The
Sarangi

The sarangi is the great bowed instrument of North Indian classical music, and for centuries it was the favoured accompaniment to vocalists — partly because it can shadow a singer so closely. It is a short, heavy, gut-strung fiddle, played not with the fingertips but with the nails and cuticles sliding along the strings. Behind its three or four main strings hang as many as thirty-five or forty sympathetic strings, which give the instrument its weeping, resonant halo and its reputation as the hardest of all to master.

To play the sarangi is to slide constantly, the fingernails dragging along gut strings to find each pitch, so the instrument bends and aches the way a voice does. The sympathetic strings ring behind every note, thickening the sound into something that seems to grieve. Like much of this music it is built on the raga, and in slow performance it becomes almost unbearably expressive — not depicting sorrow but seeming to sound from inside it. It is one of the most directly emotional voices in this whole atlas.