Iqbal Ahmed Khan was one of very few sarangi players left in Bombay in the 1990s. Iqbal Ahmed Khan is the son of Kazan Khan and grandson of Ghulam Hussain Khan who was the brother of Shamir Khan, the father of the great singer Amir Khan of Indore. Iqbal Ahmed's early childhood was spent in Calcutta where he started learning sarangi on a small instrument at the age of five or six. He told me that he learned initially from Faiyaz Ahmed Khan (of the famous singing duo Faiyaz Ahmed and Hiaz Ahmed Khan), who like is father Bashir Khan, was also a sarangi player. Iqbal Ahmed's life took him to Kashmir, Panjab and Delhi before he settles in the Opera House area of Bombay and became a staff artist at All India Radio.
I met Iqbal Ahmed Khan at his home in January 1997. He started by playing rag Bhimpalasi:
This was followed by an extraordinary demonstartion of double stopping, his idea of Western chordal music, on sarangi, then something akin to Western atonal music:
Finally we talked for quite a while:
