I
do not know the origin of the word tambura.
This word is used in the song 'Maayaa Machindraa' in the film Indian.
It goes
‘tamburaa meettum kingaraa’
'kanjiraa tatti konji raa'
(etc.)
Talk about Manipravalam. There is a mixture of tamil, telugu (konji
raa), hindi (maistiri) and sanskrit (kaadal saastri) in this song.
Going back to tambura....
Purandaradasa uses the phrase 'tamburi meetidava' in one of his
devarnamas back in the 16th century. tambura is not a modern word.
The function of the tambura is to provide a sonorous bed of sruti
upon which the musician weaves his musical fabric.
North of the Karnataka Sangita zone in India, it is called the
taanpura.
Functionally they are the same, although there is difference in the
material used in making it and in the nature of the sound produced and
in some cases even the tuning.
The sruti box was the first approximation to the tambura. A sruti
box? What a name? As if you can pack a sruti in a box?
The keyboard and the harmonium were an import from the West. The
sruti box uses bellows in the same manner as a harmonium. It can provide
a small range of srutis based on its configuration. It is a pretty
laborious process, bellowing and singing at the same time (literally).
Yet, it found popular usage in the 60s and the 70s.
Enter the electronic sruti box in the 1980s. I was fascinated that
you didn’t have to do any mechanical work to produce a sruti. All you
had to do was to switch it on. It even sounded good.
Nah! It doesnt sound good when you listen to it now. It is really a
drone. Now the use of the word 'drone' is an insult to the word
sruti.
But the early electronic sruti boxes produced nothing more than a
drone,
that was somewhat better than the ones produced by the flourescent lamps
(tube lights), that would often sound loud way within the confines of
say a small branch of a local financial bank in Madras!
The next stage in evolution was the electronic tambura. This was a
better contraption that gave the feel of strings being plucked. With
this revolution, many performers even stopped using the real tamburas on
stage.
Now that was kind of sad. There is no substitute for the real one; at
least the electronic tamburas of the 90s were not.
Today, in the 2000s technology has facilitated the availability of
many decent electronic tamburas; many of them actually play back
recorded samples of the real one.
Chances are that if you used one of these, you could actually enjoy
singing to the accompaniment of a drone -- no, electronic sruti.
I would still vote for the real one!
Kanniks
The author can be reached at
www.kanniks.com