The Guitar, the Ancient Strings, and the Tribal Drum — An Indian Musical Journey
Music in India has never been a mere arrangement of pleasant sound. It is treated as a discipline of the spirit, a science of vibration, and a living inheritance passed from guru to shishya across centuries. Nowhere is this more visible than in the instruments themselves — each one a small universe of engineering, mythology, and hard-won craftsmanship. This essay examines three broad families of instruments that together tell the story of Indian music: the guitar, which India absorbed from the West and quietly rebuilt in its own image; the old-aged instruments such as the veena, sitar, and sarod, whose design solves the specific acoustic problem of imitating the human voice; and the tribal instruments of the Adivasi and folk communities, whose simplicity conceals a sophisticated understanding of rhythm, material, and ritual. Rather than treat these as a museum catalogue of facts, the attempt here is to read them as engineering responses to a single cultural demand — that an instrument must not merely play a note, it must bend, slide, and breathe like a singer.
I. The Guitar — India’s Borrowed Voice, Re-engineered
The guitar arrived in India as a colonial import, yet within a few decades Indian musicians had begun dismantling its Western logic and rebuilding it to serve raga music, which does not move in the fixed semitone steps of Western harmony but in continuous, voice-like curves called meend and gamak. A standard guitar, fretted and tuned to equal temperament, resists this kind of movement; the frets impose fixed pitches, and the six strings offer no drone or resonance beyond what is plucked.
Working Principle
The breakthrough came from lap-style slide playing, in which the guitar is laid flat on the performer’s lap and the strings are stopped not with fingertips pressing down onto frets, but with a smooth steel or glass bar moved along the surface of the strings. Because the bar does not need to land precisely on a fret, the player can glide continuously between any two pitches, exactly reproducing the sliding ornamentation of Hindustani and Carnatic singing. Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, a disciple of the sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar, took this logic to its extreme conclusion in the 1960s. As a teenager he acquired an ordinary Western archtop guitar, stripped its six strings, and rebuilt it with nineteen strings in total — three melody strings for the raga line, four drone strings called chikari for rhythmic punctuation, and twelve unplayed sympathetic strings running beneath the main strings. These sympathetic strings are tuned to the notes of the raga being performed; they are never touched directly by the player, yet every time a melody string is struck, the sympathetic strings vibrate in resonance with matching frequencies, thickening the tone into a shimmering halo of sound. He renamed his creation the Mohan Veena, consciously reconnecting it to the ancient veena tradition rather than to its Hawaiian ancestry.
The instrument’s global recognition arrived in 1994, when Bhatt’s collaborative album with American guitarist Ry Cooder won the Grammy Award for Best World Music Album, a moment that placed an Indianised guitar on the same stage as the sitar and sarod in the eyes of the world. Following closely in this tradition is Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya of Kolkata, who has gone further still, designing his own family of slide instruments — the Chaturangui, Anandi, and Gandharvi — and even developing what may be the first slide instrument in the world with a resonating top made of stretched animal skin rather than wood, called the Pushpa Veena. Bhattacharya is credited with introducing the world’s first structured syllabus for teaching slide guitar in the Hindustani classical idiom, and has trained well over a thousand students, in addition to receiving Grammy nominations and the President of India Gold Medal.
What this history reveals is not simple imitation but a deliberate act of cultural translation. The guitar’s Western vocabulary of chords and frets was quietly subordinated to an older Indian grammar of drone, resonance, and vocal slide — proof that an instrument’s identity is decided less by its country of manufacture than by the musical philosophy imposed upon it.
II. The Old-Aged Instruments of India
Long before the guitar reached Indian shores, a family of stringed and plucked instruments had already solved the problem of vocal imitation through centuries of incremental refinement. Three deserve close attention: the veena, the sitar, and the sarod.
The Veena — India’s Most Ancient Surviving Instrument
The veena holds a position in Indian culture that goes beyond music; it is the instrument of Goddess Saraswati, deity of knowledge and the arts, and its lineage is traced back roughly three and a half thousand years to bow-harp instruments referenced from the Vedic period. The form most commonly played today, the Saraswati Veena of Carnatic music, took its present shape in the seventeenth century under the patronage of the Thanjavur court, which is why it is also called the Tanjore Veena. Structurally, it consists of a large resonating body carved from a single block of seasoned jackwood, a long hollow neck fitted with twenty-four fixed frets set into scalloped wax, and a second, smaller gourd near the upper end that balances the instrument across the player’s body and adds resonance. Four principal strings carry the melody while three additional strings supply rhythmic drone. The genius of the design lies in the scalloped fret-bed: because the frets are raised and the wax beneath is carved away, the player can pull a string sideways across a fret after striking it, bending the pitch upward by several semitones without ever re-striking the string. This lateral pull produces the gamaka — the oscillating, curling ornament that is the actual substance of Carnatic melody, far more than the plain notes themselves.
The Sitar — Engineering a Shimmer
The sitar, which reached unprecedented global fame through Pandit Ravi Shankar’s performances in the West during the 1960s and his association with George Harrison of the Beatles, works on a related but distinct principle. Its curved, sloped main bridge, called the jawari, is deliberately not cut to a sharp edge the way a Western guitar bridge is. Instead the string grazes gently along the sloped surface as it vibrates, generating a buzzing complexity of overtones prized as the instrument’s living quality — quite literally, the word jawari carries connotations of vivacity. Beneath the main playing strings run eleven to thirteen additional sympathetic strings, tuned separately to the notes of whichever raga is to be performed; because changing raga means re-tuning this entire second set of strings, audiences at classical concerts often watch performers spend several unhurried minutes tuning before a note of the raga itself is sung. Two major schools of sitar construction and technique took shape in the twentieth century — the instrumental tantrakari style associated with Ravi Shankar’s Maihar gharana, favouring a larger body and extra bass strings, and the vocal-imitating gayaki style associated with Ustad Vilayat Khan, using a smaller, single-gourd instrument suited to reproducing the ornamentation of khayal singing.
The Sarod — The Voice Without Frets
Where the sitar and veena manage vocal-style bending through frets, the sarod abandons frets altogether. Descended from the Afghan rabab and reshaped in India through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly by the Bangash lineage of musicians, the sarod carries a polished steel fingerboard over which the player’s fingernails — not fingertips — glide freely, since there is no fret to obstruct lateral movement. This fretless surface, combined with a skin-covered resonating body, gives the sarod its characteristically deep, gliding, almost percussive tone, distinct from the sitar’s brighter buzz. Ustad Allauddin Khan of the Maihar gharana rebuilt the instrument in the twentieth century with a larger teak body and expanded sympathetic strings, training both his son Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and his son-in-law Pandit Ravi Shankar, which is how the sarod and sitar came to be introduced to Western concert audiences almost simultaneously. Today the instrument’s most recognised ambassador is Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, sixth in an unbroken line of Bangash sarod players, who pioneered a markedly vocal style of playing by using the very tips of his fingernails to execute extended glissandi that mimic sung phrases with startling accuracy, and who has represented Indian classical music at venues such as Carnegie Hall while holding all three of India’s Padma civilian honours.
The Shehnai — Auspicious Breath
A fourth old-aged instrument deserves mention precisely because it works on none of the string-bending principles above: the shehnai, a double-reed wind instrument with a conical wooden body flaring into a metal bell, whose sound has been treated as auspicious at Indian weddings and temple ceremonies for centuries. Its distinctive nasal, piercing tone comes from the double reed vibrating against a constant, forceful stream of breath, and because the reed itself is flexible, a skilled player can bend pitch continuously in a manner not unlike the sitar’s jawari, achieving the same vocal-style ornamentation through breath control rather than string mechanics. Ustad Bismillah Khan transformed the shehnai from a purely ceremonial, outdoor instrument into a serious concert instrument of Hindustani classical music over a performing career spanning roughly eight decades, famously refusing lucrative offers to settle abroad and choosing instead to remain rooted in Varanasi, near the Vishwanath temple where he had played since childhood. His recognition, culminating in the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award, demonstrates how a folk-ceremonial instrument can be elevated to classical stature purely through one musician’s individual mastery and interpretive imagination — a reminder that the boundary between folk and classical in Indian music is far more porous than instrument classification charts suggest.
III. Tribal Instruments — The Unwritten Orchestra of Rural India
If classical instruments represent centuries of court patronage and codified technique, tribal and folk instruments represent an equally sophisticated but orally transmitted tradition, built from whatever the immediate landscape provides — bamboo, gourd, animal hide, horn — and tied inseparably to festival, harvest, and ritual rather than to concert performance.
The Tarpa of the Warli
Among the Warli Adivasi communities of Maharashtra and Gujarat, the tarpa is both a wind instrument and the centrepiece of the community’s most recognisable dance. The player blows continuously into a reservoir chamber fashioned from a dried bottle gourd, which feeds two bamboo pipes attached to a wider resonating horn; because the chamber stores breath, the player can inhale through the nose while still pushing air out through the mouth, producing an unbroken drone around which dozens of dancers move in a spiralling circle. The instrument is inseparable from its social function — it is rarely, if ever, played as a solo concert piece, existing instead purely to animate collective movement.
The Dhol and Nagara — Percussion as Public Announcement
Across almost every Indian region, some version of the dhol, a large double-headed barrel drum slung over the shoulder and struck with sticks or hands on both faces, provides the rhythmic backbone of folk celebration, from Bhangra in Punjab to the Bihu dhol of Assam, whose distinctive compact build and rapid rhythmic vocabulary earned it a Geographical Indication tag in 2024. Working alongside the dhol in many regions is the nagara, a large kettle-shaped drum covered in hide and struck with sticks, traditionally used to announce royal processions, temple festivals, or the arrival of important news across a village — its deep, carrying boom functioning historically almost like a public address system. Regional tribal variants multiply this basic design endlessly: the Bodo community’s kham, the Biate community’s hide-covered khuang, and the Santhal Pargana region’s smaller tamak, each tuned and built slightly differently according to locally available wood and hide.
The Ektara and the Melodic Folk Instruments
At the opposite end of complexity sits the ektara, a genuinely one-stringed instrument, typically a hollowed gourd with a single string stretched over a bamboo neck, plucked to provide a droning rhythmic pulse beneath devotional folk singing, particularly in the Warkari and Baul traditions. Despite — or perhaps because of — its extreme simplicity, the ektara demands exceptional rhythmic control from the singer, since the entire percussive framework of the song rests on one plucked string. In Assam, instruments such as the pepa, a reed horn made from buffalo horn and bamboo, and the gogona, a bamboo jaw harp, supply melody during the Bihu festival, crafted entirely from raw materials named in the local tribal languages — lao for gourd, mohor xing for buffalo horn — underscoring how tightly these instruments are bound to the ecology of their specific region rather than to any pan-Indian standardised design.
Desert and Hill Instruments — Rajasthan and the Northeast
The tribal and folk landscape of India is far too diverse to summarise through any single instrument, and two further examples illustrate the range. Among the Manganiyar and Langa communities of the Rajasthan desert, the kamayacha, a bowed string instrument with a large hide-covered resonator and sympathetic strings of its own, accompanies hereditary praise-singers who have performed for local patron families for generations, its low, growling drone suited to open-air desert performance where sound must carry across sand rather than through a concert hall. Alongside it, the morchang, a small metal jaw harp gripped between the teeth and plucked with a finger, produces rhythmic, twanging overtones shaped entirely by the resonating cavity of the player’s own mouth, making the performer’s body itself part of the instrument’s acoustic design. In the hill tribes of the Northeast, similarly, log drums, buffalo-horn trumpets, and bamboo flutes are carved to exploit exactly the timber and hide available in each micro-region, so that an instrument’s shape often reveals, to a trained ear, almost precisely which valley or community it originates from. This hyper-local specificity stands in deliberate contrast to the standardised, workshop-built classical instruments of the Hindustani and Carnatic traditions, and is itself worth analytical attention: it shows that Indian instrument-making has never been a single national tradition but a federation of thousands of parallel local traditions, each solving the same basic problems of resonance, portability, and material availability in its own dialect.
IV. Critical Analysis — What These Instruments Reveal About Indian Musical Thought
Placed side by side, the guitar, the veena family, and the tribal drum or horn appear to belong to entirely separate worlds — one urban and imported, one aristocratic and codified, one rural and orally transmitted. Yet a closer analytical reading exposes a shared logic beneath the surface variation.
First, almost every serious Indian instrument treats the fixed, discrete pitch as a starting point rather than a destination. The sitar’s jawari, the veena’s scalloped frets, the sarod’s fretless fingerboard, and the slide bar of the Mohan Veena are four separate engineering solutions to one identical problem: how to make a plucked or struck string behave like the continuously sliding human voice. This is a philosophical commitment as much as a technical one — Indian classical aesthetics privileges the raga’s melodic curve over the isolated note, and instrument-builders across four centuries kept re-solving the same equation using whatever material science was available to them at the time.
Second, resonance is treated as a communal, almost democratic principle rather than an individual one. Sympathetic strings on the sitar, sarod, and Mohan Veena are never touched by the performer, yet they are indispensable — they represent the instrument listening to itself and amplifying its own harmony, a design metaphor for the guru-shishya tradition in which each generation of music is shaped by resonating with what came before rather than starting from silence.
Third, where the classical instruments formalise vocal imitation through elaborate engineering, tribal instruments achieve emotional and rhythmic power through radical economy of means. The ektara’s single string and the tarpa’s single continuous drone accomplish through sheer repetition and communal participation what the twenty-four fretted veena accomplishes through virtuosic individual technique. Neither tradition is more sophisticated than the other; they simply optimise for different social functions — the veena for a seated, listening audience, the tarpa for a moving, dancing, participating one. Recognising this prevents the common but flawed hierarchy that ranks classical instruments as inherently superior to folk and tribal ones; the correct comparison is one of purpose, not of merit.
Finally, all three families share a striking pattern of individual reinvention layered onto inherited tradition. Vishwa Mohan Bhatt did not invent the guitar, but he re-imagined it; Allauddin Khan did not invent the sarod, but he rebuilt its proportions; the Bihu dhol was not created by a single craftsman, but its compact form was shaped and reshaped by generations of Assamese drum-makers responding to festival demand. Indian instrument-making, in other words, is not a museum of frozen antiques but a living argument that each generation of musicians and craftsmen continues to have with its predecessors.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q. Why does the sitar need such a long tuning process before a performance?
A. Because its eleven to thirteen sympathetic strings must be individually re-tuned to match the specific notes of the raga about to be performed, a process that can take several minutes and is considered part of the performer’s preparation rather than a delay.
Q. What is the real difference between the sitar and the sarod?
A. The sitar uses movable metal frets and a wire plectrum, producing a bright, buzzing tone through its sloped jawari bridge, while the sarod is entirely fretless with a polished steel fingerboard played with the fingernails, producing a deeper, more gliding and percussive tone.
Q. How did an American slide guitar become an Indian classical instrument?
A. Vishwa Mohan Bhatt modified a Western archtop guitar by adding thirteen extra drone and sympathetic strings and adopting lap-style slide technique, allowing it to reproduce the continuous pitch-bending of raga music; he renamed the result the Mohan Veena.
Q. Are tribal instruments considered less advanced than classical instruments?
A. No. Tribal instruments such as the tarpa or ektara are built for communal participation and ritual function rather than solo virtuosity, and their simplicity is a deliberate design choice suited to their social purpose, not a lesser stage of development.
Q. Why is the veena associated with Goddess Saraswati?
A. The veena’s documented history stretches back roughly three and a half thousand years, and Hindu iconography has long depicted Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and the arts, holding the instrument, which is why it is regarded as sacred rather than purely musical.
Conclusion
From a modified Hawaiian guitar reborn on a Rajasthani musician’s lap, to a three-and-a-half-thousand-year-old gourd-bodied veena sacred to a goddess, to a single bamboo pipe animating an entire Warli village in dance, Indian musical instruments share one enduring obsession — the pursuit of a sound that moves, bends, and breathes like a human voice. The legendary musicians associated with them, from Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Amjad Ali Khan to Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya, did not merely play these instruments; they continued the centuries-long work of rebuilding them, note by note, string by string, for the next generation to inherit. That unbroken chain of re-invention, rather than any single instrument, is the true legendary achievement of Indian music.
By: Bill Nwonwu
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