walking upstream…
Allauddin Khan
photo: prof. rafiqul islam · cc by 2.5 ↗Allauddin Khan
Ustad Allauddin Khan — known to his students as Baba, and rendered elsewhere as Alauddin or Ustad Allauddin Khan — ran away from his Bengal village at ten to join a traveling jatra troupe, then spent three decades assembling a musical education one grueling teacher at a time: seven years of vocal drilling in Calcutta, a chance sarod performance that redirected his ambition entirely, and finally, in his twenties, years spent talking his way into a reclusive Rampur master's household before a single lesson was granted. What he collected from that sequence he spent the rest of his life redistributing: from 1918 until his death in 1972, seven decades as court musician at Maihar produced the Maihar gharana and trained his son Ali Akbar Khan, his daughter Annapurna Devi, and his disciple Ravi Shankar. Every teacher he is remembered for, he first had to earn.
the sound in question
Sarod – Raga Hem (All India Radio recording)Allauddin Khan
walk the tributaries ↓
Wazir Khan1900s–10s · Dhrupad / Rudra veena / Hindustani classical
Wazir Khan, chief musician of the Rampur court and a descendant of Tansen's line, was famously unapproachable — visiting dignitaries waited days for an audience, and even senior musicians sat on the floor rather than beside him. Allauddin, unproven in his twenties, had to persuade the nawab to intervene before Wazir Khan would even consider him. Acceptance changed nothing at first: "Each morning, I would go to his house at 7 a.m., wait till noon, clean his spitoon and shoes, but no music lessons would happen," Khan told the musicologist B.R. Deodhar. "This continued for two and a half years." Only then did the Senia gharana's repertoire open to him.
listen: upstream & heresource: The Hindu — The ustad behind Senia gharana (Khan's own account, via B.R. Deodhar's interview, of studying under Wazir Khan) ↗
No known recordingWazir Khan
Sarod – Raga Kaushi BhairavAllauddin Khan
listen forWazir Khan promised, in his own words as relayed by Ravi Shankar, "I'll teach you all the dhrupad and dhamar songs... and the technique and different baj of the been, rabab, and sursringar" — the rudra-veena tradition of the Tansen line. No recording of him survives, but that transfer is audible in Khan's own Raga Kaushi Bhairav: the alap unfolds long and unmetered, built on held glides rather than the quicker, more ornamented phrasing of vocal music — dhrupad logic played on a sarod.
Ahmed Ali Khan1880s–90s · Sarod / Hindustani classical
At the Muktagachha court of Raja Jagat Kishore, the itinerant multi-instrumentalist heard a sarod player named Ahmad Ali Khan and, as his disciple Ravi Shankar later wrote, experienced for the first time "the full effect of the musician and the beauty of the music." Khan decided on the spot to become his student, abandoning violin, flute, and every other instrument he had picked up along the way. He spent roughly four to five years traveling and living with his new teacher, cooking for him and serving him, absorbing an instrument he had never seriously touched before — the one he would make his own for the rest of his career.
listen: upstream & here
No known recordingAhmed Ali Khan
Raag BasantAllauddin Khan
listen forNo recording of Ahmad Ali Khan survives to confirm exactly what passed between them, but the result is traceable in Khan's own playing: by the time of his AIR-era Raag Basant, his touch on the sarod is fully idiomatic to the instrument's plucked strings and sympathetic resonance, not borrowed secondhand from vocal or veena technique — the sound of a man who gave up every other instrument to master one.
Nulo Gopal1870s–80s · Hindustani vocal / Khyal
Newly arrived in Calcutta at ten, Khan was taken in by a Bengali vocal teacher named Nulo Gopal, who warned the boy he would only accept him on old-fashioned terms: twelve years of nothing but sargam, palta, and murchhana — solfège, scales, exercises, no songs at all. Khan agreed. Ravi Shankar's memoir credits the seven years Khan actually got, before Nulo Gopal died of plague, with sharpening his ear to the point that he could notate any music he heard, in his head or on paper, without an instrument in hand.
listen: upstream & heresource: Ravi Shankar, My Music, My Life (archived excerpt) — Khan's training under Nulo Gopal, Ahmad Ali Khan, and Wazir Khan ↗
No known recordingNulo Gopal
Raag Paraj BasantAllauddin Khan
listen forNo trace of Nulo Gopal's own singing survives from pre-gramophone Calcutta, where teachers taught entirely by ear. What's audible instead is the residue decades later: in Raag Paraj Basant, Khan's sarod bends and holds each note the way a khyal singer shapes a phrase before moving on, rather than favoring the quick plucked ornaments idiomatic to the instrument — a vocalist's patience, translated onto strings.