Natthu Khan (1875-1940) was a stalwart of the Delhi tabla gharana. (A discussion of the genealogy of the Delhi gharana is presented in my article Genealogical musings….) Rebecca Stewart, in her wonderful but sadly unpublished Ph.D. dissertation The Tabla in Perspective (UCLA, 1974) suggested that Natthu Khan was primarily responsible for popularizing the Delhi peshkar and qaida. Peshkar and qaida are really names for types of improvisatory processes that a player conducts on thematic material (gat), and the origins of both are firmly associated by most players with the Delhi tradition.

In the following recording, from the mid to late 1930s and just a few short years before his death, Natthu Khan plays a theme that is identified by many older musicians as “Natthu Khan’s peshkar”. We must therefore assume that Natthu Khan too thought of this theme as a peshkar.

The tempo is quick for peshkar by modern standards, at around 100 beats per minute. Now it would be typical to hear the beat at half that rate, and to hear the material from the first eight counts of tintal repeated in the second eight counts, albeit with khali-bhari transformations (i.e., "dha -kr dha dhi na" would become "ta -kr ta ti na". Natthu Khan makes no attempt to create this kind of bipartite structure, though he does maintain the khali-bhari structure of tintal itself, always making counts 9 through 12 khali (“empty", i.e., without the bass drum sonority).

The theme itself is typical of the peshkar genre, with its delayed, off-beat flam stroke in the sequence "dha -kr dha dhi na" (elaborated as "dha -kr tage dhi na") and its heavy reliance on the cadential sequence "dha tit dha dha ti na" (or "dha tit dha dhage ti na"). In the second quarter of cycle 2 the surface rhythmic density is suddenly doubled and the "dha dhi na" (or "dha ti na") motif fills out to become "dhage tina kena".

This change becomes the substance of the improvisation in cycle 3, but it returns to the initial motive with a tihai in the final line:

Cycle 4 is largely repetitive, and maintains the quicker rhythmic momentum established in the previous cycle.

Cycle 5 sees an unexpected change: the introduction of a gat that is now widely known as a very famous Delhi qaida, “dha ti dha ge na dha tira kita …”.

The next two cycles (6 & 7) develop the qaida rather conservatively, with lots of repetition and without often breaking apart the original string of bols.

Another unexpected twist occurs in cycle 8: half way through the cycle Natthu Khan introduces yet new material in the form of a gat in triple time. What makes this whole cycle so fascinating is the stacking of the three themes in quick succession: peshkar in the initial three matras (albeit with transitional phrases approaching the qaida theme), duple-time qaida from matras four to eight, and triple-time qaida gat from matras nine to sixteen.

In cycles 9 & 10 the triple-time material dominates, with much repetition and little variation. A simple tihai ("dhi na ta" three times) concludes the 110-second presentation.

What we have, then, is really a mixture of peshkar and qaida with remarkably porous boundaries: although there is an overall sense of progression in Natthu Khan’s playing it is by no means a systematic development. Themes are interspersed and variations rarely stray far from the patterns presented in those themes. The peshkar presentations of Natthu Khan’s rough contemporary Ahmedjan Thirakwa were similarly unsystematic and also concluded with qaida variations in triple time. Thirakwa recorded his peshkar many times throughout his life with scarcely any changes, suggesting far less reliance on improvisation than is currently either the norm or the expectation. Early twentieth century performance practice seems to have been a far cry from the kind of ordered, incremental, and extensive improvisation based on exclusive themes advocated by Inam Ali Khan, the late khalifa of the Delhi tradition and a figure widely credited as an authority on peshkar and qaida. (One day I shall publish some of my interviews with Inam Ali Khan from April 1984.) Thus, on the evidence of recorded samples from the 1930s, we should be cautious about attributing systematic improvisation in qaida prastar to figures like Natthu Khan. We would be better rewarded by looking to the middle of the twentieth century for clues as to why such a premium has been placed in tabla playing on long and extensive variations on a single theme at a time. Perhaps it was a strategy to restrict rhythmic improvisation in a way that paralleled the melodic restrictions placed on a vocalist or instrumentalist performing a rag.

One caveat to all this is the fact that performers that recorded in the 1930s were restricted to just a few minutes, and Natthu Khan's playing may not have been representative of his approach in a live concert. It is also possible the musicians consciously hid their material when recording, for fear that their knowledge might be stolen on repeated hearing. Nevertheless, I have found other evidence to suggest that the rich thematic mixing that goes on in Natthu Khan's recording was not unique. Tabla was probably not nearly as rule-bound as many musicians would now have us believe.