Ustad Sakhawat Hussain Khan

Ustad Sakhawat Hussain Khan (1875-1955) emerged in the early 20th century as one of the most outstanding sarod virtuosos of his time. He brought together the musical strands of his predecessors, who were crucial to the history of the sarod, and thus became the central representative of what came to be known as “Lucknow-Shahjahanpur Gharana” in later years. Sakhawat Hussain Khan was among the earliest artists from India to present Indian classical music on a larger scale in Europe.He also played a key role in the transformation and modernization of musical education in India. Sakhawat's musical career spans a pivot of socio-musical change from the end of British colonialism to the birth of the Indian nation in 1947. (Katz 2017)

Sakhawat Hussain Khan was born in 1875. As the son of Shafayat Khan (1838-1915), he already belonged to a significant musical lineage associated with the region of Shahjahanpur – the Shahjahanpur gharana of Enayat Ali Khan (1790-1883). His career was given a tremendous boost when he came under the artistic auspices of two musical heavyweights, Karamatullah (1848-1933) and Asadullah (Kaukab) Khan (ca. 1850-1915). The two brothers had brought national and international recognition to the Lucknow Gharana – or “Bulandshahr Gharana” – of Niamatullah Khan (d. 1903). They enriched Sakhawat's musical education with a tremendous wealth of skill and repertoire. The two strands of sarod playing from Shahjahanpur and Lucknow merged when Sakhawat married the daughter of his mentor, Asadullah (Kaukab) Khan. This genealogy was central to Sakhawat's unique musicianship. His disciple Devrani Chatterjee has edited his autobiographical notes and in her introduction repeats the narrative of Sakhawat's musical genesis:

“The Ustad's initial training was from his father Shafayat Khan. Later he learned from Karamatullah Khan who was the uncle of Ustad, and who was regarded as the most learned sarod player of his time. Ustad became the disciple of Karamatullah Khansaheb with lots of pomp and splendour [a reference to a lavish shagirdi, or discipleship ceremony] and learned a lot of things from him. Later when he married the daughter of Karamatullah Khansaheb's younger brother, Professor Asadullah Khan Kaukab, he also learned from him for quite a long time.” (Khan n.d.: n.p., in Katz 2017)

From then on, the trajectory of Sakhawat's life and career was a constant succession of musical achievements, which we can witness in tributes from powerful political figures and memoirs of his contemporaries. S.K. Chaubey, English professor at Lucknow University and great music lover, recalls in his notes on musicians he encountered in his life:

“During all these years, he was seen at important all-India music conferences, festivals and functions, and his Sarod recitals always appealed to his audiences. He had the rare gift of capturing the imagination of his listeners by never leaving them bored stiff with long preliminaries and longer perorations. And this is one thing which our instrumentalists and vocalists must never forget. A musician must, primarily, move and thrill his listeners without resorting to the sluggish ways of musical hair-splitting. Ustad Sakhawat Khan was an ace performer in this respect and almost invariably pleased his audiences. One always felt that the Pakhawaj accompaniment by Pandit Sakharam was an indispensable factor in making the recital complete. Often, it was as thrilling as Ustad Hafiz Ali Khan's Sarod to the Pakhawaj accompaniment of the late Parwat Singh of Gwalior. Surely, it was a rare combination which had hardly grown stale even after two decades.” (Chaubey 1958)

Of the celebrated successes of his career, Sakhawat Hussain Khan is most remembered for his worldwide travels in the mid-1930s as an accompanist for the dance company of Leila Roy Sokhey aka “Madame Menaka”. Menaka's Indian Ballet was a professional company that enjoyed great popularity in the 1930s and toured extensively in India, Southeast Asia and Europe. (Schlaffke 2021) Parallel to the now much better known dancer and choreographer Uday Shankar (1900-1977), Leila Roy was one of a number of actors involved in the proto-national movements in India at the beginning of the 20th century, which sought to valorize and emancipate local art forms. She developed so-called dance dramas based on various Indian folk dances, but mainly using elements from the North Indian Kathak style, and performed them throughout India.

Sakhawat Hussain Khan took a crucial role in Menaka's ensemble, providing the modernist choreographies with a profound musical basis. This anchored the national dance revival project deeply in the living tradition of North Indian classical instrumental music. Max Katz has pointed out that this modern/traditionalist attitude was part of Sakhawat Khan's artistic self-image:

“While proud of his individual achievements and international travels, Sakhawat Husain Khan emphasizes his investment in the past and future of his musical lineage, as well as his responsibility in propagating the musical heritage of the nation.” As he writes, "I am trying to keep my ancestors' names alive, which I did by spending several years performing in India's biggest music conferences, receiving many medals and awards" (Khan n.d.: n.p.). Sakhawat Husain Khan acknowledges his great gift from God and the blessings of his elders, asserting that he continues to accrue renown because the musicians of "my lineage have been the custodians of the sarod, rabab, and sursingār from Mughal times, whose branches have spread all over the land of India" (ibid.). Taking credit on behalf of his gharana, Sakhawat Husain Khan notes that "all those playing sarod today are the special blossoms from the garden of my family". (Katz 2017)

At the height of Sakhawat Kahn's activity, musical education in India was developing in a new direction. In 1926, Pt. Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande founded his college in Lucknow – the Marris College of Hindustani Music, which in a short time became the leading musical institution in the country. Sakhawat Hussain Khan was one of the school's most prestigious teachers throughout his life. Sakhawat's writings reveal how he viewed the nexus of the National Cause, the college and his own lineage. These records reveal, “that Sakhawat Husain Khan embraced the reformist vision of a modernised Hindustani tradition, and participated in it fully as an educator and author while also championing his own lineage and extolling its ongoing vibrancy.” (Katz 2017)

At the same time, Sakhawat Hussain Khan took a clear stance against the extensive stylistic changes that were taking place in instrumental music in India. He saw the orthodox instrumental style of his family threatened by a "harmful" development in Hindustani music, which was increasingly transferring distinctive vocal techniques to instrumental music. He puts it this way himself:

“Instrumental music has a style of its own and with the blessings of God I am steadfast in the teaching of my ancestors and have not made any changes whatsoever because I don't think I am more capable than them. Which form and which thing have they not done before? Nowadays a lot of gayaki [vocal style] is becoming fashionable. Here you find tan-s [melodic runs] of gayaki, and there you find thumri style. And sometimes excessive importance is given to the rhythms of tablã and dance. And the argument is that it is for the sake of the development of music. Neither is there any beauty of gat-toda [instrumental compositions and variations] nor any mood for rhythmic technique (lay kä mizaj). I am surprised when people request me to play these things. What should be my reply and how should I explain? (Khan n.d.: n.p.)”

Sakhawat's stylistic purism was perceived in his time as much as an anachronism as a rich source of original instrumental musicality:

“All his life he stood by the tradition and purity of style. He was quite a puritan in this respect, for I remember clearly his constant tirades against instrumentalists who tried to reproduce the vocalist's graces on their instruments. Not that he hated the vocalists. It was a passionate plea for sticking to the traditional Baj. S. N. Ratanjankar was not quite exaggerating when he said in a tribute paid to him:
"He was unique in his musical expression and stood apart by himself among all the Sarod-players of India and was a true representative of the proper Sarod Baj". It is a praise for an earnest devotion to tradition. This is what marked the late Ustad's style. He would never sacrifice his traditional technique.” (Chaubey 1958)


When Sakhawat Khan died in 1955, S. K. Chaubey realised what a loss this was for the Indian music world:

He is no more and with his passing has disappeared the last representative of the famous Karamatullah Khan Baj or style. I wonder if there is anyone in the family who can give us an authentic version of that old style in a truly traditional manner.
His two sons have done very well in recent years. His elder son Umar Khan is a well-known Sarod-player and is at present living in Calcutta. The younger son Ilyas Khan is an equally well known Sitar-player with a bright future ahead of him. They are the torch-bearers of the family.
"What after Sakhawat Khan?" was a natural query made by a young aspirant of the Bhatkhande Music College at his death. It is a desperate cry and not a simple question. It indicates a gap yet to be tilled up. Who can replace him? (Chaubey 1958)

The recordings
The recordings presented here are not only a document of Sakhawat Khan’s mastery. They also document the massive shifts in the social and aesthetic constitution of musical modernity in 20th Century India.

Sakhawat’s career falls within the time period that sound recordings became largely available in India. Although Sakhawat insisted on the importance of the dissemination of his music by traditional methods of oral teaching and embodiment, he did not hesitate to make use of the new emerging media of sound recordings. Despite this, very few examples of Sakhawat’s playing actually exist. Therefore, these recordings give only a glimpse into the enormous repertory of the gharana and the distinctive rendering of complete performances of the respective raga repertory.

Our archive lists a total of twelve short recordings of Sakhawat Khan:
- six solo pieces with pakhawaj accompaniment on three 78RPM discs, cut in the mid-twenties or early thirties.
- one piece with pakhawaj accompaniment, as part of a split 78RPM disc featuring sitarist Fazal Hussain on the flip side, cut in the mid-twenties or early thirties.
- one solo piece with tabla accompaniment that was used as background music in a feature film about the Indian Army, most likely recorded in the forties.
- one solo piece with tabla accompaniment from the Wadia Film Reel, shot between 1933-1936
- three ensemble pieces as part of Menakas Dance Ensemble, recorded live on 17.05.1936 in Hamburger Volksoper

The Indian Recordings

- The 78RPM disc recordings:
All of Sakhawat Hussain Khan’s shellac disc recordings feature Pandit Sakharam (1879-1967) on Pakhawaj. The famous duo was known as “Sakha-Sakhi”, or the two Sakhas (“friends”) of Lucknow. Their recitals display a very lively and intimate interplay between sarod and pakhawaj, akin to the dhrupad traditions of singing and veena playing. As SK Chaubey remembers in his memories on Sakhawat Khan: “His weekly demonstrations (at the Marris/Bhatkande College of Music in Lucknow) in the thirties, along with the Pakhawaj accompaniment of Pandit Sakharam, were the most thrilling items. The incomparable pair was known all over U. P.” Susheela Misra in her book about the Bhatkande College:”They would always begin with serious faces but before long, their duet would turn into a duel, each trying to outwit the other with loud clangs and bangs - all in a friendly spirit of course.”
Pdt. Sakharam served the Bhatkande College for most of his life as Pakhawaj and Tabla teacher and has been considered one of the outstanding representatives of the reputed "Nanasaheb Panse gharana".

In all these recordings the Ustad plays fast drut gat-todas in thumri-ang Ragas. The only exception being his recording of Raga Mewar (a rare Raga which resembles Barwa and Pilu and is similar to Raga Maand), in which he presents a mid-tempo gat.

- Raga Pilu: The Wadia-Movietone reel recording:
Most present-day connoisseurs of old Raga-music recordings have heard Sakhawat Khan´s music for the first time in the thrilling 4:40 min video clip that was first uploaded to YouTube by Hungarian sitar player and collector Toth Szabi in October 2014. This clip stems from “The heritage collection” of JBH Wadia (a prominent movie director, screenwriter, producer and founder of Wadia Movietone Studio) and features six performances by leading classical musicians. Produced between 1933-1943 at the Wadia-Movietone studios in Bombay, as part of Wadia´s pioneering series “The Variety Programme”, these are the earliest filmed performances of leading 20th century artists. The short reels were shown as “openers”,before major movies in cinema halls. In 2019 we located a much cleaner copy of the “Variety Programme #8” in the collection of Irfan Khan and restored it. It can be watched on our YouTube channel “Lucknow-Shahjahanpur-Gharana Archive”. As Sakhawat Khan left India in early 1936 to tour Europe with Madame Menaka’s dance troupe, this reel must have been filmed some time between 1933 and early 1936. Each detail of this performance remains thrilling even after watching it many times: the beauty of his gat-toda, the superhuman speed and clarity of his bols, the playing posture, the stunning theka and thaap of the tabla accompanist, Ustad Faiyaz Hussain Khan (maternal uncle of Ustad Ahmed Jan Thirakwa)... .

- Raga Gara: The Feature Film Recording:
This recording comes from a feature film on Indian army soldiers during World War II called “Men of India”. It was uploaded to YouTube in July 2013 and shortly thereafter the music used therein was identified as being Sakhawat Khan’s Raga Gara by his grandson Irfan Khan. The recording of a drut gat in Raga Gara is employed as background music for the narrator Z.A. Bukhari (a former station director of AIR Lucknow). During the thirteen minute documentary the Ustad´s same four-minute recording of Raga Gara is played three times in succession. I edited the three versions and sliced them together to get rid of the narrator’s voice as much as possible. As certain parts had narration in all three versions I could not erase the voice completely, so this compilation, cut up, with occasional narrator’s interruptions, is as close as we can get to the sound of the original performance. Nonetheless, this is a great document of the Ustad’s music, as it is the longest rendering with the best audio quality from his recorded oeuvre. Furthermore, we have a very short line of alap (which is absent in his other recordings, except in Raga Mewar) at the beginning and a stunning tabla accompaniment. Unfortunately neither the name of the tabla player nor the recording date is known, but we assume this is his youngest recording, most probably done during the 1940s.


The Menaka-Recordings
Sakhawat Hussain Khan travelled extensively with Madame Menaka, beginning in 1935 with a tour of India (including performances in Ahmedabad, Surat, Baroda, Lucknow, Calcutta, and Chittagon), Burma, Singapore, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka (Joshi 1989). From 1936 to 1938, Sakhawat Husain Khan accompanied Menaka's troupe on a tour of Europe that entailed some 750 performances. Beginning in January of 1936 in Switzerland, the troupe proceeded to Luxembourg, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Balkans, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, England, France, and Austria (ibid.: 25-26, see also The Menaka-Archive: www.menaka-archive.org).
The most prestigious of these hundreds of performances took place at the International Dance Olympiad as part of the Olympics of 1936, held in Berlin under the auspices of the Nazi government. To understand these performances in Europe, it is important to realise that despite the exotic revues popular in the 1930s, the Menaka programme was not perceived primarily as an exotic vaudeville programme, but in the context of classical high art. Especially in Germany, dance and music from India was met with open eyes and ears. There were several reasons for this. A discourse of crisis was unfolding in German art. Moreover, under the regime of Nazi cultural policy, a search was on for new models for a “völkisch” reorientation of German art. Non-European art, which seemed so profoundly in tune with its ancient cultural roots, was therefore of particular interest. Despite such ideological framing, many eyewitness accounts of the Menaka Ballet testify to how the fascination of Indian dance and music captivated audiences night after night.

Six musicians accompanied Menaka's dance troupe. Ambique Majumdar, an ambitious graduate of Bhatkhande College in Lucknow, is listed as the official music director of the Menaka Ensemble. On photographs he can be seen next to Sakhawat Hussain Khan with a sarod, and he also acted as a singer and performed some songs. However, in keeping with the oral history of the Lucknow Gharana, Sakhawat Khan himself was the undisputed musical authority of the group and acted as the actual music director.

German archival findings reveal that Majumdar remained in Germany when the ensemble left in 1938, where he studied music in Königsberg and worked for Subhas Chandra Bose's radio station Azad Hind in Berlin. In the course of the war, his trail was lost. It is possible that he died at the end of the war during the bombing of Dresden.

The four other musicians in the Menaka ensemble were Vishnu Shirodekar (tabla, pakhawaj), Sheikh Mahboob Ali (sanai), Janardan Abhyankar (tabla tarang) and Kamel Ganguli (ghanta tarang, dilruba). Unfortunately, not much is known about them. Of the 6 musicians, at least tabla tarang player Janardan Abhyankar made a name for himself in India's music industry. He contributed music to several popular film productions. The tabla tarang recording made on 2 February 1937 with Uday Shankar's company had been considered one of the earliest tabla tarang recordings till then. Janardan Abhyankar's was made a year earlier.

On 17 May 1936, the German National Broadcasting Company (Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft) produced an audio recording of the Menaka programme, which was performed at the Hamburg Volksoper. A total of 12 individual pieces were recorded, including arrangements for the whole orchestra as well as solo performances. The recordings survived the Second World War in an adventurous way, because parts of the German radio archive were buried in a Berlin garden compound. Today, the only surviving shellac copy of the recordings is in the German Broadcasting Archive in Frankfurt, from where the digital copies of the recordings published here originate. Unfortunately, Sakhawat's solo recording of all things was lost in the turmoil of the war, so that we can only hear his incisive sarod playing in the ensemble's group recordings.

Among the ten preserved recordings only four contain sarod, among these four pieces the one entitled “Tanz junger Mädchen (in Raga Pilu)” is not played by Sakhawat Hussain but most likely by Ambique Majumdar or Kamal Ganguli –both multi-instrumentalists.

- “Prélude (Orchester)” is a colourful opening piece with several chapters based on Raga Maand-Bihag and the Ustad’s masterful strokes are easily recognised right from the first line.

- “Patang (Drachentanz)” is a straightforward arrangement of a Gat-Toda composition in Raga Zila for sarod, jal-tarang and tabla.

- “Tarana-I-Ushhaq (Moghul Serenade)” is a simplified ensemble arrangement (for sarod, jal-tarang & tabla) of a complex and traditional gat in Raga Gara that was originally composed by Ustad Karam Khan –cousin-brother of the Gharana’s founding member, Niamatullah Khan (d. 1903) and grandfather of sitar player Shafiqullah Khan.

The recordings from Hamburg largely represent the ballet's programme, as it was also announced in the programme booklets for most of the tour.
In the programme for the beginning of the tour in the Netherlands in early 1936, 14 items are listed, including not only dances but also purely musical pieces, some for the whole ensemble, some for individual solo instruments. A sarod solo by Sakhawat Hussain Khan, "from his repertoire", is announced in the programme booklet as the 5th item on the programme. We can assume that Sakhawat was able to draw from a rich repertoire in the course of the 3-year tour. He presumably regularly chose different ragas for his solo performance, so it is likely a large amount of the gharana repertoire would have been heard in Europe, over the course of the tour.

Menaka's dance programme was intensively observed and classified by professional art critics, especially in Germany. For German audiences, the dances were an ambivalent experience, oscillating between fascination for the exotic flair and a multi-layered interest in the cultural origins of Indian art. Sakhawat's performances are regularly praised by German critics in the feuilleton as performances of the highest virtuosity that initially took some getting used to but then became hypnotically fascinating. For instance, in a review of a performance in Munich, critic K. Ude writes, "The prelude to the performance was an 'unending melody' on the Sarod--a melodious string instrument played by Ustad Sakhawat Hussain Khan. The Sarod created a magical spell and took the audience to the exotic East" (May 12, 1937, translated by Rashmi Misra, quoted in Joshi 1989: 48).

Moreover, while in Germany, Menaka's troupe appeared in a feature film titled “Der Tiger von Eschnapur” by German Director Richard Eichberg. The film includes two major dance pieces, both accompanied by the troupe's orchestra, and both including clear and sustained shots of Sakhawat Husain Khan playing his sarod. The Menaka ensemble was largely integrated into the film scene with an authentic piece of their stage repertoire and, measured by their function as extras, they are given quite a prominent appearance. It is also remarkable that the original sound recordings of the ensemble were used for the sound design of the scene and not replaced by a specially composed film score. So we see and hear them actually in sync with the music.

List of references:

Chaubey, S.K. 1958. Musicians I have met. Lucknow: Prakashan Shakha, Information Department, Uttar Pradesh.

Joshi, Damayanti. 1989. Madame Menaka. New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi.

Katz, Max. 2017. Lineage of Loss: Counternarratives of North Indian Music. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Schlaffke, Markus. 2021. „Die Rekonstruktion des Menaka-Archivs: Navigationen durch die Tanz-Moderne zwischen Kolkata, Mumbai und Berlin 1936-38“. Weimar: Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Misra, Susheela 1985. Music Makers of the Bhatkande College of Hindustani Music. A Sangeet Research Academy Publication