Adnan Khan

Adnan Khan is a Grammy-nominated sitar player who works in the gayaki ang, the approach that shapes the instrument after the singing voice. He lives in Delhi, in a family that has played this music for generations. A plucked string starts dying the moment it sounds, so a sitarist who wants it to sing has to carry the note somewhere else: into the meend that bends one swara into the next, into the krintan that sounds a note without striking it again. That is the work the gayaki ang asks for, and it is what his hands were trained to do.

He took his first lessons from his maternal grandfather, the late Ustad Zafar Ahmed Khan, a sitar player of Delhi, at the family house in Daryaganj that the musicians of that quarter knew as Mousiqi Manzil. The instrument had run through that house for generations and he grew up hearing it before he could hold it. He goes on training with his father, the sitar player Ustad Saeed Khan, who set the standard of tone and of raagdari that his playing still answers to. Between the two of them he had a teacher in the room for most of his childhood.

The gayaki ang reached him through his uncle Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan, a khayal singer who has gathered one of the largest archives of bandishes in Indian music. From 2009 to 2013 Adnan Khan held a senior A-grade scholarship at the ITC Sangeet Research Academy in Kolkata and studied there under the same teacher. Four years beside a singer rather than a sitarist changed what he listens for. It taught him where to breathe, how long to hold a swara before it has to move, and how much of a phrase to leave unsaid. A bandish learned from a voice arrives with its words attached, and the words decide the phrasing. He came out of those years with bandishes that most sitarists know only as songs.

Melody leads in his playing. The tone stays even across the string, and the swaras of a raga keep their shape through the fastest taans. He returns to Shuddha Kalyan, an early evening raga that climbs on five notes and leaves the fourth and the seventh for the descent, and to Miyan ki Malhar, the monsoon raga that sets its two nishads against each other. Shahana, a Kanada raga of the late night, sits in his repertoire alongside them. He closes a concert with a dhun or a thumri, where the singing line has nowhere to hide. Zuheb Ahmed Khan and Zargham Khan play tabla with him, and he has recorded Shuddha Kalyan with Ustad Akram Khan.

He first played in public at eight. Since then he has performed at the Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan in Jalandhar, the oldest festival of Indian classical music, at Kal Ke Kalakar in Mumbai, at the ITC Sangeet Sammelan and the MTV India Music Summit, and for the Ustad Vilayat Khan Foundation. At Chandigarh in 2016 he opened with Shuddha Kalyan in a slow gat and finished on the Afghani dhun Anar Anar. Abroad he has played the World Music Festival in Turkmenistan and concerts in Bangladesh, Bahrain and the Maldives. His sitar features on Sounds of Kumbha, nominated for Best Global Music Album at the 68th Grammy Awards. In November 2026 he tours the United Kingdom with KalaSudha on A Hundred Strings, beside the santoor player Vinay Desai and Ustad Akram Khan on tabla.