Eighteen-hour days forged a sarod master for the West
Ali Akbar Khan’s father, Allauddin Khan, began lessons before dawn and could stretch them to eighteen hours. That Maihar discipline produced a sarod virtuoso who, invited to America by Yehudi Menuhin in 1955, helped plant Hindustani classical music in California classrooms—and on the Concert for Bangladesh stage.
Born 14 April 1922 in Shibpur, Brahmanbaria (now Bangladesh), Khan grew up in Maihar, Madhya Pradesh, where Allauddin served as court musician to the Maharaja. Early training covered many instruments and voice before settling on sarod; uncle Aftabuddin taught tabla and pakhavaj. Fellow students included sister Annapurna Devi and Ravi Shankar, who married Annapurna in 1941. Khan debuted at thirteen at an Allahabad conference in 1936, broadcast on All India Radio Bombay in 1938, and from January 1940 gave monthly Lucknow AIR performances.
In 1943 he became court musician to Maharaja Umaid Singh of Jodhpur, earning the title Ustad. After princely states dissolved and Hanwant Singh died in a 1952 crash, Khan moved to Bombay, scoring films such as Chetan Anand’s Aandhiyan (1952)—Lata Mangeshkar sang its title track without fee—Satyajit Ray’s Devi (1960), and later Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993). From 1945 His Master’s Voice 78s included his new Raga Chandranandan, built from four evening ragas; a twenty-two-minute remake on the 1965 Master Musician of India LP carried it worldwide. No Indian artist had previously issued a classical long-play disc on U.S. soil or brought the sarod onto American TV broadcasts; Khan did both.
Teaching matched performing: a Calcutta school in 1956, then the Ali Akbar College of Music in Berkeley in 1967, relocated to San Rafael in 1968, with a Basel branch in 1985. He became an adjunct professor at UC Santa Cruz. In August 1971 he joined Shankar, Alla Rakha, and others at Madison Square Garden for Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh. Honours included Padma Bhushan (1967), Padma Vibhushan (1989), a 1991 MacArthur Fellowship—the first for an Indian musician—five Grammy nominations, and a 1997 National Heritage Fellowship. He died of kidney failure in San Anselmo, California, on 18 June 2009, aged eighty-seven.
Source: Ali Akbar Khan
