Most instruments, though definitely not ugly (just look at the sitar) are more made for function, rather than form. The taus (Persian for peacock) however, seems to have been made with the opposite purpose in mind. Just look at it!
The taus is said to have been invented when the Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, and some of his companions, were resting under a tree after singing and playing stringed instruments, with their instruments lying on the ground. All of a sudden, a peacock came up to them, and let out a cry, which made all of the instruments’ strings resonate. The Guru liked the sound so much that he resolved to make an instrument which captured it beautifully, thus leading to the invention of the taus.
However, one should not be unfair to the taus; its voice is just as beautiful as its outward appearance, and is definitely not an instrument which prizes looks more than performance. If you don’t believe us, look at the video below!
Save the Sitar is a website dedicated to promoting and preserving Pakistan’s classical music. Join our growing community to help further our cause!
Dr. Lowell Lybarger’s Introduction to the World of the Sitar
Dr. Lowell Lybarger is a tabla player and the current director of the Music Lab at the Arkansas Tech University. He has also been a visiting professor at the NCA, where he was a mentor to Ali Ayub. He inspired him to start his research project on the Sitar gharanas of Pakistan, and has written a foreword for it below.
It is a pleasure and an honor to provide a foreword to this invaluable scholarly work on the Pakistani sitar traditions authored by Muhammad Ali Ayub, and now propagated by the up-and-coming young scholars, Muneeb and Mubeen Ifan Chaudhary.
For many years, I have known about the often neglected but brilliant classical traditions of music and instrument making of the Punjab province of Pakistan. Yet, when I conducted my own research in the 1990s and early 2000s, I knew that I was merely scratching the surface of deep layers of musical history and culture that few were aware of nor appreciated. This is quite evident in the research that Ali Ayub has performed and gifted to future generations of sitar students and music cognoscenti in Pakistan and beyond.
Ali Ayub was uniquely qualified to conduct this research due to his extensive background in both western and eastern music traditions from his ability to play the sitar, and most importantly, due to his inquisitive mind and powerful intellect. Contrary to what most contemporary sitar connoisseurs and even many performers realize, the history of sitar in Pakistan is very rich, and involves many gharanas and silsile. Music recordings of sitar began with the phonograph and sped up with mass LP and cassette production, and has now sky-rocketed with digital technologies and near-instantaneous global communication through social media. The great irony is that while a lot of information is readily available about the diversity and complexity of sitar traditions in both India and to a lesser extent Pakistan, few would even realize to consider traditions outside of the two most famous silsile: the gayaki ang associated with the late Ustad Vilayat Khan and the tantrakari ang associated with the late Pandit Ravi Shankar.
The sitar research conducted by Ali Ayub provides a wealth of historical, biographical, and musical data that aptly demonstrates how the sitar of Pakistan (and India) involves musical traditions and individual performers that cannot be adequately classified as exclusively gayaki ang or tantrakari ang. These two polar depictions of the sitar, however popular they might be at the present time, do not reflect the sublime variations and complexity of this magnificent musical instrument. Interestingly, the trend to gravitate to one of these styles through instant access to recordings of their representatives, past and present, is a sociomusical force that is difficult to counter. This makes the material documented in Ali Ayub’s thesis all the more important for enabling performers and listeners to realize possibilities beyond the current trends.
In a world of increasing access to recording technologies, performing musicians and electronic music producers have a great opportunity to promote their style or their brand of music performance, yet they face a tremendous challenge: musical originality. This is where the research available at the Musicology Department of the National College of Arts, as established by the consummate musicologist and journalist Sarwat Ali, will provide a treasure trove of musical possibilities for future generations of musicians and listeners. In this regard, I am deeply grateful for the work done by Ali Ayub on the legacy of the sitar and for Muneeb and Mubeen’s most excellent website that promotes it as one-step further towards global communities recognizing the illustrious legacy of the music of Pakistan.
Lowell H. Lybarger, PhD, MLIS
Arkansas Tech University
Save the Sitar is a website dedicated to promoting and preserving Pakistan’s classical music. Join our growing community to help further our cause!
Professor Allyn Miner’s Review of Ali Ayub’s Thesis
Allyn Miner is a professor emeritus in the Department of South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a sitar player and the author of Sitar and Sarod in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1997) and the Minqar-i Musiqar: Hazrat Inayat Khan’s 1912 work on Indian music theory and practice (2016). She visited the National College of Arts in Lahore in 2017 as visiting faculty. We were thus overjoyed when she kindly consented to reviewing our project with Ali Ayub.
Muhammad Ali Ayub’s thesis is the first-ever account of the classical sitar players of modern Pakistan. This eye-opening work begins with the stories of dozens of musicians who have carried family traditions over many decades despite fading public recognition. We have here a treasure trove of life stories, a fine collection of photographs, many rare, and full genealogical charts of five important stylistic sitar lineages (gharanas) based in Pakistan.
In the second part Ali Ayub gives an introduction to sitar music and considers the stylistic features of the five gharanas. Recordings by some of the great Pakistani sitarists are the basis for notations given in chart form here. Techniques, phrasings, ornaments, formats, and pacings are discussed and the defining characteristics of each gharana are summarized. An important point made is that sitar music in Pakistan survives in distinctive styles, having developed independent of trends in India and in global world music.
The thesis concludes with comments on the music of current players, some of whom perform all over the world. This excellent work is being posted by Save the Sitar in an effort to make research on classical music in Pakistan more available than it has been.
Save the Sitar is an exciting project. May it grow and gain support from a wide readership! Muneeb and Mubeen Irfan Chaudhary’s enthusiasm is infectious. The project is so worthy: interviews with nearly forgotten players and craftsmen; ideas on how to approach and hear rag music anew; appreciations of lesser known classical instruments. And most of all its outreach to young listeners. It’s time that the traditions of classical music in Pakistan be rediscovered and take a deserved place in the global reach of rag music.
Save the Sitar is a website dedicated to promoting and preserving Pakistan’s classical music. Join our growing community to help further our cause!
Bade Ghulam Ali Khan was a legendary classical singer, with an emphasis on the classical. He refused out of hand to work in the film industry, despite many requests from well-known film and music directors. He restricted himself only to classical music; which is why it was so surprising when he actually agreed to work in a certain movie – the famous Mughal-e-Azam
When approached by the director, he deliberately asked for a huge sum of money, 25000 Indian rupees. It may not seem like much at this time, but just to put things in perspective, even celebrated singers like Lata Mangeshkar or Muhammad Rafi were being paid around 500 rupees at that time, so he was demanding fifty times the normal amount of money! Surprisingly, the director agreed at once, even giving him an advance.
When the fateful day came, the singer threw a fit due to the studio settings, demanding that it be set up like a traditional baithak. After the settings had been adjusted to his liking, he refused to perform until the scene for which he was singing was shown to him. That scene had not even been recorded yet, forcing the director to get it quickly recorded and shown to the artist, who only then agreed to perform. Talk about finicky! Well, at least all this fuss yielded two beautiful songs, which you must listen to here
Save the Sitar is a website dedicated to promoting and preserving Pakistan’s classical music. Join our growing community to help further our cause!
Legend has it when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb banned music, his court musicians decided to appeal to his sense of mercy to save their livelihood. One Friday, as Aurangzeb was going to the mosque, he saw an elaborate funeral procession being carried by the musicians, who were ‘crying aloud with great grief, and many signs of feeling’. Upon Aurangzeb’s questioning, they answered that ‘the king’s orders had killed Music, therefore they were bearing her to her grave’. Unfazed, Aurangzeb calmly told them to make sure to bury Music well!
While Aurangzeb’s alleged “burial of music” is supposed to have spanned his (admittedly long) reign, classical music recovered and developed to reach new heights. Today we can see history uncannily repeat itself more than three hundred years later as the absence of a ruthless monarch does not hinder classical music’s miserable and final decent to the grave: we have lamented the destructive forces of pop music, cultural intolerance, governmental inaction and corporate commercialism many a times on this website. These economic and cultural forces have forced musicians into unemployment and to leave their art to die; a lucky fraction have gained employment as pop musicians or other low-paying jobs like kulfi sellers.
With the imminent death of Pakistani classical music, what’s worse is the lack of written material that would have forever captured this art in the form of words on a paper or bits on a hard drive. To quote Albert Camus, classical music’s impending fate is that “when [it] die[s], [it] die[s], and nothing remains”. However, there are a handful of researchers out there who are playing their individual, but invaluable role in the documentation of their terminal patient. Ali Ayub is one of them.
Ali Ayub is a researcher and musician whose graduation dissertation, “Sitar Music in Pakistan”, is a detailed analysis of the histories and styles of the country’s major sitar gharanas. Having interviewed the foremost exponents of the sitar and completed arguably the most extensive fieldwork the discipline has ever seen, his work’s significance is hard to put in words!
So let’s come to Ali Ayub himself. Born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital, his first exposure to music was not classical in the least: he discovered progressive rock as a teenager, began playing the guitar with his friends and even formed bands and did gigs. However, the turning point in his musical journey came during his years as a student in commerce college, when he stumbled across a CD of performances by Ustad Vilayat Khan and Ravi Shankar. Undaunted by its “heaviness” on the ears, Ali Ayub was astounded by its sheer beauty and stylistic novelty. He realized his true calling in life and resolved to learn the sitar, despite the absence of precedent in his family. The lack of any reliable financial and academic resources did not hold him back and he began taking classes at NCA in 2005.
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An eye opening experience followed. Apart from learning the sitar, Ali Ayub attended performances by the likes of the great Wasifuddin Dagar and was exposed to the arts of Pakistan like never before. He learnt about everything from South Asian history to the philosophy and analysis of music from national treasures like educationist Arfa Sayeda Zehra and polymath Raza Kazim. His voracious appetite for knowledge led him beyond the classroom and to the library, where he discovered the overwhelmingly disproportionate focus on India in classical music academia. The lack of a consistent cultural policy in Pakistan had led to security issues for foreign researchers and a pitiful dearth of resources for local ones. Inspired by the work of University of Pennsylvania professor Allyn Miner and horrified by the lack of academic work in Pakistan, Ali Ayub resolved to conduct unparalleled fieldwork and research on Pakistan’s under-documented sitar-playing tradition.
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In his quest to document the five major sitar gharanas found in present day Pakistan, Ali Ayub travelled across the country, from Lahore to Karachi via Hyderabad. Most sitarists refused to share their knowledge, offering excuses ranging from busy schedules to deaths in the family (of which we assume a fraction must have been genuine). This “gharana mentality”, i.e. jealously guarding musical knowledge from outsiders, continues to this day. Even when gently persuaded to share what they knew, sitarists of the same gharana would often give inconsistent information, forcing Ali Ayub to painstakingly corroborate each fact. This labor of love cannot be praised enough, but the ever modest researcher credits his success largely to his mentor Dr. Lowell Lybarger, a student of tabla maestro Mian Shaukat Hussain. Dr. Lybarger taught Ali Ayub the art of developing a bond of trust with musicians during his years at NCA when they would visit and interview musicians on weekends. The apprentice would assist the expert with his equipment, keenly observe his every action and follow his lead during delicate rituals like the bestowment of nazar (the money given to show one’s appreciation of a performance).
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Sadly, Ali Ayub’s research paints a grim picture of the current condition of sitar music in our country. While we may talk sentimentally of preserving our classical heritage, artists have to put bread on the table. A heartbreaking majority had resigned themselves to a fate of taking their art to the grave and hoping for a better future for their children in some other profession. Not too differently, Ali Ayub is devastatingly pragmatic and has low expectations from his research: it might help other researchers or encourage some individuals to explore classical music.
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Does a spark of hope remain? On one hand we see inevitable cultural and economic doom steadily encircle its limping prey while on the other hand are a few individuals tirelessly dedicated to the preservation of classical music. Perhaps this metaphorical anecdote can shed some warm light on today’s bleak situation: when Ali Ayub visited Ustad Abid Khan in Hyderabad, the former sitarist was selling kulfis in the street to make ends meet. His son, Shahid Khan, was going to leave the sitar for a financially safer profession but Ali Ayub tried to convince him otherwise. The result: today Shahid Khan enjoys a reasonably successful career as a sitarist.
So let’s do our best to ensure that the classical music survives this dark night.
دل ناامید تو نہیں ناکام ہی تو ہے
لمبی ہے غم کی شام مگر شام ہی تو ہے
(فیض احمد فیض)
I haven’t lost hope, but just a fight, that’s all;
the night of suffering lengthens, but it is just a night, that’s all.
(Faiz Ahmad Faiz)
Save the Sitar is a website dedicated to promoting and preserving Pakistan’s classical music. Join our growing community to help further our cause!
Save the Sitar 