Tablā.

Asymmetrical pair of small, tuned, hand-played drums of North and Central India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The tablā are the principal drums of modern Hindustani music. They accompany vocal (khayāl, thumrī, ghazal etc.) and instrumental music, as well as the dance style kathak. They are also found today in various popular and devotional musics (bhajan, qawwālī). The word tablā is a Persian and Urdu diminutive of the Arabic generic drum-name tabl.

1. History.

The modern tablā pair comprises a treble drum (the tablā, on the right), its body a tapering wooden cylinder, and a bass kettledrum (duggī, or daggā, on the left), with a body of clay or chromed copper. This pairing cannot be documented before the late 18th century, but it probably results from a combination of the two separate types which are found, themselves paired, in northern court paintings from c1745.

In Delhi, Rajasthan and Avadh, miniatures of this period show small, hand-played kettledrums, played standing with the drums held at the waist, accompanying dance. This type survives today as the duggī of the śahnāī ensemble of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Its origins seem reasonably clear: smaller, hand-played versions of the ceremonial drum-pair Naqqāra were evolved for these more intimate musical occasions.

In the north-west, especially the Punjab, however, contemporary painting shows two cylindrical drums, similarly played. This type also survives in its region today, in the Punjabi dukkar and Kashmiri dukrā (both terms mean simply ‘the pair’), also called jorī by the Sikhs in the context of their religious music śabad. The origin of this, the modern tablā right-hand type, is harder to trace. It may represent a remodelling of the duggī type under influence of the pakhāvaj.

The bringing together of the north-western tablā-type and the north-central duggī would have occurred in the latter half of the 18th century. The evolving tablā probably incorporated aspects of technique and repertory from the dukkar and duggī. Tradition allows seniority to the school of Delhi and to its founder, Siddhar Khan (thought to have been born c1710–20).

There are two principal influences on the older Delhi playing style and repertory (bāj): that of the dholak (which the tablā was to replace in the accompaniment of the quieter styles of northern court and chamber music); and that of the stick-played treble- and bass kettledrum pair nagārā, or naqqāra. The influence of the dholak has been seen chiefly in finger-strokes. The main contribution of the nagārā has been in the compositional and elaborative organization of certain sound-categories – pitch (the ‘high-low’, zir-bam, structures familiar in Islamic musics), resonance, variation in timbre and, to a lesser extent, force of attack – into a distinctive metrical system, characterized by a nucleus of pitch, stress and timbre-oriented metres, primarily symmetrical, and variational and extensional procedures.

Early in the 19th century a Delhi player, Bakshu Khan (b c1780), is credited with founding the Lucknow tablā school. This added not only a further layer of nagārā techniques, but also an overlay of pakhāvaj strokes. The latter was taken much further by the Banares school (founded by Ramdas Sahay, b c1810). The Lucknow and Banares schools are known as the ‘eastern’ (pūrab) baj, in opposition to the Delhi, ‘western’ (pachāo, pachva), style.

2. Structure.

The name tablā denotes the right-hand treble drum (also dāya, dāē, dāhinā: ‘right’), and also the pair (the plural table is rarely used in this sense). The left-hand bass drum is duggī, or daggā (or bāya, bāē: ‘left’). Only the bāya is a true kettledrum, a roughly hemispherical bowl somewhat straightened at the top and tapering at the base. Today, it is usually of cold-spun copper, chromed on the outside, but bāya of terracotta can still be found, although their fragility makes them less common (they are usually said to give an excellent sound). The right-hand dāya is a lightly upward-tapering, or truncated conical, wooden cylinder about 1 cm thick; at its base is a shallow (about 2 cm), round, solid wooden stem, integrally carved. Different woods are employed, the best being dense and heavy: bījīsār or bijyaisār (a kind of sāl-wood) and śīśam or sīso are often recommended.

Absolute sizes cannot be given, since tablā players (tabaliyā, tablāvādak) purchase drums to suit the size of their hand and also have a selection, to suit different pitches according to the requirements of the accompaniment. The dāya is generally a little longer (about 26 or 27 cm) than the bāya (about 25 or 26 cm). Three main sizes can be seen with professionals: an older type, with a very large dāya, played by masters of the older generation and still found in manufacture, with a dāya-head diameter of 16·5 cm or more, fully as large as the pakhāvaj; the medium-sized Bombay type, with a dāya diameter of 14 cm or more, often considered the mellowest of modern tablā; and the modern small Calcutta tablā, around 13 cm or less on the dāya, developed in this century, when Calcutta was the centre of patronage for instrumental music, and reflecting the rise in instrumental system-tonic pitch in recent decades. The bāya is about 22 cm across.

The drumheads are similar to those of the older pakhāvaj. Each head (purī: ‘skin’; in Bengali also chāuni: ‘covering’) has two main membranes, of goat, the upper cut away to leave an outer ring. These are attached to a plaited, four-ply leather hoop (gajrā), wider than the diameter of the wooden shell which lies about half to 1 cm below the rim when fitted. Inside the flange formed, two thick pieces of rough leather are also stitched to the hoop beneath the main membranes, to protect the playing-skins from the wooden rim. Both right and left heads are laced by a long leather strap (davāl, dvāl; singār), about 1 cm wide and 2 mm thick and of untanned buffalo hide, in a V pattern through 16 holes in the hoops and running round a multiple leather hoop (gudrī) at the narrow base of each drum. Under each W is a wooden cylindrical block (gattā), about 6 cm long and 3 cm wide, which raises the pitch when hammered downwards. On the similar bāya lacing there are generally no tuning blocks, though some use thin wooden dowels or metal tuning-rings. Fine-tuning is done with a small metal hammer (hāthauri) on the drumhead hoops.

In the centre of the exposed main skin of the dāya is a round, hardened, black tuning-paste (siyāhi, syāhi: ‘black’; or gāb: ‘mangosteen tar’) applied in five or more progressively smaller concentric layers, each allowed to harden and smoothed down before the next is deposited. The essential ingredients are said to be iron-oxide ash, glue, wheatflour paste (some say rice), soot and copper vitriol (nīlathotthā). When the paste is dry and the drumhead stretched, the drum has a bright, sonorous and pitched tone. The dāya head is thus divided into three main concentric areas: the outer, upper skin ring (kinār, cati), most of which lies over the wooden rim of the shell; the exposed lower main skin (maidān, sur, lav), these two occupying about a quarter each of the drumhead area; and the central black spot, occupying about half the drumhead. The outer ring, when tuned to the soloist’s tonic, struck with the forefinger and partly damped by the third finger on the edge of the black spot, gives a ringing tone, rich in first harmonics; the central lower-skin area, similarly played, gives a pitch in which second harmonics, or upper-octaves, dominate; the central black circle, when struck by the fingers and held, gives a dry, unpitched, wooden sound; and the whole drumhead, when struck and released, gives a ringing tone roughly a 2nd above the fundamental.

The bāya head is similarly constructed, but here the outer upper ring is proportionally much smaller (it is not struck functionally), and the black tuning-paste, about 8 cm across, is placed eccentrically on the exposed main skin. This positioning of the paste results in a less precisely-pitched tone for the head, distinguished by its darker timbre, but it often appears to be at around the subdominant below the fundamental of the right-hand drum. In this, the tablā differs from the mrdangam of the South and the northern pakhāvaj and compares more with the kettledrum nagārā. The dāya, like the mrdangam, has two qualities of system-tonic, but the bāya has not. The syāhi of the bāya is also a development unique to the tablā, showing that its pitch-timbre relationship to the treble dāya is carefully controlled.

3. Technique.

The composite development of the tablā is reflected not only in its physical structure but also in its playing technique. The major sources of influence are the Hindustani pakhāvaj (see Mrdangam) and dholak. Dhrupad tālas are performed on the tablā, often retaining the original pakhāvaj syllabic formulae but modifying the actual execution, the predominantly open-handed strokes of the pakhāvaj giving way to the edge tones of the tablā or dāya. The difference between dhrupad-related and non-dhrupad (khayāl, thumrī) tālas lies both in the mnemonic syllable drum patterns (thekā) of the various tālas and in the repertory of compositions. Pakhāvaj syllables (bol) retain their prominence in some essentially non-pakhāvaj compositions (e.g. gat).

Tablā playing is approached essentially through the means of mnemonic syllables translated into a variety of strokes which are underlined by the metric structures of composition. The two drumheads of a pair (jorī) of tablā accommodate a limited number of strokes and combinations, which are given a variety of syllabic interpretations. The dāya, unlike the bāya, utilizes all three concentric areas of the drumhead; the edge (kinār), the middle or sounded area (sur, maidān) and the black tuning-spot in the centre (siyāhi, gāb). Though there are similar areas on the bāya head, here the black spot is placed towards the top right-hand edge, and is usually played across, rather than on. The kinār on the bāya does not have any syllabic content.

The pair are placed upon their rings before the player; the bāya is usually kept with its head horizontal, the tablā is nearly always tilted slightly outwards. The dāya is tuned to the tonic with the aid of a tuning hammer, but the bāya is tuned to a suitable tension, rather than a pitch. Here the bāya and dāya are taken in their literal sense, as ‘left’ and ‘right’ (drums), respectively (there are, of course, left-handed tablā players).

Each head has two basic tone-qualities, closed or open (the latter with dampening or without). The open tones are produced by the first (index) finger, with a few exceptions, striking along various portions of its length, such as the stroke/syllable nā/tā (whole-hand, whole-head) on kinār. Closed syllables are mostly those struck on the siyāhi. Whenever possible the third finger acts as an anchor, resting gently on the bottom right-hand edge of the siyāhi. There are two basic stroke-qualities on the bāya. Two strokes of the tip of the second and first fingers at the top of the skin, between the siyāhi and the kinār, produce the open and resonant tones (ghe, ga, ghen). The third stroke is played with the flat of the hand, producing kā, ke, ka, ki or kat, a closed or dampened tone.

The two resonant stroke-syllables on the bāya are added simultaneously to the unvoiced ones on the dāya to produce voiced and aspirated syllables (e.g. tā + ghe = dhā). The voiced syllables epitomize the notion of bhārī (‘heavy’, ‘full’) and the unvoiced khālī (‘empty’). These notions play an important part in the breakdown of a tāla. Syllabic phraseology (bol) is central to the mnemonic approach to tablā, presented as known formulae of various sizes. These permute and combine to form various compositions and so constitute the foundation of the tablā repertory.

For bibliography see India, §III.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N.A. Willard: A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan (London, 1834) [repr. in Tagore, 1875]

Meadows Taylor: ‘Catalogue of Indian Musical Instruments, Presented by Col. P.T. French’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, ix/1 (1864) [repr. in Tagore, 1875]

K.M. Gosvami: Sangīt-sār (Calcutta, 1868)

K.D. Banerji (Bandyopadhyāy): Gītasūtrasār (Calcutta, 1868)

S.M. Tagore (Thākur): Yantrakssetradīpikā (Calcutta, 1872)

S.M. Tagore: Hindu Music from Various Authors (Calcutta, 1875, 2/1882/R1965)

C.R. Day: The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan (Delhi, 1891/R1977)

A.H. Fox Strangways: Music of Hindostan (London, 1914)

W.G. Archer: Indian Painting in the Punjab Hills (London, 1952)

B. Śarmā: Tāl Prakāś (Hathras, 1959, 2/1963)

D. Murphy: ‘The Structure, Repair, and Acoustical Properties of the Classical Drums of India’, Journal of the Music Academy, Madras, xxxvi (1965), 223–47

D. Roach: ‘The Benares Baj: the Tabla Tradition of a North Indian City’, Asian Music, iii/2 (1972), 29

R. Stewart: The Tabla in Perspective (diss., U. of California, LA, 1974)

D.M. Neuman: The Cultural Structure and Social Organisation of Musicians in India (diss., U. of Illinois, Urbana, 1974)

F. Shepherd: Tabla and the Benares Gharana (diss., Wesleyan U., 1976)

R.S. Gottlieb: The Major Traditions of North Indian Tabla Drumming (Munich, 1977) [incl. cass.]

ALASTAIR DICK (1, 2), DEVDAN SEN/R (3)