Specific Discipline

Sitar

सितार

"Learn to shape raga phrases with the mizrab, movable frets and meend."

Fretted strings Melodic study

The sitar is a plucked, fretted, long-necked lute of Hindustani classical music, with movable frets, sympathetic strings and a gourd body, played with a wire mizrab.

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Quick Facts

Tradition

Hindustani classical

Instrument family

Long-necked plucked lute

Fingerboard

Curved, movable frets

Plectrum

Mizrab

Repertoire

Raga and gat

Overview

The sitar (सितार) is a plucked, fretted, long-necked lute of Hindustani classical music. It has curved, movable frets, a set of played strings with sympathetic strings beneath them, and a gourd resonator. Players pluck it with a wire plectrum called the mizrab, worn on the right index finger.

The right hand sounds each note with a mizrab stroke while the left index and middle fingers stop the string at the frets or pull it sideways to bend the pitch. Together they shape the phrases of a raga, the melodic framework of a performance.

Much of the repertoire rests on the gat, a fixed instrumental composition set in a taal (rhythmic cycle) and often accompanied on tabla. The player returns to it between variations. A widely described concert order opens with alap, an unmetered exploration of the raga, moves into jor, where a steady pulse enters, often reaches jhala, a fast passage, and then turns to gats.

The tradition passes from teacher to student through the guru-shishya relationship, and formal curricula stress learning face to face. Before choosing lessons, ask how you will practise on a sitar at home and how the teacher introduces tuning and fitting the mizrab.

Part of Hindustani Classical

Hindustani classical instrumental music is North Indian raga music played on instruments such as sitar, sarod, sarangi, bansuri and tabla, each with its own technique.

Historical Timeline

Sources disagree on who developed the sitar, and none read here supports a single inventor. Popular belief credits the poet Amir Khusrau (1253 to 1325), yet the word sitar does not occur in his writings, and no written or pictorial source shows the instrument for more than three centuries after his death. Later oral sources name an eighteenth-century musician, Khusrau Khan. The name comes from Persian words meaning "three strings". The historian Allyn Miner tentatively concludes that the sitar reached Delhi from the northwest in the first half of the eighteenth century, developing from the Persian and Central Asian setar.

Indian musicians widened and lengthened the setar's neck, replaced silk frets with raised metal bars and fitted a flat platform bridge, borrowing features from the bin, or rudra veena. First an accompanying instrument for singing and dance, the sitar took on bin technique and replaced the bin as the leading solo instrument. After the Second World War, radio, recording and air travel carried the sitar to Europe and the United States, and Ravi Shankar began international tours in the 1950s.

1730s

Muraqqa-i Dehli account

The Muraqqa-i Dehli, Dargah Quli Khan's Persian account of Delhi in 1738, names a sitar player as the brother of the bin player Niyamat Khan 'Sadarang'. It is the earliest known written mention of the instrument.

Late eighteenth–nineteenth centuries

Masitkhani gat repertoire

Masitkhani gats are slow sitar compositions associated with Masit Khan, a Delhi musician of the late eighteenth century, whom Miner credits with the first solo sitar style. Musicians in Jaipur and elsewhere in Rajasthan later developed the style.

Late nineteenth century

The Lucknow sur pyar

The sur pyar, made in late nineteenth-century Lucknow, joins a sitar, a tambura and an esraj in a single instrument. Its inventors called it sur pyar, "lovely sound". The esraj section carries sympathetic strings; the sitar section has none.

1905

Imdad Khan's gramophone recordings

The Gramophone Company recorded Imdad Khan (c.1848 to 1920), one of the earliest sitarists on disc, in 1905, according to the historian Allyn Miner.

1997

Calcutta sitar by Murari Adhikari

Murari Adhikari built this sitar in 1997, with seven melody and thirteen sympathetic strings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which holds it, notes its older style, popular in the early twentieth century, with a sound hole under the strings.

Playing Techniques

Strings, bridge and jawari

The buzzing tone comes from the main bridge: the strings touch its broad, slightly curved top as they vibrate, and this contact, called jawari, shapes tone and sustain. Players pluck a main melody string and drone strings, including the high chikari. Sympathetic strings (tarab) beneath the frets ring without being plucked.

The mizrab stroke

A mizrab is a wire plectrum worn on the right index finger. The left index and middle fingers stop the main string at the frets. One teaching system names the strokes da (inward) and ra (outward), combined as dir and rda. Their patterns play against the cycle of the tabla.

Frets and meend

The frets are curved metal bars tied to the neck, movable to suit each raga. In meend, the player pulls the string to one side at one fret, raising the pitch in a continuous glide. In ghaseet, the finger slides along the fingerboard under one stroke.

Chikari, jor and jhala

The chikari strokes change through alap, jor and jhala. In alap the player brushes the two chikari strings with another string for a tanpura-like backdrop. In jhala, melody and chikari strokes alternate at speed.

Journey to Mastery

Follow this structured journey to master this discipline

Posture, mizrab and first strokes

With your teacher, settle a seated posture on the floor and the angle at which you hold the sitar, then fit the mizrab on your right index finger. Practise the basic inward and outward strokes on the main string. Pause between attempts, compare the sound, and repeat the stroke your teacher demonstrates.

20%

Sargam and hand coordination

Play a simple sargam pattern on the note names Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni, each note repeated up and down the scale. Land the mizrab stroke as your left finger reaches each fret. Keep a pace at which every note sounds clean, and listen as well as watch your hands. Repeat any change of fret that needs more control.

40%

Raga phrases and meend

Learn a short raga phrase from material your teacher chooses and mark the notes it arrives on. Listen to the phrase before you play it. Then work on meend, a glide in pitch made at one fret, through an exercise your teacher demonstrates. Compare the starting and arriving notes before you join the glide to the phrase.

60%

Gat and taal

Learn one short gat in the taal your teacher chooses and find where it starts in the cycle. Recite the taal's theka, the tabla stroke pattern of the cycle, with hand beats while your teacher or a tabla recording keeps time. Then play the gat and practise its return to the starting point against that pulse.

80%

Develop a short performance

Take a passage you can play cleanly and add one variation your teacher gives, such as a toda or a tan, played between returns of the gat. Keep it within the raga and taal. Record a complete attempt, choose one point to correct, then play the passage again with that correction.

100%