Chapter 05
Instruments, Archives and the Machines That Changed Listening
4 min
An instrument is an action
Indian instrument lists are easy to produce and often useless. Sitar, sarod, vina, sarangi, shehnai, bansuri, tabla, mridangam, ghatam, dhol and harmonium become decorative nouns. The better approach is verbal: pluck, bend, bow, breathe, strike, damp, shake, sustain.
A sitar player plucks, presses and pulls a string across a curved fret to bend pitch while sympathetic strings answer. A sarod player stops strings against a smooth metal surface, making slides possible with a different attack. A vina player combines fretted pressure, pluck and ornament. A sarangi player uses the cuticle area against strings and a bow, producing a close vocal flexibility. A shehnai player manages a double reed and breath through a penetrating tone. A bansuri player changes pitch, colour and phrase through embouchure and finger holes.
Drums are equally diverse. Tabla divides work between two drums and allows tuned resonance and bass pressure. Mridangam uses a barrel body and two heads to articulate Carnatic rhythmic language. Kerala ensembles can build enormous structures from chenda and other percussion, but the ensemble name and occasion matter. A festival procession, theatre accompaniment and temple-linked performance are not interchangeable because all contain drums.
Makers belong in the story
Instruments do not arrive from a timeless catalogue. Makers select wood, skin, metal, reed and string; repairers adjust climate damage; players modify setup and technique. Museums can preserve forms and materials, and the national performing-arts collection in New Delhi holds a wide range of chordophones, aerophones, idiophones and membranophones. Yet a silent object cannot fully demonstrate pressure, tuning, maintenance or repertory.
The kamaicha makes the point vividly. Its sound depends on construction, bow, strings, sympathetic response and a performer's lineage. To photograph the object without Sakar Khan or other players is to preserve only part of its knowledge. The same is true of vina, sarangi and shehnai. Makers and performers should be understood as connected specialists, not as separate craft and art categories.
The gramophone creates a new duration
Early commercial recording changed Indian music by limiting duration, selecting artists and creating repeatable performances. Gauhar Jaan's famous recorded announcements made the new medium audible: the performer identified herself at the end so the distant recording process could catalogue the take. Her work reveals artistry, technology and business at once.
The short disc did not simply shrink longer performance. Musicians selected forms, adjusted pacing and learned how a microphone heard. Record companies developed market categories by language, genre and region. Those categories helped records travel while also hardening distinctions that had been more fluid in performance.
Later long-playing records, cassettes, film soundtracks, radio archives, compact discs and streaming each changed duration and discovery again. A cassette could circulate devotional, regional and political music cheaply. Streaming can make a century of material appear simultaneous, hiding whether a track was collected, recorded, released or reissued decades apart.
All India Radio builds a shared but unequal ear
Akashvani, or All India Radio, linked regional stations to national broadcasts and preserved major classical, light-classical, folk and spoken-word recordings. The National Programme of Music and Sangeet Sammelan placed artists before listeners far beyond a concert city. Auditions and grading affected professional careers. Regional stations created language-specific publics.
Broadcasting expanded access while also selecting. A microphone in an archive is evidence that an institution chose to record, preserve and transmit. It is not proof that the artist mattered more than someone left outside the system. Radio standards also changed concert length, repertory and presentation. The archive is invaluable precisely because it shows both music and institutional power.
Digital preservation now allows fragile tapes and discs to survive and become searchable. Chennai's music archives bring together roughly a century of Carnatic and gramophone history, including famous singers and early records. Access remains shaped by copyright and facility rules. A free listening kiosk is not the same as an openly reusable file.
How to compare two recordings
The same raga, composition or performer at two dates may differ in the duration before percussion enters, register, tempo, microphone distance, accompanimental balance and audience response. Date and context can reveal a changing concert convention or simply two artistic choices; not every difference tells a story of decline or modernization.
This method works beyond classical music. Compare an archival Bihu item with a current festival performance, a Sidi ritual-linked recording with a concert presentation, or an early film song with a remix. The task is not to find the authentic original. It is to hear what each medium asks the music to become.
