From Mughal Courts to Monterey: The Story of the Sitar
In June 1967, at the Monterey Pop Festival in California, the crowd that had come to hear rock bands sat down on the grass for an Indian musician. For several hours on a Sunday afternoon, Ravi Shankar played the sitar, with Alla Rakha on tabla, building slowly from meditative phrases to blazing, rapid exchanges. When it ended, the audience rose to its feet. For many in that field, it was the first time they had heard a raga.
That afternoon was a high point of a remarkable journey. The sitar had grown up in the courts and music rooms of northern India, shaped over generations by families of musicians who guarded their techniques closely. Within a few years of Monterey, its shimmering sound had become one of the most recognisable in the world.
Origins Wrapped in Debate
Where the sitar came from is one of the most debated questions in Indian music history. A popular tradition credits its invention to Amir Khusrau, the celebrated thirteenth-century poet of the Delhi Sultanate. Most modern historians treat this as legend: there is no reliable evidence for it, and the instrument we know appears centuries later.
Two broader roots are usually discussed. One is India's own long tradition of plucked string instruments, many of them called veena in older texts, including long-necked fretted lutes. The other is the Persian setar, whose name means "three strings", a small long-necked lute that would have been familiar in the Persian-influenced culture of the Mughal courts. Many scholars see the sitar as a meeting of these traditions, an Indian instrument shaped partly by Persian models, but the exact story remains open.
Taking Shape in the Eighteenth Century
The sitar emerges clearly in the historical record in the eighteenth century, in the period of the later Mughal emperors in Delhi. Early sitars were smaller and simpler than modern ones, with fewer strings, and they did not yet have the full set of sympathetic strings that give today's instrument its halo of sound.
Musicians of this era shaped the instrument's repertoire. Masit Khan is associated with the Masitkhani gat, a stately, slow composition style often linked with Delhi. Later, Ghulam Raza Khan, working in Lucknow, gave his name to the faster Razakhani gat. Both forms are still played today. Over the nineteenth century, makers added strings, enlarged the gourd and the neck, and fitted the taraf sympathetic strings, gradually arriving at the large, resonant instrument heard on concert stages now.
The Gharanas: Families of Sound
Hindustani music was passed down through gharanas, lineages of teachers and students, often based on a family, each with its own style and repertoire. Two lineages came to dominate twentieth-century sitar.
The first is the line often called the Imdadkhani or Etawah gharana, named after Imdad Khan, a renowned player of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His son Enayat Khan carried the tradition forward, and his grandson would become one of the greatest sitarists ever.
The second grew around Allauddin Khan at Maihar, in central India. A multi-instrumentalist and demanding teacher, he trained a remarkable circle of musicians, among them his son Ali Akbar Khan on sarod, his daughter Annapurna Devi on surbahar, Nikhil Banerjee on sitar and a young dancer-turned-musician named Ravi Shankar.
Vilayat Khan and Ravi Shankar
Vilayat Khan (1928–2004) took his family's tradition in a new direction. He developed what is known as the gayaki ang, a style in which the sitar imitates the human voice, with long, singing slides and phrases modelled on vocal music. He also helped refine the instrument itself. To many listeners in India, he represented the sitar at its most lyrical and refined.
Ravi Shankar (1920–2012) had spent his youth touring Europe and America with his brother Uday Shankar's dance troupe before devoting years to strict study with Allauddin Khan. His style drew on the deep, slow exploration of a raga associated with the older been (rudra veena) tradition, combined with rhythmic brilliance. From the 1950s he began touring the West, and he worked with Western musicians, including the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, with whom he recorded the album West Meets East (1966).
The two men were often seen as rivals, yet together they raised the profile of the sitar enormously, at home and abroad.
When the Sitar Met Western Pop
In 1965, George Harrison of the Beatles played a simple sitar line on "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)". Soon afterwards he began studying with Ravi Shankar, and his Indian-inspired songs, such as "Within You Without You" (1967), introduced millions of listeners to the instrument's sound. Brian Jones played sitar on the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" (1966), and the sitar briefly became a symbol of the decade's fascination with India.
Ravi Shankar performed at Monterey in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969, and in 1971 he and Harrison organised the Concert for Bangladesh in New York to raise money for refugees. Shankar was sometimes uneasy with the way his music was treated as a fashion, and he insisted that audiences listen to Indian classical music with the seriousness it deserved. Over time, many did.
The Sitar Today
Today the sitar is at the heart of Hindustani classical music and continues to evolve. Vilayat Khan's son Shujaat Khan and Ravi Shankar's daughter Anoushka Shankar are among the many players carrying their lineages forward, alongside musicians who mix the sitar with jazz, film music and electronica. Students around the world learn it with teachers in person and online.
Curious listeners can also take their first steps without an instrument. On HarmonyHub you can play a virtual sitar free in your browser, with strings named in sargam from Sa to Ni and a Raag Yaman guide to try a real raga phrase. You can explore more of the subcontinent's sounds among our Indian instruments.
A Voice Shaped by Generations
The sitar did not appear in a single moment of invention. It grew over centuries, from Indian and Persian roots, through the Mughal courts and the patient teaching of the gharanas, until two great twentieth-century masters carried it to the world. Every note that shimmers from it today carries that long history.