Aman Ali Khan
Aman Ali Khan almost didn't become a musician. Raised in Bombay's Bhendi Bazaar quarter, the son of gharana co-founder Chhajju Khan showed little interest in the family trade until, his biographers record, he praised a young singer named Anjanibai Malpekar and she turned the compliment back on him — he alone, she said, had inherited the treasure his elders had spent their lives gathering, and it was his duty to claim it. Rigorous riyaz followed, then a step outside the Hindustani tradition entirely, to study Carnatic music under a Mysore court musician — a transfer that gave his gharana its most distinctive sound. He shunned the concert stage, taught in near-seclusion, and left Bombay for Pune in 1947, dying in Delhi in 1953 of pneumonia caught mid-tour; his manuscript on music theory had already burned in a house fire. Sources disagree on his birth year: 1888 or 1884.
Somewhere in his years of study, Aman Ali Khan stepped outside the Hindustani tradition and trained under Kalanidhi Bidaram Krishnappa, a Mysore court musician working in the wholly separate Carnatic system. What came home with him was concrete: sargam, the solfa-syllable singing rarely foregrounded in Hindustani khayal, the rhythmic play called layakari, and swift Carnatic ornaments known as khatkas and gamaks. The vocalist and writer Warren Senders describes him as "strongly influenced by certain aspects of Karnatic music, especially the rendering of complex note patterns (swaraprasthas)" — and his best-loved bandish, "Lagi Lagan Sati Pati Sang" in Raga Hamsadhwani, borrows its mukhda outright from Muthuswami Dikshitar's Carnatic kriti "Vatapi Ganapatim."
listen forNo recording of Krishnappa's own Carnatic singing survives to check against. What's audible is the transfer he left behind: in Aman Ali Khan's Hamsadhwani recording, listen for rapid, syllable-sung sargam runs threaded through the raga — a texture rare in Hindustani khayal outside this gharana — and the short, snapping khatka and gamak ornaments that read as distinctly Carnatic against the surrounding khayal phrasing. The melody itself rises through the same shape as Dikshitar's "Vatapi Ganapatim," the Carnatic composition Aman Ali Khan built his own bandish around, so the borrowing is traceable phrase by phrase, not just in spirit.
Chhajju Khan was Aman Ali Khan's father and teacher, a fakir by temperament who co-founded the Bhendi Bazaar gharana with his two brothers and composed under the pen name "Amar Muni." His son inherited both the name and the discipline: Aman Ali Khan folded "Amar" into most of his own bandishes and, once family pressure and Anjanibai Malpekar's urging pushed him into serious riyaz, built his practice on the note-permutation technique his father's generation had cultivated. "Chajju Khan's son was Aman Ali Khan who continued the legacy forward," the fifth-generation exponent Kishori Janorikar told The Asian Age in 2018, crediting him with carrying the gharana's defining style forward.
listen forChhajju Khan left no recording — he belonged to the pre-disc generation that built the gharana in 1890s Bombay. What survives is his son's own patient, almost mathematical unfolding of a raga in "Raga Patdeepaki": listen for merukhand, a fixed set of notes worked through in near-total permutation before a phrase resolves. "It's a system of permutation and combination of notes that is specially taught in our gharana," the gharana disciple Anuradha Kuber has said of the technique — audible here in phrases built note by note rather than leaping toward a climax.