Instruments, widespread in South Asia, in which alteration of pitch is produced by the variation of tension in the string, either directly through pressure of the player’s hand or arm, or indirectly by the use of a device such as a flexible neck or yoke, or turnable peg. The instruments all consist of a vessel-shaped body: wooden or metal cylinders, gourds or clay pots with no base, one opening covered with skin. A gut or metal string passes at right angles from the middle of the skin through the body, held by a device such as a wooden cross-bar, and is attached at the other end to another cross-bar (held in the hand), a neck or a yoke (either directly or via a peg). They are all plucked and are predominantly single string instruments.
The ānandalaharī of Bengal, often known by the onomatopoeic names gubgubī and khamak, comprises a barrel-shaped or upward-tapering wooden cylinder open at both ends. The lower end is covered with a complete skin, the upper skin with the centre cut away (earlier instruments had only a lower skin, glued on). Both skins are laced to plaited leather hoops and braced by chord V-lacings, each with a metal tuning ring. A string of gut is looped through two holes and a protective button (or piece of bamboo etc.) in the lower skin, passing up through the body to a handle formed from a small brass pot. The body is held under the left arm with the left hand gripping the handle to tension the string; the right hand plucks the string with a small plectrum of bone or similar material (see fig.1).
The gopīyantra, also of Bengal and Orissa, has a body which resembles that of the ānandalaharī. Unlike the ānandalaharī it has a neck, or yoke, consisting of a split-bamboo fork whose upper node is left whole and whose lower ends are nailed or bound to the sides of the resonator (see fig.2). The string is attached to a tuning peg inserted through the node. When the two sides of the fork are squeezed by the right hand the pitch of the string rises. The string is plucked by the index finger of the right hand. The gopīyantra is also known as the ektārā or khamak. A similar instrument known as the gopīyantra kendrā is used by the Mundā Ādivāsī people. Both the ānandalaharī and the gopīyantra are used by religious mendicant singers of the Sādhu type and especially by singers of the heterodox Baul faith.
Sachs (1914) classified these instruments as ‘plucked drums’. However, work by Picken and others (1981) shows that they are not only true chordophones but also frequency doublers. When a string is attached at right angles to the centre of a membrane, the fundamental is an octave higher than the expected frequency.
C. Sachs: Die Musikinstrumente Indiens und Indonesiens (Berlin and Leipzig, 1914, 2/1923)
S. Ray: The Music of Eastern India: Vocal Music in Bengali, Oriya, Assamese and Manipuri with Special Emphasis on Bengali (Calcutta, 1973)
B.C. Deva: Musical Instruments of India (Calcutta, 1978)
C.J. Adkins and others: ‘Frequency Doubling Chordophones’, Musica asiatica, iii (1981), 1–10
L.E.R. Picken: ‘The “Plucked Drums”: Gopīyantra and Ānandalaharī’, Musica asiatica, iii (1981), 29–33
ALASTAIR DICK/R