Part of Carnatic Classical
Carnatic instrumental music is South Indian classical music played on veena, violin, flute and mridangam. Instrumentalists play the same songs as singers, in a singing style.
Historical Timeline
Sanskrit literature knows the drum as the mridanga. The word appears in the Mahabharata, and the Natyashastra, the ancient treatise on drama and music, counts it among the principal drums. Writers explain the name in different ways. The Natyashastra ties it to mrit, earth or clay, the material of early drums. Monier-Williams derives it, probably, from mridam and ga, "going about while being beaten", and Apte from the root mrid, "to be beaten". Later drums were made of wood. The physicist C. V. Raman noted that ancient Sanskrit works refer to the mridanga and that the Ajanta cave paintings picture it.
Hindu legend says Nandi played the drum for the tandava, the dance of Shiva, and calls it deva vadyam, the divine instrument; Ganesha is often shown with it. Accounts of its northern relatives differ. Jameela Siddiqi, writing for the Darbar trust, presents the mridangam as the prototype of the pakhawaj, and Raman called the tabla a modern variant of the mridanga.
The Natyashastra
The Natyashastra lists the mridanga among its principal drums, the pushkara, and describes shapes likened to the myrobalan fruit, a barley grain and a cow's tail. Raman noted that the drum also appears in the Ajanta cave paintings.
Three 20th-century masters
Palghat Mani Iyer (1912-1981) becomes the first mridangist to receive the Music Academy's Sangita Kalanidhi. His contemporaries include Palani Subramania Pillai (1908-1962; some sources give 1909) and C. S. Murugabhoopathy (1914-1998).
Later Generations
After Mani Iyer's award in the 1960s, the Music Academy gives its Sangita Kalanidhi to more mridangists: T. K. Murthy in 1994, Mani Iyer's disciples Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman in 2001 and Palghat R. Raghu in 2007, and T. V. Gopalakrishnan in 2014.
Playing Techniques
Karanai (Black Spot)
The karanai is the permanent black patch on the right-hand treble head. That head is built from three layers of skin. The maker cuts away all but one layer over the centre, leaving rings at the margin, then builds the patch on the single skin coat by coat, rubbing each down with a stone. It is thickest at the centre. Raman recorded in 1934 that the paste was said to contain iron oxide, charcoal, starch and gum; Jameela Siddiqi of the Darbar trust gives boiled rice, manganese filings and water.
Raman's experiments, begun in 1919, showed that the loaded head damps its higher overtones and groups its lowest nine modes into five tones in harmonic sequence, so the drum sounds a definite pitch. A broad marginal ring gives a short, muffled tone and a narrow ring a longer, brighter one. To tune the drum to the tonic, the player strikes the hoop or strap, sometimes through a wooden peg.
Left Head Paste (Thoppi)
The larger left-hand bass head carries no permanent patch. Before each performance the mridangist presses a fresh, moistened lump of dough onto its centre, which lowers the pitch and deepens the bass. Raman, writing in 1934, described the dough as kneaded wheat flour.
Solkattu and Konnakol
Solkattu are the spoken drum syllables of Carnatic rhythm, sol meaning syllable and kattu a group in the percussionist Trichy Sankaran's gloss, and konnakkol is the art of reciting them.
One research dataset, published by the Music Technology Group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra from recordings of a professional Carnatic percussionist, sorts mridangam strokes into ten classes: bheem, cha, dheem, dhin, num, ta, tha, tham, thi and thom.
Journey to Mastery
Follow this structured journey to master this discipline
Seating and first strokes
Speaking the Rhythm
Learning the Talas
Accompanying a Soloist
Solo Performance
Past Performances
Featured Artists
Renowned performers of this discipline