South Asian names for Naqqāra; the Arabic spelling is retained only in Urdu. Often, but not always, played in pairs, kettledrums have been the leading instrument of military bands and of the ceremonial band naubat, naubatkhāna or naqqārakhāna of courts, shrines and temples in South Asia since the Middle Ages. They are also widespread in this area as folk and Ādivāsī instruments, to accompany dancing, hunting etc; both folk and court nagārā are closely associated with oboes and horns. In Nepal the nagārā, a large kettledrum with metal body, is found mainly in temples and princely palaces. Very large pairs are still to be seen at the ancient palaces of Kathmandu and Bhaktapur but they are now used only rarely. The Newari people of Nepal called the instrument jornagārā or dohranagārā.
Kettledrums probably reached India after the Arab conquest of Sind, in 712 ce, together with the other Arab military instruments, the oboe and trumpet. With the establishment of Muslim Turko-Afghan rule under the Delhi Sultanate from 1192, the name naqqāra was adopted in India, often in an Indo-Aryan form as nagārā, nagārā etc. While it continued to function as an important military drum throughout the Muslim period, the nagārā soon became important also as a leading instrument of the palace ceremonial band Naqqārakhāna, or naubat. The naqqāra/nagārā was played in pairs of a treble and bass drum. Although the term may in South Asia be generic for such paired kettledrums, it is clear that in the late medieval and early Mughal periods, as indicated by the Ā’īn-i-ākbarī, it denoted higher-pitched pairs of such drums, played alongside lower-pitched or tenor pairs known as kuvargah or damāmā, and with the large, single, bass kettledrums depicted in Mughal painting. In these sources one leading drum-pair is often depicted in the centre of the band, frequently placed on a richly embroidered cushion.
In the late Mughal and early modern periods the nagārā may be seen depicted in other court music scenes also, accompanying female dancers. The nagārā survives in modern times in a few, much reduced naubat bands found mainly at Muslim shrines (dargāh) such as those at Ajmer in Rajasthan and Mundra in Cutch.
The court nagārā as it survives today consists of two hemispherical metal bowls (somewhat pointed at the base) – the smaller on the right (jil, jhil, from the Arabo-Persian zir), and the larger on the left (dhāma). The single skins are braced with X-lacing, divided by crosslacing in the centre. Tuning is variously effected by heat, the pouring in of water through a small hole in the base, and, in the case of the bass left-hand drum, by an interior resinous tuning-load stuck under the skin. The drums are either placed on their sides, with the two heads facing inwards, or with the right almost horizontal; they are struck with two sticks, short and thick with tapering heads. Though precise pitch is neither possible nor desired, the relationship between the drumheads appears to be of a 4th or 5th (the left at the dominant or subdominant below the right). The timbre difference is very noticeable, the right having a tight, metallic tone and the left a dark, dull thud.
Abu’l Fazl: Ā’īn-i-ākbarī (c1590), trans. H. Blochmann in The Imperial Musicians (Calcutta, 1873, 2/1927), 680ff; trans. H.S. Jarrett, rev. Sarkar in Sangīt Bibliotheca Indica, cclxx (Calcutta, 1948), 260ff
J. Levy: disc notes, Music from the Shrines of Ajmer and Mundra, Tangent TGM 105 (1970); reissued as TSCD911 (1995)
R. Stewart: The Tabla in Perspective (diss., UCLA, 1974)
B.C. Deva: Musical Instruments of India: their History and Development (Calcutta, 1978), 78ff
A. Dick: ‘The Earlier History of the Shawm in India’, GSJ, xxxvii (1984), 80–98
ALASTAIR DICK