What is a gharana in Hindustani music? The concept of the gharana has been subject to continuous debate in scholarly writings about North Indian music. When approaching gharana, should we understand it as a social group or relationship, or should we emphasise the teaching and transmission within individual, hereditary musical lineages? Commonly understood, the term signifies individual teaching lineages of training and transmission. In North Indian music, the concept of the modern gharana is associated with practices of the khyal, even though we have dhrupad gharanas like the Bettiah and instrumental gharanas, such as the Maihar and Imdadkhani sitar gharana.

The word baj in Hindustani instrumental music broadly encompasses the idea of technique and style. It could refer to a form of vocal music such as the thumri, dhrupad, and khyal styles that instrumental musicians follow in their presentations. Baj also refers to instrumental compositions—the masitkhani (slow) and rezakhani (fast). The baj could be a signifier of regional styles and styles evolved by specific gharanas. Since there is no equivalent to the word gayaki, used for vocal music, Bimalakanta Roychaudhuri in his The Dictionary of Hindustani Classical Music, proposed the use of vadaki for instrumental musical style.

Chanda’s book on the Imdadkhani sitar baj sparks this discussion on the gharana. In the very beginning, the author notes that it has become very common to use “Imdadkhani baj” or “Imdadkhani gharana” in the present day to identify a set of techniques, practices, and style of the sitar articulated and evolved by three generations of musicians in the gharana-Ustads Imdad Khan (1848–1920); Ustad Enayet Khan (1894–1938); and his son Ustad Vilayat Khan (1928–2004). This was perhaps not the case decades back when Bimalakanta Roychaudhuri, a foremost disciple of Ustad Enayet Khan, established the Imdadkhani school of sitar in Calcutta in the late 1940s to disseminate the teaching of the late Ustad and his gharana. Enayet Khan, the court musician of the zamindars of Gouripore in Mymensingh (undivided Bengal) hosted Bengali students and disciples. Like his father, he was an important innovator of the sitar’s style, techniques, and sound. In the hands of the three generations of sitar players, the instrument’s style continually evolved and was refined, so that by the time of Ustad Vilayat Khan, it became a dominant sound and style of sitar playing. The changes were partly in response to the changing acoustics, spaces, tastes, and listenership of Hindustani instrumental music in the twentieth century. A central feature of the Imdadkhani baj, which also influenced other instrumental gharanas, was its reliance on vocal styles and practices, more specifically its deriving on khyal and thumri vocal genres of Hindustani music.

Notations and handbooks on instrumental music were published in copious numbers from the nineteenth century—there were even publications in Bangla based on Enayet Khan and the teachings of other Ustads, notably Tarer Swapna by Jyotish Chandra Chowdhury (1939) and other publications by Bengali amateurs. Yet, the book discussed here is a unique one. It begins with a study of the baj or style of surbahar and sitar playing in the gharana, delineating differences with the style of the Senis or the musicians belonging to the central lineage of Tansen in Hindustani music. It goes on to document the specificities and techniques of playing the instrument drawing upon the notebooks, memory and teaching of Enayet Khan, handed down by Bimalakanta Roychaudhuri. It sheds light on the distinctive features of the gharana playing style through a discussion on the musical material (vadya bastu), including not only compositional structures, but also phrases, embellishments, textures, and techniques that mark the gharana playing.

As such, it offers insights into the playing styles, training and teaching within the gharana such as the emphasis on laya (tempo). Two articles by Bimalakanta himself, published in an older Bengali periodical Basudhara appear in the book’s appendices. These are biographical sketches of the Ustads Imdad and Enayet Khan, written in an anecdotal style, offering insights into the life and practices of these two musicians.

The bulk of the book includes notations from the notebooks of Bimalakanta—the teaching handed down by Ustad Enayet Khan. From a simple alap (introductory part of a raga performance) composed in Raga Yaman for the surbahar that was part of Enayet’s daily riyaz (practice), the notations and compositions become more complex. Bol or rhythmic stroke patterns of percussion and string instruments are also included, which became integral to the right-hand playing techniques in the gharana.

The publication comes at an important point of renewed interest and an intersection between history and musical scholarship, when pedagogy, performance, and historical practices of Hindustani music demand new attention. The book comes with an accompanying DVD-recording of the notated compositions in different ragas rendering the Imdadkhani style intelligible, and—given the paucity of recordings of both Imdad and Enayet Khan—adds to the archive of music. An elaborate alap in Raga Yaman, nineteen masitkhani and twenty-eight razakhani gats (compositions) ably demonstrate the gharana and individual playing styles and teaching methods. The notations and video recording, placed side by side, enable an easy comparison. One of the key aspects of these recordings is the alap played in Raga Yaman. Imdad and Enayet Khan used to play alap in the instrument surbahar. Barring a few three-and-half-minute gramophone recordings, that too of some portions of the vilambit (slow tempo) and jhala (concluding portions), we hardly have any evidence of the full-length alap as taught in this gharana. Here, the alap is outlined in detail closely following the notebooks and notations, demonstrating the different rhythmic aspects of the jor (transition from the alap) and jhala and various types of the gamaka (vibrato) with bol patterns. Thus, the notebooks and notations and the recording all hold important archival value.

Notations have been a matter of great controversy in the field of Hindustani classical music and could best be understood as aiding memory, teaching, and personal practice. But as recent works and archival initiatives have shown, notations and the notebooks of past teachers and practitioners are particularly valuable not only for present day interpretation and rendition of music, but for historical understanding, as they trace the materiality of the process, constituting the very basis of personal musicology and practice. A case in point is the recent experiments with the personal collection of Birendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury, housed at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, which has prompted new engagements with music and historical scholarship.

The book on Imdadkhani baj can be seen in conversation with these efforts to document and preserve a public history of music across several mediums. Writing about performing subjects and styles of Hindustani music has always been a contentious issue for historians. Even Indic musicologists, I would wager, have been rather wary about writing on these subjects. Indeed, we do have fragmented writings and biographical and hagiographic literature on musicians that have accumulated over the years. More particularly, the archival and literary field of modern North Indian music has been dominated by scholastic writings on textual tradition, the so called sangit shastra. By contrast, we have fewer reflections on individual musicians, their playing styles and teaching, or how they negotiated with the social and the aesthetic. Books like the one on Imdadkhani gharana and its practices bridges this gap to a certain extent. The work not only documents practice, transmission and evolution within a particular gharana of hereditary musicians but suggests important linkages between hereditary and non-hereditary practice as well. Although a book primarily of notations, it presents a slice of the material and cultural history of Hindustani music in Bengal, given the centrality and salience of the gharana of instrumental music in the region and in a larger context of Hindustani music in the twentieth century.