Indian Classical Music — Stream Rare Recordings by the Great Ustads & Pandits

Indian classical music is the art music of the subcontinent: a soloist improvising, at length and inside strict rules, on a melodic framework called a raag and a rhythmic cycle called a taal. It belongs to the whole of South Asia, on both sides of the northern border, which is why this page, like Saarey's archive, treats Pakistani classical music and Indian classical music as one northern tradition, shared across the subcontinent.

Three things set it apart from Western classical music. There is no score: a performance is made in the moment from a short fixed composition, the bandish, and a grammar absorbed over decades. There is no harmony in the Western sense: only a drone, a single melodic line and the cycle of the drum. And it is learned by ear, passed from ustad (or guru) to shagird (disciple), phrase by phrase, within lineages called gharanas.

Its theory is ancient. The Natyashastra, the Sanskrit treatise attributed to the sage Bharata, is dated by most scholars to between 200 BCE and 200 CE, and already treats scales and the rass — the feeling a performance exists to awaken. The thirteenth-century Sangita Ratnakara of Sarngadeva is still claimed as a foundational text by both of today's systems.

The music you can actually hear, though, is young. The first commercial recordings on the subcontinent were cut in Calcutta in 1902, and the recorded century since — from 78-rpm sides to the concert tapes of the 1960s and the mehfils of today — is what an archive like Saarey's exists to keep audible.

Start here: one evening raag, Yaman, one complete performance. Performances unfold over 15–60+ minutes; give the opening its time.

What the world calls Indian classical music is really two systems with a common ancestry. The northern system — shared across Pakistan and India, and the heart of Saarey's archive — and the southern Carnatic system of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana both rest on raag and taal, and both trace their theory to the same Sanskrit treatises.

They began to part from around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as the north absorbed Persian and Central Asian influence through the Delhi Sultanate and then the Mughal courts. Amir Khusrau (1253–1325), poet, musician and disciple of the Chishti saint Nizamuddin Auliya, is credited — in legend as much as in evidence — with fusing Persian and Indian singing and with the seeds of qawwali, tarana and khayal. Tansen, the dhrupad singer who joined Akbar's court in 1562, became the ancestor-figure to whom the north's lineages still trace themselves.

Where the two systems differ today:

• Repertoire. The north is built on khayal, dhrupad, thumri and the instrumental gat; the south on the kriti, the composed song shaped by Purandara Dasa (1484–1564) and perfected by the "Trinity" of Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri around 1800.
• Composition versus improvisation. Carnatic music is taught and sung through its compositions; the northern system treats the composition as a seed for long improvisation.
• Classification. The south groups its raags under 72 parent scales (melakarta), codified by Venkatamakhin in 1660; the north uses the ten thaats set out by V. N. Bhatkhande in the early twentieth century.
• Ensemble and ornament. A Carnatic concert usually seats violin and mridangam beside the voice; a northern one has tabla with sarangi or harmonium, and prizes the slow glide (meend) and oscillation (andolan) over the south's rapid gamaka.
• Time. The northern system ties its raags to hours of the day and to seasons far more strictly — the doctrine of samay.

One tradition, two homelands: the northern system does not stop at the border drawn across the northern plains in 1947. Its gharanas span it, and its greatest recorded voices include Pakistani ustads scarcely available on mainstream apps. For the northern system on its own terms, read its own page.

Listen: a northern khayal in Raag Darbari, then a Carnatic kriti in the same raag, Darbari Kanada — the same roots, two aesthetics.

A raag is not a scale, a key or a tune. It is a complete grammar for melodic improvisation: which notes belong, which are stressed, how the line may rise and fall, which phrase announces it, and what hour and feeling it belongs to. The Sanskrit root means "to colour" — a raag colours the mind.

Each raag has a parent scale, its thaat; an ascent and descent, the aroha and avaroha; a dominant note and its partner, the vadi and samvadi; a signature phrase, the pakar; a time of day, its samay; and a rass, the emotion it is built to evoke. Several hundred raags are in active practice; a few dozen account for most of what has been recorded. Saarey indexes 171 of them.

Eight to know first:

• Raag Yaman — Kalyan thaat, early evening. All seven notes, with a sharpened fourth (tivra Ma) as its only altered note; the raag many students learn first, and the clearest door into the music.
• Raag Darbari — Asawari thaat, deep night. Grave and unhurried, with a slow oscillation on its flattened third and sixth; tradition says Tansen brought it to Akbar's darbar, hence the name.
• Raag Bhairvi — Bhairvi thaat, the concert's farewell. By convention the last raag of the evening, tender and devotional; thumris and bhajans live here.
• Raag Maalkons (Malkauns) — Bhairvi thaat, midnight. Five notes only, Re and Pa omitted; serious, meditative, and among the oldest raags in the tradition.
• Raag Baagheshri — Kafi thaat, late evening. The raag of a woman waiting for her beloved: restful on the surface, longing underneath.
• Raag Marwa — Marva thaat, sunset. A flattened second, a sharpened fourth and no fifth at all — the unsettled, solemn hour when the light goes.
• Raag Bhimpalasi — Kafi thaat, afternoon. Poignant and yearning, built around Ma and Sa.
• Raag Megh — Kafi thaat, the monsoon. "Megh" is the gathering cloud; with Mian Ki Malhaar, the raag said to summon rain.

The tradition also painted its raags. The Raagmala, the "garland of raags", gave each raag a face, a family and a scene; Saarey's gallery of Raagmala paintings sits beside the recordings for that reason.

Listen: follow the clock — evening raags, late-night raags, raags for the rain.

If the raag organises pitch, the taal organises time. A taal is a fixed cycle of beats (matras) grouped into sections (vibhags), some stressed with a clap (tali), one marked by a wave of the hand (khali). The tabla voices the cycle as a pattern of syllables, the theka, repeating beneath the soloist throughout.

Everything returns to sam, the first beat. A soloist may wander for many cycles, then calculate a threefold cadence — a tihai — that lands on sam exactly as the drummer does. That shared arrival is the moment audiences erupt.

The cycles you will meet most:

• Teen Taal — 16 beats in four fours; claps on 1, 5 and 13, a wave on 9. The backbone of most khayal and instrumental music.
• Ek Taal — 12 beats, favoured for slow, expansive khayal.
• Jhap Taal — 10 beats grouped 2+3+2+3, with an asymmetric lilt.
• Rupak — 7 beats grouped 3+2+2; unusually, its first beat is a wave, not a clap.
• Dadra (6) and Keherwa (8), the light cycles of thumri, ghazal and folk; Chautal (12) and Dhamar (14), the dhrupad cycles played on the pakhawaj.

Tempo, or laya, moves through vilambit (slow), madhya (medium) and drut (fast), and a full performance usually travels from the first to the last. Shaping tempo itself — subdividing it, pulling against it — is layakari, one of the highest rhythmic arts.

Listen: a tabla solo makes the cycle audible. Ustad Shaukat Hussain Khan's Teen Taal (1961) is sixteen beats you can count on your fingers.

Khayal — the reigning vocal form. The word is Persian for "imagination", and that is the point: a short bandish, a few lines in Braj, Urdu or Persian, becomes the seed for thirty minutes to an hour of elaboration, in two halves — the slow bada khayal and the fast chhota khayal — built through alap, taans and cadences toward sam. It grew gradually in the Delhi Sultanate era and took its classical shape at the court of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–1748), where Niyamat Khan "Sadarang" composed khayals still sung today. Full definition: khayal.

Dhrupad — the oldest surviving form: austere, slow and majestic. Associated with the Gwalior court of Raja Man Singh Tomar (fl. 1486–1516) and with Tansen, it opens with a long unmetered alap that passes into pulsed nom-tom before the composition enters, sung in four sections to the barrel drum pakhawaj rather than the tabla. Ornament is sparse; the purity of each note is everything. Full definition: dhrupad.

Thumri — the romantic, semi-classical voice of the tradition. It flowered in nineteenth-century Lucknow at the court of Wajid Ali Shah and later in Benares; its texts, in Braj Bhasha and Awadhi, dwell on love and longing, often through Radha and Krishna. The raag is handled freely — Khamaj, Kafi, Bhairvi, Peelu and Pahari are its homes — and feeling outranks grammar. Full definition: thumri.

Tarana — the virtuosic close to many khayal concerts: fast, strict taal, and syllables (na, dir, dim, tom) chosen for sound rather than sense. Tradition credits Amir Khusrau with it.

Qawwali — Sufi devotional music, the tradition's ecstatic cousin. Sung for some seven centuries at shrines across South Asia as part of sama, the Chishti practice of listening, it is a group form: a lead singer, harmonium, tabla or dholak, a chorus clapping and repeating the lines, and poetry in Persian, Urdu, Punjabi and Braj. The Qawwal Bachche of Delhi trace their lineage to Khusrau himself; Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the Sabri Brothers took the form to the world.

Ghazal — poetry first, music second. Arabic in origin, it flowered in Persian and then in Urdu: rhyming couplets with a refrain, on love, loss and separation. Sung in the subcontinent as ghazal gayaki, it draws on raag and the lighter taals, and in Pakistan it had two sovereigns — Mehdi Hassan, the Shahenshah-e-Ghazal, and Farida Khanum, the Malika-e-Ghazal. Beside it sits the kafi, the Punjabi and Sindhi poetry of the Sufi saints sung in raag — see Sufi music and the kafis of the Sufi saints.

Bhajan — the devotional song of the Bhakti tradition, its words from poet-saints such as Kabir, Meera Bai, Surdas and Tulsidas. A bhajan can be a simple morning melody or a full classical rendition in Bhairvi, Khamaj or Jhinjhoti; the khayal masters made the second kind their own.

Listen: one of each in an evening — a khayal in Darbari, a dhrupad alap, a thumri in Pahari, a tarana, a qawwali, a ghazal by Mehdi Hassan, and a bhajan in Bhairvi to close.

The voice is the supreme instrument, and every instrumental style imitates it. Beneath the voice sits the tanpura, a four-stringed drone that plays no melody and never stops: it fixes the tonic, and every note of the raag is heard against it.

The melodic instruments each carry a lineage. The sitar, with its sympathetic strings and resonant timbre, is the most recognised; its players build from alap through jor and jhala into a composed gat. The sarod is fretless, deeper and weightier. The sarangi, bowed and strung with dozens of sympathetic strings, is said to be the instrument closest to the human voice and was for centuries the vocalist's shadow. The bamboo bansuri, the hundred-stringed santoor and, in Pakistan, the harmonium complete the family — along with rarer voices such as the vichitra veena and Noor Zehra Kazim's sagar veena.

Rhythm belongs to the tabla, a pair of hand drums whose syllables spell the theka, and to the older pakhawaj of dhrupad. In qawwali the dholak and clapping hands take over.

Listen: Ustad Sharif Khan Poonchwala's Raag Kirvani (1960) for the sitar as a singing instrument; then Akmal Qadri's bansuri in Raag Darbari (2000).

A gharana — from ghar, "house" — is a lineage of practice: a way of singing or playing handed from master to disciple across generations, with its own preferences in voice, ornament, repertoire and rhythm. The houses took their names from the courts and towns that fed them, and most crystallised in the nineteenth century under the patronage of the northern princely states.

The houses you will meet most on Saarey:

Smaller lineages — Talvandi, Kasur, Mewati, Seenia — are indexed beside them. Gharanas are less rigid than a century ago, but the name still marks pedigree.

Listen: the same raag, two houses — Kirana's Darbari by Ustad Mubarak Ali Khan (2012), then Patiala's by Amanat Ali and Fateh Ali Khan (1961).

The subcontinent's recorded history begins in Calcutta in November 1902, when the Gramophone Company cut the first commercial discs of the singer Gauhar Jaan. Saarey's archive begins a generation later: its earliest rendition is Ustad Abdul Karim Khan's Raag Bhairavi of 1934, the Kirana founder's voice three years before his death. From there it runs through the radio and concert tapes of the 1960s to the mehfils of the last decade.

The names to follow:

• Ustad Abdul Karim Khan (1872–1937) — founder of the Kirana gharana, court musician at Baroda, the model of sweetness and slow elaboration.
• Roshan Ara Begum (1917–1982) — his disciple, crowned Malika-e-Mauseeqi, "Queen of Music", in Pakistan. She settled in Lalamusa after Partition and became the presiding voice of the All Pakistan Music Conference, founded in 1959. Saarey holds her recordings from 1960 onward.
• Ustad Nazakat Ali Khan and Ustad Salamat Ali Khan (d. 2001) — the Sham Churasi brothers whose duets defined jugalbandi for a generation.
• Ustad Amanat Ali Khan and Ustad Fateh Ali Khan (d. 1974 and 2017) — the Patiala duo, celebrated across the subcontinent while still in their teens and honoured with the Pride of Performance in 1969.
• Ustad Fateh Ali Khan (Gawaliar) — flag-bearer of the Gwalior line in Pakistan, descended from the gharana's founders, whose earliest performances were on Radio Pakistan.
• Ustad Mubarak Ali Khan — Kirana khayal, Pride of Performance; the leading voice of Saarey's most-favourited gharana.
• Ustad Naseer uddin Saami — the Delhi gharana's living master, famed for his command of microtones (surti) and honoured with the Pride of Performance.
• Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948–1997) — Shahenshah-e-Qawwali, heir to a family tradition of some six centuries, who carried qawwali to the world through Real World Records.
• Ustad Sharif Khan Poonchwala — the sitar legend of Lahore, Pride of Performance; his son Ustad Ashraf Sharif Khan, Pride of Performance 2017, carries the house from Oslo, where he is based.
• Ustad Shaukat Hussain Khan (1930–1996) — Punjab gharana tabla, for decades the house accompanist at Radio Pakistan Lahore and the player the great singers asked for.

Browse all artists, the legendary ustads, the living ustads and the women of raag.

Listen: Roshan Ara Begum's Raag Shudh Kalyan (1960) — the Kirana voice at full height, and the place many listeners fall in love with this music.

Start with a raag, not a playlist — and stay with the first ten minutes. The alap is slow by design; it is the raag being drawn in the air before rhythm arrives. Listen for the drone, then for the notes the singer keeps returning to, then for the phrase that keeps coming back: that is the pakar, and once you can hum it you know the raag.

A first ten, in roughly the order to hear them:

1. Raag Yaman — the evening raag everyone learns first: Ustad Ashraf Sharif Khan's sitar Yaman (2005) or Beenish Pervaiz's khayal Yaman (2013).
2. Roshan Ara Begum — Raag Shudh Kalyan (1960) — Yaman's near-twin, sung by the Queen of Music.
3. Raag Darbari — midnight gravity: Amanat Ali and Fateh Ali Khan's Darbari (1961).
4. Raag Maalkons — five notes at midnight: Ustad Naseer uddin Saami's Maalkons (2016).
5. Raag Megh and Raag Mian Ki Malhaar — the monsoon pair: Ustad Salamat Ali Khan's Megh (1964), Roshan Ara Begum's Mian Ki Malhaar (1965).
6. Raag Baagheshri — late-evening longing: Ustad Fateh Ali Khan (Gawaliar)'s Baagheshri (2016).
7. Raag Marwa — the sunset raag with no fifth: Ustad Fateh Ali Khan (Gawaliar)'s Marva (2014).
8. A dhrupad — Aliya Rasheed's Raag Yaman (2009), forty minutes of the oldest form, to hear what khayal grew out of.
9. A thumri in Raag Pahari — Ustad Salamat Ali Khan's thumri (1960), the semi-classical heart of the Punjab.
10. Raag Bhairvi — to close, as every concert closes: Ustad Abdul Karim Khan's Bhairavi (1934), the oldest recording in the archive.

Then widen the circle: Akmal Qadri, fourth generation of a Lahore bansuri family; Beenish Pervaiz, Gwalior-trained, in khayal and ghazal; Noor Zehra Kazim on the sagar veena; and, at the archive's folk edge, the late Sultan Muhammad Chanae of Balochistan, whose rubab dhuns in Raag Kedara and Raag Bhairvi show how far the raag idea travels. A qawwali by Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or the Sabri Brothers belongs in any first week.

Listen at the raag's own hour if you can. The music was ordered by the clock for hundreds of years, and the ordering still works.

The tradition's greatest recordings are archival — many from the 1930s to the 1980s — and on most services they are organised by album and playlist rather than by raag. Saarey Music, founded in London by a Pakistani family that has supported this music for generations, was built the other way round: around the raag, the gharana and the complete performance.

In practice that means 171 raag pages, each with its thaat, time of day, mood and complete recordings; artist pages for the ustads and pandits, with gharana and instrument; taal and gharana metadata; a glossary of 55 core terms; and rare recordings by the great ustads and pandits back to 1934, with the recording year documented on every rendition — a 1961 Teen Taal presented as a 1961 recording. Renditions are curated by season and time of day, as the culture has ordered this music for hundreds of years, and streamed in high quality; see audio quality and restoration for how a 92-year archive is handled.

Weighing platforms? Read how to choose a classical music streaming platform and the honest comparison of Saarey, Spotify and Raaga.

Listen: the Saarey app on iOS and Android, or the web — ad-free, with offline listening — starting with Raag Yaman.