Musical Instruments of India

In the folk and tribal music of different regions of India, various types of stringed instruments are found with a very varied tradition. In the Rajasthani tradition there are more than ten types of Sāraṅgī, often written Sarangi, such as the jogiya sāraṅgī, the Sindhi sāraṅgī, the dhani sāraṅgī, the Gujaratan sāraṅgī, the pyaledar sāraṅgī, the dhadya sā raṅgī, etc. Many references can be found among the texts of various poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which highlight that Sāraṅgī had acquired a very important place in devotional and folk music. In the ecstatic verses of bhakti the Sāraṅgī is mentioned together with other folk instruments, mostly idiophones, which did not fall into the elite category of classical music. As has already been noted in the previous paragraphs, in the past there was a certain rigidity, dictated by traditional restrictions, regarding the teaching of certain musical instruments. The Sarangi was used to accompaniment devotional music, together with various other folk instruments and its appearance on the classical scene occurred later, probably between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. Only thanks to the process of democratization of music, probably supported by Western cultural elements and geopolitical needs, were concepts contrary to traditional structures introduced, such as that of "parity" and "equality" between musical instruments. In fact, from the second post-war period onwards there will be many cases in which an instrument considered folk, often with a strong regional identity, suddenly becomes an instrument capable of presenting the Rāga on stage, a bit as if from the fifties onwards the launeddas had established themselves on the stages of Western classical music, stealing the show from the piano or violin. The Sāraṅgī is a very ancient fretless bowed instrument made from a single piece of hollowed-out wood and with a soundboard made of leather that supports a bridge that houses both the main gut strings and the metal resonance strings. Although it was born as a folk instrument, it is today one of the main instruments both for the accompaniment of the voice and for the accompaniment of percussion in solo concerts, also boasting a considerable presence as a solo instrument, in fact, according to a widespread opinion, the Sāraṅgī is the instrument that comes closest to the timbral qualities of the human voice. Our textual references suggest that two types of bowed instruments prevailed in India between the seventh and fifteenth centuries: one was like the Sarangi, with the sound box positioned vertically and the sound plane perpendicular to the ground, and the other similar to the modern Ravanastra, Ravanahatha or Ravanhastha Vīṇā, present in Nepal, India (it is an icon of Rajasthani folk music) and Sri Lanka, with the soundboard facing the sky. As the popularity of the dhrupad style began to decline in favor of the khayal style, the need for a new accompaniment instrument was felt. Previously, the dhrupad style was accompanied by the Vīṇā, but this was not suitable to accompany the khayal style. Thus, with the favors of the universe of Hindustani saṃgīta, the Sāraṅgī enjoyed for almost two centuries the fact of being the only stringed instrument suitable for vocal accompaniment, so much so that it became as indispensable as the tampura or the tabla. For this reason, Sāraṅgī players boast an extremely vast musical education, being able to absorb knowledge directly from singers and percussionists of the dhrupad, khayal, thumri, gamba, ghazal etc. genres. Some famous singers, for example, Abdul Karim Khān, Bade Ghulam Ali Khān and Amir Khān were initially trained to play the Sāraṅgī and later took the path of vocal music.

 

 

Some great names of Sāraṅgī instrumentalists:

  Mamman Khan

Bundu Khan

Abdul Aziz Khan

Ashique Hussain

Abdul Majid Khan

Bade Sabir Khan

Ahmadi Khan

Gopal Mishra

Hanuman Prasad Misra

Sagiruddin Khan

Sabri Khan

Sultan Khan

Abdul Lateef Khan

Inder Lal Dhandra

Bharata Muni Bhushan Goswami

 

As mentioned at the beginning, the instrument is obtained by hollowing out a single block of wood, usually rosewood or teak, with a length that varies between sixty and seventy centimeters, a width of about fifteen centimeters and a thickness of ten centimeters. The shape of the Sāraṅgī's body is quite irregular, the sound box presents as a soundboard a skin of goat origin glued along the edge, on which the bridge rests supported by a leather belt, nailed to the sides of the box, which must withstand the pressure of thirty-five strings and more. Inserted on the right side there are three rows of wooden keys for the resonance strings and in the upper part there are the keys for the three main strings plus another set of keys for the sympathetic strings positioned perpendicular to all the others.

The tuning of the sympathetic strings can be described in the following way: the eleven or twelve resonance strings present in the upper part of the body are tuned to the Rāga to be played, the fifteen keys on the left side are tuned to the chromatic scale, the rest of the nine strings sympathetic notes are tuned to the main notes of the Rāga to be played, such as vadi, samvadi[1] etc., according to the musician's choice. The artist sits cross-legged on the floor and holds the instrument in front of his chest, he mainly uses three fingers of the left hand in a quite unique way: in fact, unlike other bowed instruments, the sound is produced by the contact of the string does not occur on the tips of the fingers but rather on the roots of the finger nails.

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[1] This means that if the entire scale is fixed in the first eleven or twelve strings, only the main notes of the Rāga will be chosen in the third group. Taking Rāga Yaman as an example, we could imagine that Ga and Ni could certainly find a place in the third group of sympathetic strings, together with Sa and Pa.