Sites of Memory in Hindustani Music: Yusuf Ali Khan and the Sitar Shops of Lucknow

Abstract

In late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century North India, musical instrument shops served as important meeting places where musicians overturned the feudal hierarchy of the royal court, forging bonds of camaraderie across social, musical and familial lines. This article explores the alternative socio-musical world of the instrument shop through a study of the sitar shops of Lucknow, focusing especially on the life of Yusuf Ali Khan, an influential but largely forgotten sitarist who was also a renowned instrument maker. Positing that dominant spaces and places of cultural production (such as the royal courts) shape our historical understandings, the article argues that minor sites of memory (such as the sitar shops of Lucknow) offer counter-narratives of Hindustani music history that illuminate unexpected dimensions of the larger tradition.

Keywords:

• Hindustani Music
• Lucknow
• Yusuf Ali Khan
• Musical Instrument Shops
• Sitar Makers
• Space
• Place
• Sites of Memory
• Counter-narrative
• Feudalism

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

Parts of this research were generously funded by Fulbright-Hays, the American Musicological Society (through the Harold Powers World Travel Fellowship for Research on Music), the Reves Center for International Studies and the College of William and Mary. I am grateful to Jonathan Glasser for his insightful comments and to Matt Rahaim for his extensive engagement with this article in its successive drafts. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their rigorous critical commentary and suggestions for improvement. This article is dedicated to Qamar Ali, a true gentleman of Lucknow.

Notes

¹ Musical instrument stores and workshops have been overlooked not only in the literature on Hindustani music but in music scholarship generally. An exception to this lacuna is found in a small number of recent works focusing on the guitar. These include Guest-Scott's article on genre and guitar lessons, in which the author takes seriously music stores as important sites within an ‘organologically organized social network’ (2008: 437), as well as works by Kies (2013) and Dawe and Dawe (2001) that explore the cultural worlds of guitar makers in Mexico and Spain, respectively. Regarding Indian musical instruments, the only sources I have encountered that focus substantially on the craft of instrument making are Hackleman (2002), Koch (2011), Rao (2000) and Roda (2013).

² The author of the conference proceedings notes that Yusuf Ali Khan played ‘the Raga Vasant on Sitar. He showed special skill in what is known as the “zara” [jhālā]. He also played the Sohni Raga, and with this, it being midnight, the engagements of the 9th January came to a close’ (Report 1925: 56).

³ Sangeet Natak Akademi was created in 1952 as a national academy for music, dance and drama, and gave its first awards in the areas of sitar and sarod to Allauddin Khan (sarod) in 1952, Hafiz Ali Khan (sarod) in 1953, and Yusuf Ali Khan (sitar) in 1958. The next musicians to win the awards in those categories after Yusuf Ali Khan were Ravi Shankar (sitar) in 1962 and Ali Akbar Khan (sarod) in 1963 (Report 2007).

⁴ Stephen Slawek writes that Ravi Shankar ‘characterizes his own style as a mixture of his training with Allauddin Khan and influences from other musicians whose styles appealed to him’ (1991: 174). Slawek specifies that the two sitarists who most influenced Ravi Shankar outside his gharana were ‘Rameshvar Pathak and Yusuf Ali Khan’, whom Slawek describes as ‘two well-known sitar masters of the early twentieth century’ (Slawek 1991: 179, fn. 5).

⁵ Ravi Shankar is clearly referencing Yusuf Ali Khan's shop on Latouche Road, which he calls Aminabad. Aminabad is not a road, but a densely populated market section of Lucknow bordered on one side by Latouche Road.