Enayet Khan

He was born in 1894 in the North-Western Provinces of British India into a family of musicians; Wikidata gives his birth year as 1895, and the record states the split.¹² His father was the great sitar maestro Imdad Khan, who taught him the sitar and the surbahar (bass sitar) in the family style known as the Imdadkhani or Etawah gharana, named after the village of Etawah near Agra.¹ He married Bashiran Begum, daughter of the khyal singer Bande Hussain.¹

He settled with his family in Calcutta, where, though he lived only to 43, he did much pioneering work on the sitar: he developed further the gayaki ang his father had taught him, standardised the instrument's physical dimensions and added the upper resonator gourd that is popular with today's players, though his own descendants have not used it.¹ In a city fast becoming an important centre of the arts, at a time when the independence struggle had fired interest in national culture, he brought sitar music out of narrow connoisseur circles to new mass audiences; Rabindranath Tagore was a musical collaborator and personal friend.¹ Some of his recordings have been reissued on CD in the Great Gharanas: Imdadkhani compilation of RPG/EMI's Chairman's Choice series.¹

Enayat Khan died young, at 43, in 1938 at Calcutta, leaving four children.¹ His two sons, the sitar player Vilayat Khan (1928–2004) and Imrat Khan, were trained in the Imdadkhani style by other members of the extended family — Vilayat on sitar and Imrat on surbahar — and both became very famous classical musicians.¹

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