Starting the sitar: what to know before your first lesson

The sitar is not a difficult instrument to begin. It is a difficult instrument to begin well, and almost everything that goes wrong in the first year is decided in the first fortnight — by how you sit, what you bought, and whether anybody told you that the instrument is tuned to you rather than to a pitch.

So this is the conversation I would want to have with somebody before their first lesson, rather than after it.

Start with the thing that is not true

You will read, more or less everywhere, that the sitar was invented in the thirteenth century by the poet Amir Khusrau. It is repeated in concert programmes, in encyclopaedias and by a great many people who play the instrument.

The scholarship does not support it. Khusrau does not mention the sitar anywhere in his works — a point on which researchers are, unusually, unanimous — and one musicologist quoted in the standard organological survey puts it with some feeling: no other lute, he says, has raised so much discussion with so little foundation.¹

What the evidence actually suggests is less romantic and rather more interesting. There was already an Indian long-necked lute, the tritantri veena — three strings, and "three strings" is what seh-tar means in Persian, which is one proposed route to the name. There was also the Persian and central-Asian tanbur, which arrives in India with Turkish and Persian influence and turns up in Mughal painting. The sitar seems to have grown out of that meeting over several centuries, in many hands, and the paintings let you watch it happen: the bridge changes shape, the frets change material, the tuning pegs move.

I mention this at the start of an article about beginning the instrument because it sets the right expectation about everything that follows. The sitar is not a fixed object with a correct configuration handed down from a single inventor. It is still being argued about, and the two instruments you will be choosing between in a moment are the result of one of those arguments.

What the thing actually is

A gourd for a sound box — grown as a pumpkin, and Darbar has met the family who turn them into sitars — a wide hollow neck of toon wood, and two curved bridges — traditionally bone or horn, now often plastic — over which run rather a lot of strings.

The frets are the first surprise. They are strips of nickel silver tied to the neck with thread, curved so they stand clear of the fingerboard, and they are movable. You push them along the neck to suit the notes of the raga you are about to play. A guitarist takes a moment to absorb this: the instrument does not have a fixed set of pitches built into it.

The second surprise is underneath. Running below the frets is a bank of taraf — sympathetic strings, eleven or thirteen of them, which you never pluck. They are tuned to the notes of the raga and they ring on their own when you play the matching pitch above them. That shimmering halo that makes a sitar sound like a sitar is not an effect and not a technique. It is a whole second instrument, playing itself, and it is why the thing takes twenty minutes to tune.

Then there are the chikari — three or four short drone strings running to pegs high on the neck, struck with the back of the hand as punctuation — and, finally, the playing strings, of which there are two or four depending on which sitar you have bought.

Which brings us to the choice.

The two sitars, and why it matters before you buy

The difference is not cosmetic and it is not really about the extra gourd. The Ravi Shankar instrument carries two extra bass strings and reaches down an octave further, which suits a style built on long unfolding alap in the lower register. The Vilayat Khan instrument gives up that range in exchange for a voice-like upper register — it was set up to imitate singing, which is the deepest compliment North Indian music pays an instrument, and it is the same ambition that produced the dilruba.

For a beginner in this country the practical advice is duller than the history: buy whichever your teacher plays. The string layout, the fingering and a fair amount of the technique differ, and learning on an instrument your teacher cannot demonstrate on is an avoidable handicap. If you have no teacher yet, find one first and buy second. This is the single most common and most expensive mistake people make.

Sitting: the part people get wrong and pay for later

You play sitting on the floor. Left leg folded in front of you, right leg across it, and the gourd resting on the sole of your left foot — not on the floor, not on your thigh. Your right forearm rests on the sound box and your right thumb sits at the highest fret. Held that way, the instrument is stable without being gripped, the neck runs up at about forty-five degrees, and the face of it stands vertical.²

Everything about that position is doing a job. The foot and the forearm are the two anchor points, so the left hand is free to move rather than holding the instrument up. Get it wrong and you will find out which — a neck that rides too high, a right shoulder hoisted, a spine slowly twisting. None of it hurts in week one. All of it hurts in year two.

If you cannot sit cross-legged comfortably, say so at the first lesson rather than quietly enduring it. Adaptations exist and a good teacher has seen the problem before.

The two hands

The right hand wears a wire. The mizrab is a coil of wire worn on the index finger, and it should be bent to fit that finger closely — a loose one moves while you play and a tight one is agony. Buy the plastic-coated ones. The uncoated kind cuts into the finger and will end your practice sessions early for reasons that have nothing to do with music.

The strokes are named. The basic inward stroke is da, and while all four fingers move together as a unit, only the mizrab touches the string. Beginners flap; the movement is small.

The left hand does the actual music. The index finger presses the string just behind the fret, parallel to it, with the fingertip and a rounded knuckle — and then, crucially, it pulls the string sideways across the fret. That pull is not an ornament. It is how the sitar produces meend, the slide between pitches that carries most of the expression in Hindustani music, and how it reaches the microtones that live between the frets. A skilled player can pull a single fret's worth of string through five notes.

Your thumb stays lightly on the back of the neck and never leaves it. It is the anchor the pull works against, and taking it off is the first bad habit to form.

This is worth being blunt about: the pull is where the sitar's difficulty lives. Fretting notes is easy. Bending a heavy steel string a long way, in tune, at speed, with a fingertip, is what takes the years — and it is why the calluses on a sitarist's left index finger are a different shape from a guitarist's.

Sitar or guitar?

People ask, usually meaning "will one help me with the other". Some of it will.

What transfers: a sense of rhythm, patience with a fretted instrument, and a left hand that already knows how to bend a string, which is a genuine head start.

What does not: chords, because there are none — Hindustani classical music is melody over a drone, not harmony. Nor does reading, since the tradition is taught by ear and by demonstration. Nor, really, does your sense of pitch, because a sitar is not tuned to a fixed reference at all.

That last point is the one that unsettles guitarists most, so let me put it plainly. There is no concert A. The instrument is tuned so that its principal note, Sa, sits wherever suits the instrument, the player and the occasion, and every other pitch is defined by its relationship to that Sa. The scale degrees are named — Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni — and they are relationships, not letters. A raga is built out of those relationships, along with a great deal else that a scale does not contain.

Which means that a chromatic tuner is genuinely useful to a beginner — for holding the sympathetic strings steady once you have decided where Sa is — and a tuner with a "sitar" preset is a slightly misleading object, because it has decided something for you that is not fixed. The tuner on this site is chromatic and free, and chromatic is the honest mode.

What one costs

Wide range, and the range is not vanity. Here is the shape of it — one European specialist's catalogue, in August 2026, so treat it as a scale rather than a quotation.

Add shipping — around €98 within Europe from that supplier — and, if you are buying into the UK from abroad, budget for import VAT and a courier handling fee on arrival. That is the part people forget, and it is not small.

Two things worth more than the price difference between tiers:

Buy from someone who knows what a sitar is — and take a maker's checklist with you. A specialist checks and sets an instrument up before it ships. A marketplace listing does not, and a sitar that has crossed a continent in a box generally needs attention when it arrives.

The jawari is the whole sound. The main bridge is not a knife edge like a guitar's; it is a wide curved surface, and the string buzzes along it in a controlled way that produces the sitar's characteristic voice. That curve is filed by hand, it wears, and it has to be re-cut periodically by someone who can do it. A cheap sitar with good jawari sounds better than an expensive one with bad jawari, every time. When you go to buy, this is the thing to ask about. (Klaas Janssens, a sitar maker in Belgium, has the clearest explanation of jawari I know of, from somebody who files them for a living.)

And a thing not to buy first: an electric sitar, or a guitar with a buzz bridge. They are interesting instruments in their own right and they will not teach you this one.

What the first year is actually like

Slower than you want, and in an unfamiliar order.

You will spend a long time on single notes and on the exercises called paltas — small melodic patterns, run up and down, endlessly. The tradition teaches by ear and by imitation, so you will be copying your teacher rather than reading anything, and you will be doing it before you can hear what you are copying. Both of those things are normal.

The tuning will take you twenty minutes and defeat you regularly. Everyone's does. It gets faster, and it is also, quietly, the beginning of your ear training — you cannot tune eleven sympathetic strings to a raga without learning what the raga is.

And you will not sound like a sitar for a while. The instrument you are hearing on the recording is being played by somebody whose left hand has been pulling those strings for thirty years. That is not a discouraging fact. It is just the correct scale of the thing, and knowing it in advance is the difference between a beginner who continues and one who concludes, at month four, that they have no ear.

Where to hear it

Recordings are easy to find; live performance is better and there is more of it in this country than people realise. Darbar, a UK charity devoted to Indian classical music, runs a festival and keeps a large archive of performances and an instrument-by-instrument introduction — it is the best single starting point in Britain, and it is where I would send anyone who wants to know what they are aiming at.

I studied the sitar in India, and it changed how I hear everything else — the longer version of that is on my About page. If you have questions about starting, or about what you are looking at in a shop, I am happy to be asked, and if I cannot help I will say so and point you at somebody who can.

References

1. Kasliwal, S., Classical Musical Instruments (Delhi, 2001), the sitar chapter — reproduced in full here. The Amir Khusrau attribution is examined and rejected; the quotation about lutes raising much discussion with little foundation is Kasliwal quoting the musicologist B. C. Deva. The account of the instrument's development from paintings draws on Allyn Miner's research into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources.
2. India Instruments, "Playing Technique — Sitar" (text, concept and demonstration credited to Yogendra) and "Construction & Styles". Posture, the mizrab, left-hand fingering and the pull; and the string configurations of the two modern sitar types. Prices in the table are from the same supplier's product pages. All read 18 August 2026 — a commercial source, named as one, and used because its technique guide carries an author and its specifications are checkable.