There are several opinions about when and how the sarangi came into existence. Hindu sarangi players usually mention Ravana as the inventor, but Muslim artistes often give credit to a learned hakim of the ancient past. The story goes, writes Shahinda (1914), “A hakim [who] was once travelling on foot and worn out with heat and fatigue, stopped to rest beneath a huge tree. Suddenly some sweet strains of music reached his ears; astonished, he listened attentively and searched in vain from whence the sound came, until, at last, looking up, he discovered the object of his search. The dried skin of a dead monkey was stretched between two branches entangled with its dried guts, and the wind blowing through it caused melodious sounds. He carefully removed the skin and guts, replaced them on a construction of wood and after some years of labour, with due modifications and additions, completed the present-day sarangi.”

The same story was told to me by a musician, but here the leading figure was a Greek, Bu Ali Ibn Sina, supposedly a disciple of Pythagoras. “He was a renowned physician who treated his patients with herbs and music. Later, the sarangi was brought to India and improved upon.” Interestingly enough, the Greeks have a similar myth in which Hermes created the lyra from the shell of a tortoise, and it is not impossible that the myth travelled from Greece to India, or vice versa. Some Muslim sarangi players however tend to believe that their instrument came to India from abroad. This was also the opinion of the great musicologist Curt Sachs, and modern scholars, such as Jean Jenkins, have adopted his view.

Abdul Halim Sharar, the author of many fascinating essays on the life and culture of Lucknow, assumes that the sarangi is a recent ‘invention’. He credits it to Miyan Sarang (better known as Sadarang or Niamat Khan), the famous court musician of Emperor Mohammad Shah ‘Rangila’ (1719-1748), who will always be remembered for his great contribution to the popularisation of khayal. Sharar’s idea, which is repeated in several other books on Indian music, reflects a general ignorance about the age of the instrument and a deeply rooted belief that the sarangi played an insignificant role in classical music before the beginning of the 18th century.

The conclusion which a well-known French musicologist, Claudie MarcelDubois, arrives at is even more farreaching. According to her, in Indian paintings and sculptures, “the bow only figures subsequent to the end of the seventeenth century,” a fact which, as Werner Bachmann writes, “emerges from the detailed study undertaken by Marcel-Dubois and is confirmed by my own survey of Indian sources.” The relevant question, whether the sarangi is a late-comer to India, has never really been satisfactorily answered. There are also no answers as to when and how it entered the mainstream of classical music. Anyone who knows how complicated an instrument the sarangi is or is aware of the many different types of instruments that the sarangi family contains, can hardly believe that these instruments evolved in the course of a few centuries, or that they entered India from abroad.

Who invented the sarangi? 

Leaving aside the stories of legendary hakims who supposedly invented the sarangi, very little is known about the origin and early history of the instrument. Unlike the veena (bin), for instance, whose evolution can be reconstructed step by step, the sarangi seems to emerge suddenly, during the days of Emperor Akbar’s rule. The Ain-i-Akbari (The Institutes of Akbar, 1588-89), which devotes considerable attention to the music of India, reveals that “the sarangi is smaller than the rabab and is played like the ghichak.” Obviously, Abul Fazl, the author of this remarkable encyclopaedia, is referring to a small instrument related to the lute (rabab) and bowed like the Persian spike fiddle (ghichak or kamancha).

Surdas (1483-1563), the great Bhakti poet of Braj, whose melodious songs collected in the Sursagar inspired so many musicians, makes an interesting allusion to the sarangi in the following lines: “When Sarang made love with Nada he had to suffer the shot from a bow right in his heart.” This literally means that when the cuckoo or blackbird (sarang) made love with music (nada), it had to die. If sarang is interpreted as the bowed instrument, however, Surdas probably alludes to the humiliation and competition that sarangi players had to face when they entered the field of classical music.

A similar idea is voiced by Zafar Khan, a distinguished and erudite nobleman, who was at various times the governor of Kabul, Kashmir and Sind during the reign of Shah Jahan. Describing Agra in his Masnavi, he writes about the instruments frequently heard: “Nay [a kind of flute] has its own tone, no doubt, but it is envious of bansuli [bansuri] which can change tone at its own sweet pleasure. Kamancha may have entered this country from outside but now it is one with those of Indian descent. Sarangi is broken and deeply wounded with the arrows of jealousy...”

Does Khan mean that the sarangi was jealous of the kamancha with which it had to compete? Or is he making an allusion to the characteristic plaintive sound of the sarangi, expressing the feelings of a deeply wounded, jealous lover?

Ragadarpan (1665-66), the most informative work on Hindustani music in the 17th century, gives a vivid description of the music and musicians of the time. Its author, the scholar-musician Nawab Saif Khan ‘Faquirullah’, not only describes the sarangi but also portrays a well-known sarangi player, Allah Dad Dhadhi. “He belonged to Admad Danda near Jullundher. There was none like him in the whole Doaba area. He died when he was about 60.”

What Faquirullah has to say about the sarangi itself does not add much to our knowledge. He says: “It is usually referred to as the ghichak of Hindustan.” The rest of his description is so strikingly similar to that of Fazl, that one wonders if he copied it from the Ain-i-Akbari or if both authors borrowed it from an earlier source which has now vanished.

How old is the sarangi? 

The simple fact that the sarangi was (and still is) a modest instrument, which belonged to living folk traditions, explains why very little is known about it before the 16th century. It is certainly a much older instrument and is mentioned in various important music treatises such as the Sangitadamodara (16th century), Lahjat-i-Sikandar Shahi (15th-16th century), Sangitaraja (15th century), Ghunyat-ul-Munya (14th century) and Sangitaratnakara (13th century). But none of these works give a description of the sarangi, and it is, therefore, virtually impossible to know what it looked like and how it was played.

Even two centuries before its mention by Sharangadeva, the sarangi must have been a fairly popular instrument. It appears several times in Prakrit works of Jain religious tales (katha) and first in the Kathakoshaprakarana, written by Jineshvarasuri in 1052. The sarangi is classified as a stringed instrument in the following passage:

Gandharva (melodic music) originates from three sources as follows: from a string, from a bamboo, from a human being. 

Of these, that which originates from a string is of several types, for instance, produced by the veena, trisari, sarangi, etc.

In another passage, the author narrates that, “kakali song, blended with the notes of the veena, trisarika, sarangi, etc., was sung.”

Describing two vidyadharas [supernatural beings who hold wisdom] singing in a Jain temple, Lakshmanagani also refers to sarangi accompaniment in his Supasanahachariyam (1145): “Having worshipped the Jina images with devotion and performing vandana with proper ceremony, they were singing songs accompanied by the musical notes of the sarangi.”

“Further in the narrative, the musical notes of [the] sarangi are described as drowned in the bustle created by the crowds of vidyadharas rushing in for worship,” writes H. C. Bhayani.

Apparently, the sarangi played an important role in Jain religious music during the 11th and 12th centuries, and, like its modern counterpart, it was used to accompany singing. The fact that it is first mentioned in popular narratives which were written in Prakrit, the language of the masses, seems to indicate that the sarangi was primarily an instrument for folk and religious music. From the given passages, it is difficult to ascertain, however, whether this sarangi was the precursor of today’s sarangi. It is somewhat surprising that bowed instruments are not represented in the splendid sculptures of the Jain temples of Gujarat and Rajputana, built between the 10th and 13th centuries. Moreover, in Gujarat, the term ‘sarangi’ is loosely applied today to any bowed instrument whether it is a ‘real’ sarangi or a ravanhatha, a spike fiddle.

Haripala, a king of Gujarat, also makes a thought-provoking statement in this respect. He writes: “In local language the kinnari is called saranga veena...” This is followed by a long and detailed account of the kinnari veena. The description of this instrument in the Sangitasudhakara (mid-12th century) leaves no doubt that the author is portraying the ancestor of the veena or jantar. Nowhere does he mention the use of a bow, although it is known that such instruments were occasionally played with a bow.

That the kinnara was a much older instrument is evident from Sanskrit sources and the writings of Arab scholars and geographers. Ibn Khurdadhbih (c. 820-912) says: “The Indians have the kankala which has but one string stretched across a gourd. And it serves them in place of the lute or harp.”

Other Arab scholars refer to it as kingra, which was either a monochord stick zither with one gourd (cf. ekatantri veena) or a spike lute (cf. ektara). Apparently, the word kingra is derived from kinnara. The great medieval poet Amir Khusrau (1253-1325) writes: “...the Indians, who only know how to play on the kingra. How funny that their ajab rud [an indigenous fiddle] itself bares its teeth (i.e. laughs) to the kingra and those who play it. When a Hindu plays his ajab rud it laughs in his hands.”

It is obvious that the kingra was a very popular instrument otherwise Khusrau would not have referred to the Indians as “a race of kingra players.” S. Q. Fatimi believes that it was a bowed instrument and he may be right, but Fazl and Faquirullah fail to mention the bow when they discuss the instrument. According to them, “the kingara resembles the veena, but it has two strings of gut and smaller gourds.” It must have been different from the kinnara which had a long stick and “three gourds and two wires.”

However, Fatimi’s interpretation of the ajab rud as an instrument resembling the sarinda [a stringed folk musical instrument] is truly praiseworthy. “It does not have lips but [opens] its mouth in laughter,” writes Khusrau. The open ‘mouth’ (i.e. upper resonance chamber of the belly) is indeed very characteristic of the bowed sarinda and kobuz species. The fact that ajab rud means ‘a strange-looking lute’ also supports this view.

Were the kingra and kinnara exclusively plucked instruments? An old sarangi player from Banaras told me that yogis playing the chikara sometimes refer to it as kinnari, while Shahab Sarmadee reports that he “found a whole tribe of these people (called Kingiriya, belonging to a beggar community in Manauri, one of the towns of the Sadar Tahsil of Allahabad district) playing on such bowed instruments which they call kingri. An old drawing of a kingri resembling a chikara also demonstrates that bowed short lutes were commonly referred to as kingri. The belly of this instrument is bowl-shaped. However, like the resonator of the southern kinnaram, of the agappai kinnari of Tamil Nadu, the kingri of Madhya Pradesh, the tingari and koka of Maharashtra and the kendera of Orissa, which is made from half a coconut shell or a small gourd, covered with parchment. These crude spike fiddles usually have one or two strings and the neck is made of bamboo.

Conclusion 

To summarise, the terms kingra and kinnara denote a great variety of plucked and bowed stringed instruments. What Sachs said about the rabab also holds true for these instruments: “It is hardly ever possible to draw conclusions from the word rebab alone about the nature of a particular instrument...”

With this in mind, we should be cautious in interpreting the earliest references to the sarangi. As one of the meanings of the word ‘sarangi’ is bow, and from the 16th century onwards (when the first descriptions appear) sarangis were always bowed, it is tempting to see the 11th-century sarangi as a bowed instrument too. Is it possible that Haripala confused matters when he compared the saranga veena with the kinnari? Was there perhaps also a bowed folk kinnari in his time, which was called sarangi, as it still is today? Or were the saranga veena and sarangi different instruments altogether? It is hard to believe this but without any evidence, a conclusion would be uncalled for. The vital question as to whether the sarangi was a bowed short lute in the 11th century remains unanswered.

Equally problematic is the question of where the sarangi originated. Since Sachs suggested that bowed short lutes came into existence in Central Asia, several Western scholars have been convinced that these instruments were introduced “in a somewhat changed form to the Indian sub-continent”. Undoubtedly, there is a morphological relationship between the kobuz (kobys) and instruments of the sarinda group, and W. Bachmann observes: “The two-stringed instrument noted by Ibn Khurdadhbih is obviously the qobuz, to which there are frequent references in Central Asian, and more specifically in Uigur, sources from the ninth century onwards ... Not until after the year 1000 do we find positive proof that the qobuz was played as a bowed instrument.”

But was it the same type of kobuz that survives today? To my knowledge, neither Bachmann nor any other scholar has been able to obtain any textual or pictorial evidence which reveals the structure and shape of the 10th-century qobuz. However, Bachmann does quote a 14th-century Chinese source, the Yuán Shǐ [The History of Yuan]: “The hu-ch’in is constructed like a ho-pi-szu (kobuz) with a curled neck, a dragon’s head and two strings. It is thrummed with a bow. The string of the bow is from a horse-tail.”

The arched neck and two strings are indeed characteristic of the present-day kobuz, while the dragon’s head is a typical Chinese decoration. Apparently, the kobuz was the precursor of the Chinese hu-ch’in and for over 10 centuries it probably survived almost unchanged. It may have been the ancestor of the sarinda as well. Although there is no positive proof that the bow migrated from Central Asia to India. It may very well have been the other way around.

Finally, the sarangi family has such an overwhelming number of different species that one wonders if it is correct to think in terms of only one ancestral type. Judging from the shape and distribution, there is little doubt in my mind that sarangis (and chikaras) are authentic Indian instruments. This was also the opinion of Zafar Khan and other Persian scholars writing about Indian musical instruments. They made a clear distinction between foreign instruments such as the kamancha or nay, and indigenous instruments such as the sarangi or bansuli.