Rudra Veena

The body is a long hollow tube, the dandi, made of bamboo or hollowed wood, often teak. High frets stand along the tube, and two large gourd resonators, the tumba, sit beneath it. At the lower end a carved peacock or swan carries the flat main bridge, or jawari, and a carved head closes the upper end.

Accounts of the frets differ. Bahauddin Dagar describes wooden frets lightly cased in metal and set on a single mound of wax. Philippe Bruguière describes high wooden frets fixed with a mixture of plant matter and beeswax, and Darbar’s page mentions metal frets.

Size and fret count vary with period and maker. In Berlin, the Ethnologisches Museum’s VII c 300, from North India and acquired in 1982, measures 141 cm at its longest and weighs about 3.5 kg; its VII c 664, from Calcutta and acquired in 1995, measures 153 cm and weighs about 4 kg. The Horniman Museum dates its instrument by Kanailal & Brother of Calcutta to between about 1960 and 1980; it has a teak tube and 23 frets.

A rudra veena player makes meend, the glide between notes, by pulling a stopped string sideways across its fret towards the lower edge of the neck. The finger stays on the one fret. The fret gives the note where the glide starts, and the length of the pull decides how high it climbs. A deeper pull also colours the tone.

The glide comes from dhrupad singing, where singers make the same movement with the voice. A slow meend may span two notes, a whole octave or more; at speed it can rise and fall back within one phrase. Whatever its length, a meend has to start and land on exact notes, and the player has to know which notes of the raga it crosses. Practice on the rudra veena therefore starts with note-pattern exercises that build the finger strength to pull the strings.

The right hand plucks with metal plectra. Philippe Bruguière, writing in 1991, describes two, on the index and middle fingers, for the four melodic strings; the right little finger strikes two rhythm strings, the chikari, and the left little finger plucks a drone string. The highest and most used melodic string sits at the left edge of the fingerboard. There it can be pulled across the full width of the fret for wide glides, and it lies beside the chikari, so one short movement of the right hand can sound melody and rhythm together.

Bahauddin Dagar shapes his strokes to the syllables of dhrupad singing, so that each phrase is cut in the right place, and says he can sing at least 95 per cent of what he plays. Players disagree about gamak, a forceful oscillation of pitch in dhrupad singing. Bahauddin Dagar counts it among the vocal techniques the veena cannot produce, while Carsten Wicke, who plays and makes rudra veenas, says veena playing takes it from vocal dhrupad.