--- url: 'https://kalasudha.com/en-fr/article/beat-of-the-earth-the-tabla-and-mridangam' title: 'Beat of the Earth: the tabla and mridangam' author: name: rajeevk url: 'https://kalasudha.com/en-fr/user/4add8741a490747f' date: '2026-11-05T22:48:27+00:00' type: article summary: 'How the tabla and mridangam are built, why their heads ring in tune, and the gharanas, schools and players behind the two great drums of India. Part 4 of seven.' tags: - 'Ragas and traditions' image: 'https://files.kalasudha.com/styles/d12_standard/public/2026-11/director-series-part-4-tabla-1920x1080.jpg?VersionId=4_zf58621fa0f456059ae110919_f104ab1489ec752d9_d20261105_m231627_c003_v0312049_t0042_u01793920587555&h=d1cb525d&itok=qr3H3JUm' published: true og: site_name: KalaSudha 'image:url': 'https://files.kalasudha.com/styles/d12_standard/public/2026-11/director-series-part-4-tabla-1920x1080.jpg?VersionId=4_zf58621fa0f456059ae110919_f104ab1489ec752d9_d20261105_m231627_c003_v0312049_t0042_u01793920587555&h=d1cb525d&itok=qr3H3JUm' 'image:secure_url': 'https://files.kalasudha.com/styles/d12_standard/public/2026-11/director-series-part-4-tabla-1920x1080.jpg?VersionId=4_zf58621fa0f456059ae110919_f104ab1489ec752d9_d20261105_m231627_c003_v0312049_t0042_u01793920587555&h=d1cb525d&itok=qr3H3JUm' 'image:type': image/jpeg 'image:width': '1200' 'image:height': '675' 'image:alt': 'Hands playing a tabla, in teal and ivory' --- 7 min read # Beat of the Earth: the tabla and mridangam How the tabla and mridangam are built, why their heads ring in tune, and the gharanas, schools and players behind the two great drums of India. Part 4 of seven. [ Image ](/en-fr/profile/rajeev-kumar) [ Rajeev Kumar ](/en-fr/profile/rajeev-kumar) Director of Art, KalaSudha November 5, 2026 Share [ ](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fkalasudha.com%2Fen-fr%2Farticle%2Fbeat-of-the-earth-the-tabla-and-mridangam "Share on Facebook") [ ](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkalasudha.com%2Fen-fr%2Farticle%2Fbeat-of-the-earth-the-tabla-and-mridangam&text=Beat+of+the+Earth%3A+the+tabla+and+mridangam "Share on X") In This Article [ Two drums, two builds ](#section-0) [ The tabla: a pair ](#section-1) [ The mridangam: one barrel, two heads ](#section-2) [ The black spot that makes a drum sing ](#section-3) [ Syahi and the black load ](#section-4) [ What C. V. Raman heard ](#section-5) [ Where the drums come from ](#section-6) [ Earth in the name ](#section-7) [ A painting and a story ](#section-8) [ Schools of the drum ](#section-9) [ Tabla gharanas ](#section-10) [ Players who carry them ](#section-11) [ Thanjavur and Pudukkottai ](#section-12) [ Keeper of the cycle, voice of the solo ](#section-13) [ The accompanist ](#section-14) [ The soloist ](#section-15) [ Playing and owning them ](#section-16) [ Our instruments ](#section-17) [ Learning to play ](#section-18) [ The pulse beneath the raga ](#section-19) The **tabla and mridangam** are tuned before a single composition begins. A tabla player taps the braided rim of the right-hand drum with a small, heavy hammer, listens and taps again. In a Carnatic concert, a mridangam player strikes the leather straps of the drum with a smooth stone in the same patient search. Each is listening for one note: *Sa*, the home note of the soloist, held by the tanpura. Only when the drum agrees with the melody does the music start. In this fourth article, I move from the strings to the drums. In [the previous article](/en-fr/article/the-mastery-of-the-sitar-and-the-indian-violin), we saw how the sitar and the Indian violin imitate the singing voice. The two great drums of India carry the *tala*, the rhythmic cycle that holds a raga performance together, and they do it in tune. In [the second article](/en-fr/article/two-streams-one-source-deciphering-the-dialects-of-indian-classical-music), I compared the theka of the North with the sollukattu of the South. Here I look at the instruments themselves: how they are built, why their heads ring with a pitch, where they come from and who plays them today. ## Two drums, two builds ### The tabla: a pair The tabla is two drums, played as one instrument. The right-hand drum, the *dayan*, has a body of hollowed wood. The left-hand drum, the *bayan*, is a deeper kettledrum, usually of metal. The late 20th-century pair at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a bayan of chromed copper. Museums note that the word tabla strictly names the right-hand drum, though players use it for the pair. The shape decides the work. The small wooden dayan gives the clear, tuned strokes. The wide bayan gives the bass, and the player's left hand bends that bass up and down as the music moves. David Courtney, writing on tuning Indian instruments, explains that most players leave the bayan untuned for this reason: its pitch changes under the hand all the time. ### The mridangam: one barrel, two heads The **mridangam** is a single drum with a leather head at each end. Its shell is one piece of hollowed wood, and jackwood is the standard timber. A right-handed player strikes the smaller treble head with the right hand and the larger bass head with the left. G. Sathej and R. Adhikari studied the sound of Indian drums, and they put the contrast in one line. The mridangam is one drum covered on both sides, while the tabla is a pair of single-headed drums. Before a concert, the mridangam player presses a small disc of temporary paste, most often semolina mixed with water, onto the centre of the bass head. The paste lowers the pitch and damps the tone, and the player can top it up during the performance. ## The black spot that makes a drum sing ### Syahi and the black load Look at the right-hand head of either drum and you see a black circle. On the tabla it is the ***syahi***, a disc of loading paste, set in the centre of the dayan and off-centre on the bayan. Makers build it from rice or wheat paste with iron filings, gum and soot, plus additions that makers do not disclose. On the mridangam the black load sits on the treble head and stays there. It is an iron-bearing mineral powder bound with cooked rice. The Wesleyan University Virtual Instrument Museum records that a mridangam head may take up to fifty thin layers. The maker strikes the head between layers to test it. ### What C. V. Raman heard An ordinary stretched skin gives a dull note, because its overtones fall at uneven intervals. In 1920 the physicist C. V. Raman and Sivakali Kumar published a short paper in *Nature*, "Musical drums with harmonic overtones". They showed that the loaded Indian drumhead behaves like a string: its overtones line up in harmonic order. On the mridangam, the load brings out five near-harmonic tones, the fundamental among them. This is the reason a tabla or a mridangam can be tuned to Sa and hold a conversation with a sitar or a violin. The black spot gives the drum a definite pitch, and it is where this article meets the strings of the last one. ## Where the drums come from ### Earth in the name The title of this article comes from the mridangam's name. The Natyasastra, the ancient Sanskrit treatise on drama and music, lists the *mridanga* among its wooden-bodied drums and links the word to *mrt*, earth. The drum the Natyasastra describes is almost certainly a different instrument from the mridangam of a Carnatic concert today. The modern mridangam keeps the earth in its name. ### A painting and a story The tabla's past is harder to fix. A popular story says the poet Amir Khusrau split a pakhawaj, the barrel drum of dhrupad, into two halves. Indian course material still repeats a version of it. The music course of the Indira Gandhi National Open University presents the tabla as a softer drum made for khayal, ghazal and tarana. It remains a story. The pictures are more modest. Nainsukh painted Mian Mukund Dev of Jasrota, in the Punjab Hills, in about 1740 to 1745. The painting, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, shows a mounted musician with a drum. The museum catalogues that drum as a tabla. The painting's own inscription names the player Malla and calls him a pakhawaj player. In this early picture, a pakhawaj player is shown with a tabla. ## Schools of the drum ### Tabla gharanas Tabla players organise their art into **gharanas**: family schools that pass down a repertoire of compositions and a way of striking the drum. Players name gharanas such as Delhi and Lucknow. The ethnomusicologist James Kippen studied the hereditary drummers of Lucknow for his doctorate, and his book *The Tabla of Lucknow* (Cambridge University Press, 1988) set out their world. A *kayda* is a theme with variations that a player builds out of one phrase. [Ustad Akram Khan](/en-fr/artist/akram-khan), a seventh-generation tabla player of the [Ajrada gharana](/en-fr/gharana/ajrara-gharana), trained with his great-grandfather, Mohammad Shafi Khan, and later with Niazu Khan. He has preserved more than fifteen of the gharana's classic kaydas through his teaching and performance. ### Players who carry them Several of the tabla players KalaSudha works with carry these schools today. [Hanif Khan](/en-fr/artist/hanif-khan), a London-based tabla player, learned from his father, Hidayat Khan, and is an expert in Delhi kayda playing. [Ustad Shahbaz Hussain](/en-fr/artist/shahbaz-hussain), based in Manchester, studied first with his father, the vocalist Mumtaz Hussain, and later with teachers including Alla Rakha of the Punjab gharana. [Durjay Bhaumik](/en-fr/artist/durjay-bhaumik), from Kolkata, was first taught by Dulal Nutta of the Benares gharana and has studied with Suresh Talwalkar since 2001. Kousic Sen, born into a musical family in Kolkata, trained with masters of the Benares gharana. Sandipan Mukherjee, based in Pune, trained under Kumar Bose and continues with Arvind Kumar Azad. ### Thanjavur and Pudukkottai The mridangam has its own schools. Duke University's musical instrument collection names the two most famous: Pudukkottai and Thanjavur. In *Dhruva Natchathiram*, Lalitha Ram traces the technique of Palani Subramania Pillai (1908 to 1962) to the thavil drummers who came before the Pudukkottai style. Lalitha Ram describes the Thanjavur style as marked by restraint, comfort and *shruti*, exact pitch, more than technical display. Palghat Mani Iyer (1912 to 1981) received the Sangita Kalanidhi of the Music Academy, Madras, in 1966. The Academy's list of the honour records him as the first mridangam player to receive it. ## Keeper of the cycle, voice of the solo ### The accompanist Two details add to the comparison of theka and sollukattu in the second article. The open university's course describes tabla strokes as closed (*band*), against the open (*khule*) strokes of the pakhawaj. And on the mridangam, as the Duke collection puts it, the bols are unwritten, so students learn to feel the rhythm rather than read it. The pakhawaj still stands beside both drums. [Aditya Dip](/en-fr/artist/aditya-dip), a pakhawaj player from Varanasi, began on the tabla at twelve and then studied pakhawaj with Shrikant Mishra, the Benares master. He holds a master's degree in music from Banaras Hindu University and teaches pakhawaj with the KalaSudha Academy, online and in person. ### The soloist Both drums also step forward. In a Carnatic concert, the mridangam takes the ***tani avartanam***, the percussion solo inside the performance. The Wesleyan collection describes how the mridangam's role grew from accompanying a lead performer to solo playing of this kind. South Indian percussion has more than one voice. [R. N. Prakash](/en-fr/artist/r-n-prakash) plays the ghatam, the mridangam and the khanjira. He trained under K. N. Krishnamurthy in Bangalore from the age of six and moved to the UK in his thirties. He is a senior musician and educator at the London School of Carnatic Music. In the North, the tabla soloist builds from kaydas, the repertoire Ustad Akram Khan keeps in his performances. ## Playing and owning them ### Our instruments KalaSudha's tabla and mridangam are built by makers who work in close collaboration with us. We deliver them worldwide, and we service and repair every instrument we sell, wherever it was bought, with parts and cases supplied. A tabla head wears with playing, and a mridangam's black load is replaced when it loosens, so a drum needs a service route as well as a maker. You can ask us for a quote on the [tabla](/en-fr/instrument/tabla) and [mridangam](/en-fr/instrument/mridangam) pages. ### Learning to play The KalaSudha Academy teaches both drums online, in structured courses and live one-to-one lessons with a teacher, from foundation to advanced. Hanif Khan teaches tabla in the UK one to one, in workshops and in masterclasses, and Durjay Bhaumik teaches students worldwide. Begin at the [KalaSudha Academy](/en-fr/academy). ## The pulse beneath the raga The sitar and the violin showed that Indian instruments try to sing. The tabla and the mridangam show that a drum can be tuned to the home note of a raga. Its head is built in layers of iron and rice until it rings with a pitch. One is a pair and the other a single barrel. One appears in a painting from the Punjab Hills in the 1740s; the other takes its name from the Natyasastra. Both keep the tala under the melody. In the next article, I will turn from skin and wood to bamboo and reed: the bansuri and shehnai of the North, the venu and nadaswaram of the South, and the breath that carries a raga. [ ](/en-fr/profile/rajeev-kumar) #### [Rajeev Kumar ](/en-fr/profile/rajeev-kumar) Director of Art, KalaSudha Rajeev Kumar is Co-founder and Director of Art at KalaSudha. Since establishing the organisation in 2023, he has focused on building the future of classical heritage at the intersection of digital technology and Indian Classical Music, Arts, and Dance. [ ](https://www.facebook.com/drupler "Facebook") [ ](https://www.instagram.com/drupler "Instagram") [ ](https://x.com/drupler "Twitter") [ View Full Profile ](/en-fr/profile/rajeev-kumar) #### In This Article [ Two drums, two builds ](#section-0) [ The tabla: a pair ](#section-1) [ The mridangam: one barrel, two heads ](#section-2) [ The black spot that makes a drum sing ](#section-3) [ Syahi and the black load ](#section-4) [ What C. V. Raman heard ](#section-5) [ Where the drums come from ](#section-6) [ Earth in the name ](#section-7) [ A painting and a story ](#section-8) [ Schools of the drum ](#section-9) [ Tabla gharanas ](#section-10) [ Players who carry them ](#section-11) [ Thanjavur and Pudukkottai ](#section-12) [ Keeper of the cycle, voice of the solo ](#section-13) [ The accompanist ](#section-14) [ The soloist ](#section-15) [ Playing and owning them ](#section-16) [ Our instruments ](#section-17) [ Learning to play ](#section-18) [ The pulse beneath the raga ](#section-19) #### Share Article Copy Link [ Facebook ](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fkalasudha.com%2Fen-fr%2Farticle%2Fbeat-of-the-earth-the-tabla-and-mridangam) [ X ](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkalasudha.com%2Fen-fr%2Farticle%2Fbeat-of-the-earth-the-tabla-and-mridangam&text=Beat+of+the+Earth%3A+the+tabla+and+mridangam) [ WhatsApp ](https://wa.me/?text=Beat+of+the+Earth%3A+the+tabla+and+mridangam+https%3A%2F%2Fkalasudha.com%2Fen-fr%2Farticle%2Fbeat-of-the-earth-the-tabla-and-mridangam) [ Email ](mailto:?subject=Beat%20of%20the%20Earth%3A%20the%20tabla%20and%20mridangam&body=How%20the%20tabla%20and%20mridangam%20are%20built%2C%20why%20their%20heads%20ring%20in%20tune%2C%20and%20the%20gharanas%2C%20schools%20and%20players%20behind%20the%20two%20great%20drums%20of%20India.%20Part%204%20of%20seven.%0A%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fkalasudha.com%2Fen-fr%2Farticle%2Fbeat-of-the-earth-the-tabla-and-mridangam) ## Continue Reading [ ### The living raga: Indian classical music today Indian classical music today sounds on instruments its old masters never held. A mandolin plays a Carnatic kriti. An alto saxophone carries the gamakas of the South. A guitar laid flat across a musici... Rajeev Kumar November 5, 2026 9 min Read More ](/en-fr/article/the-living-raga-indian-classical-music-today) [ ### Ambassadors of the raga: Indian classical music in the West The story of Indian classical music in the West has many beginnings, and one of them is a boy of ten arriving in Paris. In 1930 Ravi Shankar left India to join his elder brother, the dancer Uday Shank... Rajeev Kumar November 5, 2026 9 min Read More ](/en-fr/article/ambassadors-of-the-raga-indian-classical-music-in-the-west) [ ### Breath of the raga: Indian wind instruments, North and South Indian wind instruments ask the whole body to play: breath, lips and fingers. A bansuri player draws a slow breath and lays three fingers of each hand over a length of bamboo. Then the first notes of ... 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