human voice's unbroken line. Around meend cluster the ornaments a guru introduces one by one: kan (a grace-note touch), krintan (plucked hammer-and-pull with the left hand alone), zamzama (sparkling clusters), ghaseet (a slide along the string), and gamak — the heavy, shaking oscillation that gives Hindustani music its depth. This is why sitar students sing before they play: the left hand is trying to say what the voice already knows.

The names of the two gat forms carry history: the Masitkhani gat — slow, dignified, built on a fixed stroke-pattern in teentaal — descends from the school of Masit Khan; the Razakhani gat — quick, playful, made for fireworks — from Ghulam Raza Khan. Nearly every sitar recital still walks the road those two names paved.

Imdadkhani / Etawah the singing sitar

The line of Imdad Khan → Enayat Khan → Vilayat Khan perfected gayaki ang — the sitar imitating the human voice, with long meends, khayal phrasing, and even the player singing along. Its instruments and tunings are adapted to that vocal ideal, and its deep sibling, the surbahar, belongs especially to this house.

Maihar the architect's school

From Baba Allauddin Khan of Maihar — teacher of Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan and Annapurna Devi — came a style often described as structural and dhrupad-rooted: monumental alap, bold rhythmic architecture, and an orchestral imagination that carried the sitar to the world's great halls (and to George Harrison's ears). Nikhil Banerjee's lyrical playing grew from this same house.

The beginning is humbler than the concert stage suggests: learning to sit (cross-legged, the gourd resting against the left foot, the neck rising at its angle), learning to wear and angle the mizrab, the first weeks of sore fingertips before calluses come — every sitar player's badge. Then alankars and paltas — note patterns up and down the scale — in Bilawal and the first ragas (Yaman is many students' first great friend), simple bol exercises, and the slow discipline of tuning by ear. Milestones mirror the dancer's road: graded exams through bodies such as Prayag Sangit Samiti and the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya network, school and community stages, and always riyaz — the daily practice that is the real syllabus. It is the road Devangi herself is on, sitar on lap, alongside her Kathak and vocal training — the three arts feeding each other exactly as this site's Sadhana series hopes to show.

A sitar is alive to weather. It dislikes direct sun, sudden temperature swings and above all humidity extremes — gourds crack and necks bow. It travels padded, rests on its gourd or in its case (never leaning face-down), gets its strings wiped after playing, and its frets re-tied and jawari re-dressed by a specialist when the shimmer dulls. Learning to change a string — and to keep respect for the instrument-makers whose craft this is — is part of the training.

Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Vilayat Khan — the two poles every discussion begins with; Nikhil Banerjee, whose recordings many learners keep closest; Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan, who forged his own third path; Annapurna Devi, the legend of the surbahar; and among those carrying the art onward, Budhaditya Mukherjee, Shahid Parvez and Anoushka Shankar. The fuller roll lives on the Personalities page — but for a learner, one raga heard ten times teaches more than ten heard once.