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
Most accounts credit the sursingar to musicians of the Senia lineage, who trace their descent from Tansen. S. Krishnaswami's 1965 government reference names three brothers of the early nineteenth century, Piyar Khan, Jaffar Khan and Basit Khan, and records a minority view that Nawab Kalbe Ali Khan of Rampur first made it. Joydeep Mukherjee and the Senia-trained player Birendra Kishore Roy Choudhury credit Jaffar Khan alone, at the court of Kashi (Benares); Sourindro Mohun Tagore's nineteenth-century list names Piyar Khan. Accounts differ on the motive. Mukherjee and Suneera Kasliwal's reference book blame monsoon damp, which slackened the rabab's gut strings and skin. Roy Choudhury writes that Jaffar Khan built it to match the veena of Nirmal Shah. A Tribune feature says Senia masters, who kept the rudra veena within the family, used it to teach outside pupils.
Wazir Khan of Rampur taught it to Allauddin Khan, who carried it to Bengal. It declined as the sarod and sitar gained range and players found the heavy instrument hard to practise. By 1965 Krishnaswami called its tradition close to extinction.
From the Seni rabab
Senia musicians descended from Tansen rework the Seni rabab into a sturdier instrument for slow dhrupad alap. Most accounts credit Jaffar Khan, alone or with his brothers Piyar Khan and Basit Khan; one older list names Piyar Khan.
Senia masters at Rampur
Basit Khan's son Mohammad Ali Khan masters the sursingar at Rampur and later Lucknow. At Rampur, Bahadur Husain Khan teaches it to the princes Haider Ali and Sadat Ali. By 1889 one instrument has entered a New York museum collection.
Decline
Allauddin Khan and Radhika Mohan Maitra learn the sursingar from Senia and Shahjahanpur masters. In 1948 Maitra devises the mohan veena, drawing on the sarod and sursingar. Sarod and sitar, with their wider range, displace the sursingar.
Revival
Kolkata sarod player Joydeep Mukherjee researches and redesigns the sursingar, adds sympathetic strings and teaches it. He receives the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar for 2019, and in February 2023 Mann Ki Baat broadcasts his sursingar composition.
Playing Techniques
How the sursingar is built
The sursingar is a long-necked lute with no frets. A flat gourd forms the body, faced with a wooden soundboard, and joins a hollow wooden neck topped by a polished metal plate that serves as the fingerboard. Many instruments carry a second, smaller gourd near the head. Museum examples run from about 116 to 140 cm long, and a 2012 instrument in Berlin weighs 5.1 kg.
The design reworks the Seni rabab. Its makers swapped the rabab's skin belly for wood, its gut strings for metal and its wooden fingerboard for the metal plate; Joydeep Mukherjee tells a tradition that the change answered the rabab's dull sound in monsoon humidity. Stringing varies between instruments. S. Krishnaswami's 1965 reference gives six main strings on a flat bridge plus two for drone and rhythm, the chikari, while museum examples carry from six to fourteen pegs. The early instrument had no sympathetic strings, which ring without being plucked; some later and revived instruments add them.
How the sursingar is played
The player holds the sursingar slanting, the upper end on the left shoulder, as Krishnaswami describes. The right hand plucks with a wire plectrum, which Sourindro Mohun Tagore's list calls an iron jawa. The left-hand fingers stop the strings on the bare metal plate.
With no frets in the way, the fingers slide unhindered over the polished plate. The player can sustain meend, a continuous glide between notes, over long spans, and shape gamak, a heavy oscillation between notes. Low strings and long sustain suit the slow, note-by-note unfolding of dhrupad alap, while the chikari strings supply rhythmic strokes in the faster passages. Players drew on the technique of both the rudra veena and the rabab.
Music for the sursingar
Krishnaswami's 1965 reference restricts the sursingar's repertoire to serious genres, mainly dhrupad and dhamar, a form set to the 14-beat dhamar cycle. A recital develops the alap of a raga at slow, medium and fast tempo and as a rule ends in jhala, a fast passage of alternating melody and drone strokes, with the pakhawaj drum.
It belonged to the court and the chamber. Tagore's nineteenth-century list classes it as a drawing-room instrument, and Mukherjee describes its use in royal durbars and mehfils, private music gatherings. The rababiya gharana, the Senia school of rabab players, made a custom of playing it in the rainy season. Its technique also travelled. The sitar player Ilyas Khan absorbed it, with the technique of the rabab and the been (rudra veena), into his own playing.
Journey to Mastery
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Revival and Preservation
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