Sitar

• 1. Introduction

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  The sitar carries a name built from Persian mathematics. The word itself is derived from the Persian sehtar, meaning three strings. That etymology is a clue to the instrument's origins long before it became one of the most recognizable sounds in the world. How did a three-stringed Persian lute become a complex instrument with up to 21 strings, played from India to London to Los Angeles? The answers run through a Mughal court, a generation of rock musicians, and a centuries-long argument about who really invented what.

• 2. A Name Built From Numbers

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  Persian string instrument names, according to musicologist Curt Sachs, were assembled from the word tar, meaning string, combined with a number. Dutar means two strings. Setar means three. Chatar means four, and panchtar means five. The sitar followed this pattern, arriving in the Indian subcontinent as a variant of the setar, the small three-stringed Persian instrument of Abbasid or Safavid origin. The earliest written mention of the sitar dates to 1739, in a text called the Muraqqa-i-Dehli, written by Dargah Quli Khan during the reign of Muhammad Shah Rangila. That reference places the instrument firmly in the Mughal world, well before it became the layered, resonant thing it is today.

• 3. Origins and Invention

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  Khusrau Khan, an eighteenth-century figure of the Mughal court, is identified by modern scholarship as the inventor of the sitar. He is believed to have developed it from the Persian setar, transforming the small three-stringed original into something new. An older tradition credited the medieval Sufi poet and inventor Amir Khusrow, who died around 1325, with creating the instrument in the thirteenth century. Scholars consider this attribution discredited. No text from Khusrow's era uses the word sitar, and a vague statement in a nineteenth-century work by Captain N. Augustus Willard may have confused the famous poet with the later Mughal-era Khusrau Khan. The earliest compositional style written specifically for the sitar appeared in the mid-eighteenth century, attributed to Firoz Khan, who was either the son or nephew of Khusrau Khan. The instrument's shape continued to shift as it passed through different hands. The bowl, originally made from glued wooden lathes, was remade in gourd. The neck widened. A musician named Masid Khan added two more strings. Imdad Khan introduced the sympathetic strings that ripple beneath the frets. The modern seven-string sitar was created by Allauddin Khan.

• 4. How It Is Built

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  A fully realized sitar can carry 18, 19, 20, or 21 strings. Six or seven of those run over the curved, raised frets and are played directly. The rest are sympathetic strings, known as tarb, taarif, or tarafdaar, which run underneath the frets and resonate in response to the played strings without being touched. The frets are movable, allowing fine tuning for different ragas. The instrument has two distinct bridges: the large bridge, called the badaa goraa, for the playing and drone strings, and the small bridge, the chota goraa, for the sympathetic strings. That wide, rounded shape of the main bridge is central to the sitar's characteristic tone. As a string vibrates, its length changes slightly as one edge traces along the curve, producing a cascade of overtones. Maintaining this quality by carefully shaping the bridge is called jawari, and many players rely on specialist instrument makers to manage it. Teak and tun wood, a variety of mahogany, are used for the neck and faceplate, while the resonating chambers are calabash gourds. The bridges are made from deer horn, ebony, or occasionally camel bone.

• 5. Two Schools of Style

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  Two dominant construction styles define the modern sitar. The instrumental style, sometimes called the Ravi Shankar style, is typically built from seasoned toon wood, elaborately decorated with floral and arabesque carvings, and fitted with thirteen sympathetic strings. It often carries a second resonator, a small pumpkin or pumpkin-like gourd attached to the neck. The best teak versions of this style come from wood aged for generations, and the sources of that old timber are guarded trade secrets. Instrument builders have been known to seek out teak columns salvaged from old colonial-era villas. The gayaki style, associated with Vilayat Khan, is plainer in decoration and shaped around a different approach to playing. Vilayat Khan developed a technique called gayaki ang, which uses the curved frets to imitate the melisma of vocal performance. By pulling the melody string down across the curved bottom of the fret, a player can reach a seven-semitone range from a single fingered note. Notable players added their own modifications: Nikhil Banerjee had a small extra bridge fixed at the top of the fingerboard for sustain. Among the most collectible instruments are older sitars from Rikhi Ram of Delhi and Hiren Roy of Kolkata.

• 6. Ravi Shankar and the West

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  Ravi Shankar, along with his tabla player Alla Rakha, began introducing Indian classical music to Western audiences in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The sitar's path into pop music ran through David Crosby, who championed Shankar's work and helped guide George Harrison toward the instrument. Harrison played sitar on three Beatles recordings: "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)", "Love You To", and "Within You Without You", made between 1965 and 1967. In 1966, Harrison began studying with Shankar and with Shankar's protege Shambhu Das. That same year, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones played sitar on "Paint It Black", and Dave Mason used it on Traffic's 1967 hits "Paper Sun" and "Hole in My Shoe". Shankar later called this wave of adoption "the great sitar explosion". Speaking to KRLA Beat in July 1967, he described the shift: "Many people, especially young people, have started listening to sitar since George Harrison, one of the Beatles, became my disciple. It is now the 'in' thing." Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin said he had owned a sitar before Harrison, acquired after a tour with the Yardbirds. Donovan's 1966 album Sunshine Superman featured Shawn Phillips on sitar, and Phillips returned for a track on the 1967 follow-up Mellow Yellow.

• 7. After the Explosion

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  The sitar's influence in Western music did not stop in the 1960s. Steve Howe of Yes played a Danelectro sitar guitar on the band's Close to the Edge album and on "To Be Over" from the 1974 album Relayer. Deepak Khazanchi played sitar and tanpura on "It Can Happen" from Yes' 1983 album 90125. Paul Young's 1985 cover of Hall and Oates's "Everytime You Go Away" included an electric sitar played by John Turnbull. Not every sitar sound in pop music came from a real sitar. Many pop recordings used the electric sitar, a solid-body instrument with a guitar-like design far removed from the acoustic Indian original. The Kinks' 1965 single "See My Friends" was widely heard as featuring a sitar, but it was actually a low-tuned drone guitar. Robbie Krieger's guitar part on the Doors' 1967 track "The End" drew heavily on Indian ragas without using the instrument at all. Starting in the late 1970s, Pakistan International Airlines began featuring sitar music in its in-flight programming, using the instrument's sound to evoke a sense of homeland for passengers of the Pakistani diaspora.