Pluck a single string on a sitar and something odd happens. The note leaves your finger, and a half second later it keeps going without you. A dozen strings you never touched start humming back, thin and silver, as if the instrument had been eavesdropping on itself.
Western listeners often assume it’s a pedal or a studio trick. It isn’t. It’s a nineteenth-century workshop technique, refined by ear over generations, that happens to sit on the wrong side of a law of physics nobody had written down yet when the technique was invented.
Nobody actually agrees on where the sitar came from. For generations, Indian music schools credited the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Amir Khusrau with inventing it by re-stringing an older veena. It’s a good story, and poet-saints make convincing founders, but no document from Khusrau’s century, or for four hundred years after it, mentions a sitar at all.
The earliest written reference turns up in 1739, nearly half a millennium after he died. Most scholarship now credits an eighteenth-century court musician named Khusrau Khan instead, whose name is close enough to the poet’s that later writers seem to have mixed the two up. He appears to have adapted the Persian setar, a three-stringed lute still played in Iran, onto the gourd-bodied resonating chambers of older Indian veenas. Seh means three in Persian, tar means string, and a modern sitar carries eighteen to twenty-one strings, so the name is a fossil describing an instrument that outgrew it centuries back.
Building one takes real time. It starts with a large, dried gourd, hollowed out and shaped into the tumba, the round chamber that gives the sitar its belly. No two gourds grow to identical dimensions, so no two sitars come out quite the same size. A flat wooden soundboard, the tabli, gets cut to fit that gourd, and a long, hollow neck of seasoned toon wood or teak joins it through a carved wooden collar. Sometimes a second, smaller gourd is added near the top just for resonance and balance, since the player sits cross-legged with the instrument braced against a bare foot.
Twenty curved frets run along that neck, tied on with thread instead of fixed in place, which looks like a weakness until you realize what it buys you. A sitarist can nudge each fret to retune the intervals for whatever raga is being performed that day, something a guitarist locked into fixed frets never gets to do.
Six or seven main strings run over those frets, some for melody, others tuned as drone and rhythm strings called chikari. Underneath run eleven to thirteen sympathetic strings called taraf, tuned to that day’s raga. Nobody touches these directly. They resonate on their own whenever a matching pitch sounds above them, which is where that shimmering, unfinished halo around every note comes from.
Playing it involves a wire plectrum called a mizrab, worn on the right index finger to strike the melody strings, while the left hand does something most fretted instruments don’t allow: it pulls the string sideways across the fret instead of pressing straight down, bending the pitch by as much as a step and a half. That technique is called meend, and it’s why the sitar sounds closer to a human voice sliding between notes than to a piano’s fixed, separate pitches.
The part I find most interesting is the bridge. The main bridge is carved from deer antler or bone and left almost flat, with only the faintest curve across its top. That tiny curve is the whole trick, tuned by hand in a process called jawari, filing the surface down fractions of a millimeter at a time, and a skilled specialist can spend hours on a single bridge. Done properly, the string doesn’t just ring against it, it grazes the surface, buzzing in a steady collision that keeps shortening and lengthening its effective length many times a second.
In 1921, seven years before the discovery that would earn him India’s first Nobel Prize in the sciences, the physicist C. V. Raman published a paper on Indian stringed instruments after getting curious why sitars sounded nothing like a European orchestra. What he found ran against a rule that had held since Hermann von Helmholtz’s nineteenth-century acoustics, which says that where you pluck a string decides which overtones sound. On a sitar, because of that curved bridge, every harmonic fires no matter where you pluck, the string wrapping and unwrapping around the bridge as it vibrates instead of stopping cleanly against it. That mismatch, tuned by hand long before anyone wrote it down as a formula, is where the instrument’s whole tone comes from.
By the mid-twentieth century the sitar had split into two rival schools, built around two men who barely tolerated each other. Ravi Shankar trained in the Maihar gharana under Allauddin Khan, and his sitars reflected it: large, often double-gourded, carrying extra bass strings that pushed the range toward a surbahar, the sitar’s bass cousin. Vilayat Khan, heir to the Imdadkhani gharana of Etawah, went the other way, keeping his instruments smaller and plainer, strung for speed and a hard, clean tone over depth.
The rivalry has a founding story. In 1952, at a concert billed as a duet between Shankar and the sarod player Ali Akbar Khan at Delhi’s Constitution Club, a twenty-four-year-old Vilayat Khan walked on uninvited and, by most accounts, stole the night, playing fast enough that the crowd was on its feet before Shankar’s own set had properly started. Shankar’s biographer records him leaving the stage afterward without a word. Reading past the legend, the real animosity looks smaller than advertised.
Vilayat Khan spoke warmly of Shankar in later interviews, and one biographer argues that most of the venom belonged to their fan bases rather than the musicians themselves. He’s also credited with gayaki ang, a style that imitates the singing voice through exaggerated meend, so convincingly that critics complained he made the sitar sound like it was trying to sing instead of play.
Long before any of that reached the West, Ravi Shankar had already been scoring film music in India. He wrote the soundtrack for Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy in the 1950s, and decades later scored the film Gandhi, which earned him an Academy Award nomination. The sitar in those scores does something almost opposite to what it does on a concert stage: instead of carrying a raga through a slow forty-minute unfolding, it sits inside a two-minute orchestral cue, doing the same job any other instrument would in a film score, then getting out of the way.
None of that mattered much outside India until a Beatle bought a cheap sitar from a London import shop in 1965. George Harrison used it, by his own later admission, badly, on “Norwegian Wood.” He wasn’t even the only one that year. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones played sitar on “Paint It Black,” and for a stretch half of London’s recording studios seemed to want one lying around. Ravi Shankar hadn’t even heard the recording when he first met Harrison that summer, and when he finally did hear it, his private opinion, admitted only years afterward, was that it sounded strange and clumsy. What he saw in Harrison at the time was a genuinely curious young man who wanted to learn it properly, and within a year Harrison was in India studying under him directly.
Shankar’s reach outside India wasn’t limited to rock musicians borrowing the sound for a few bars. In 1966 he recorded West Meets East with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, an album that set Indian classical technique directly against Western classical technique rather than blending the two into something smoother, and it won a Grammy. John Coltrane admired Shankar enough to name his son Ravi, born the year before that album, though the two musicians never really worked together in the way that detail makes it sound like they might have.
What happened after that had more to do with the wider cultural moment than with music. Shankar found himself, somewhat against his own wishes, turned into a psychedelic-era celebrity, playing to festival crowds at Monterey and Woodstock he later described, with visible discomfort, as behaving nothing like the audiences he knew from a classical recital. Eventually he said he needed to step back from the association and return to concert halls. An instrument built over centuries for slow, disciplined court performance had briefly become shorthand for a very different kind of noise, and Shankar, by his own account, never much liked it.
The training underneath all of this rarely gets mentioned when people talk about the instrument itself. A student in the classical tradition, the guru-shishya parampara, typically moves in with a teacher for years rather than taking scheduled lessons. Ravi Shankar himself described a stretch of roughly seven or eight years under Allauddin Khan where public performance wasn’t even the point yet, just getting the hands and the ear to a baseline the guru considered acceptable. Fingertips on the left hand develop hard calluses from years of pulling strings sideways across steel frets, and a serious student’s first few months are often just pain and a raw fingerboard before the calluses set in. None of that shows up in a recording. What you hear as fluid bending of pitch is the tail end of an apprenticeship most listeners never see the front half of.
Nikhil Banerjee, also trained in the Maihar tradition, never sought the kind of fame Shankar found, but people who study the instrument still talk about his playing as some of the cleanest technique on record. Anoushka Shankar, Ravi Shankar’s daughter and student, went the opposite direction from her father’s later discomfort with the spotlight: she deliberately mixes the sitar with electronic production and Western orchestration instead of keeping it inside the concert-hall tradition. Whether that counts as continuing the instrument’s story or wandering off from it depends on who in the family you ask.
The workshops keep at it too. Miraj, a town in Maharashtra, has built stringed instruments for generations, and sitars made there still go through the same gourd-and-antler process described above, by hand, with no shortcut for the jawari filing that a machine could do instead. A serious concert sitar from a shop like that can still take weeks to finish and isn’t cheap, which is part of why the instrument has stayed rare, and slow to mass-produce, compared to most instruments its age.
There’s a newer argument now too, about amplification. Fusion sessions and film scoring increasingly mic the sitar or fit it with an under-bridge pickup so it can hold its own inside a mixed band instead of vanishing under drums and bass, and traditionalists complain that a pickup flattens exactly the overtone chaos Raman spent a paper explaining, the same wraparound buzz that gives the instrument its whole character in the first place. Whether that turns out to be a real loss or just another round of the old fight between schools is, like everything else about this instrument, still unsettled.
By: Sannidhya Sinha Roy
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