Archives: history

by Shree Sauparnika V

A musical instrument is more than an object. It carries the knowledge, skill and imagination of the community that makes it. Across India, generations of craftspeople have learnt to understand wood, leather, metal, strings, and sound—and turn them into instruments that can sing. Their knowledge is not always written down. It is learnt by watching, listening, practising and passing it on. 

The Mridangam Makers of Chennai 

Walk through the lanes of Mylapore in Chennai and you may hear the unmistakable sound of a mridangam coming from a small workshop. For some families, making these instruments has been a tradition for generations. One family (of Sebastian and Fernandes) documented in Mylapore, traces its mridangam-making lineage through five generations.  

A mridangam’s main body is traditionally made from a single block of jackfruit wood, which is carefully hollowed and shaped; and the two heads from layers of animal hide. The hides must be prepared and stretched to the right tension, while the maker carefully works on the black paste (made of rice powder and iron filings), or soru, on the right head. Small changes in the thickness, tension and placement of these materials can alter the instrument’s pitch, which supports the vocalist it accompanies. The makers have to match the pitch, a skill that takes years to acquire. 

Yet this highly specialised craft remains undervalued, and its makers have historically faced social and economic marginalisation. Their expertise may be essential to music, but the people who possess it are not always recognised as experts. 

The Veena Makers of Bobbili 

In Gollapalli, near Bobbili in Andhra Pradesh, the Sarwasiddi community has preserved a remarkable tradition of making the Bobbili Veena. This traditional instrument is carved entirely from a single block of seasoned jackfruit wood (unlike standard veenas which have separate parts). The artisan must carefully shape it into the veena’s distinctive body, neck, and resonating chamber. 

The veena is then fitted with metal frets and strings, while decorative elements may be added to its surface. But the beauty of the instrument is not merely ornamental—the proportions, thickness, and construction of the wood all affect the sound it produces.  

Today, the material itself presents a challenge. Good-quality jackfruit wood is becoming harder and more expensive to obtain, threatening both the craft and the livelihoods of the artisans who depend on it. 

The Tabla Makers of Andharjhor 

In Jharkhand, the village of Andharjhor is known for its traditional instrument makers. Around 70 families have been involved in making instruments such as the tabla, dhol, mandar, and mridangam. Their workshops are part of a community where the skills needed to make percussion instruments have long been a way of life. 

A tabla has two parts: the dayan, usually made from wood, and the bayan, traditionally made from metal such as brass or copper. Both are covered with prepared animal hide, while the centre of each drumhead is coated with the distinctive black syahi (soru in Tamil), a mixture of materials that gives the tabla its characteristic tonal quality. 

With the advent of virtual instruments and rising material costs, the shrinking market and slow returns are now making it increasingly difficult to sustain the craft. 

The Sitar Makers of Miraj 

For more than 150 years, the town of Miraj in Maharashtra has been a centre for making string instruments. A Miraj sitar begins with simple materials: a dried bhopla or gourd for the resonator; teakwood for the body; metal strings; and traditionally, deer horn for the bridge. Each is carefully prepared—the gourd dried, the wood shaped and polished, and the strings fitted by hand. But the real skill lies in crafting the jawari, the bridge that gives the sitar its distinctive sound. Shaping it takes years of practice and a finely trained ear. 

Today, younger generations of Miraj’s instrument-making families are increasingly moving towards other careers. As fewer young people take up the craft, the wealth of specialised knowledge accumulated over generations, risks disappearing with the people who carry it. 

Listening to the Makers 

These communities are only the tip of the iceberg. India has many such communities whose knowledge and craftsmanship have shaped the sounds of our music. We remember musicians for the music they leave behind. Let us also remember the people who make that music possible. Their knowledge lives in the grain of wood, the tension of hide, the shape of a reed—and in years of experience that can be almost impossible to put into words. 

Today, these craft communities face changing livelihoods, scarce materials and fewer young people taking up the craft. When a community disappears, we lose more than an instrument—we lose generations of knowledge that may never be recovered.  

Perhaps the first step towards keeping these communities visible is simply to become more curious. Who made the instrument? Who gets to be recognised as an expert in music? What happens when the materials run out or the craft can no longer provide a livelihood? And what happens to all that knowledge when there is no one left to pass it on?

Check out our latest title, Musicians of India, to read about the musicians we know and love. 

Read more about Indian History, Mythology and Culture at our very own ACK Comics App. 

by Keya Gupta

August carries some of the most important dates of the Indian Freedom Struggle. On 8th August 1942, Mahatma Gandhi gave the call for the Quit India Movement, pushing the country towards its final phase of struggle against British rule. On 12th August, the world observes International Youth Day, a fitting occasion to remember how young India shaped its own liberation. And on 15th August, we celebrate the day independence finally arrived. Between these dates lies a quieter story, of not just the marches led by well-known leaders, but the thousands of ordinary Indians — farmers, students and homemakers — who carried the freedom struggle forward on their own shoulders.  

A Flag for Everyone: The Flag Satyagraha of 1923 

In March 1923, the Jabalpur Municipality resolved to hoist the national flag on its building, right beside the Union Jack. The District Magistrate banned it, but municipal members went ahead anyway, hoisting the flag on 18th March. Colonial police pulled it down and trampled it underfoot. The outrage this sparked did not stay confined to Jabalpur for long and grew into what came to be known as the Flag Satyagraha. It soon spread to the nearby city of Nagpur. 

What made the Flag Satyagraha remarkable was how ordinary its participants were. Under the Nagpur District Congress Committee, volunteers set out daily in small batches to march through the city carrying the national flag, defying the government’s ban on public gatherings, and courting arrest without resistance, in true satyagraha fashion. Over the months that followed, an estimated 17,000 volunteers were arrested — not soldiers or seasoned political workers, but shopkeepers, students and farmers who travelled from across the country, some from as far as the princely state of Travancore, to take their turn at the front of the procession. 

When the movement’s local leader, Jamnalal Bajaj, was arrested, leadership passed to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. On 17th August 1923, after months of sustained, non-violent pressure, the government relented and permitted a flag procession through Nagpur’s restricted Civil Lines.  

Villagers and Women on the Dandi March 

Seven years later, in 1930, Gandhi opposed the harsh salt laws passed by the British Government. On 12th March, he set out from Sabarmati Ashram with 78 chosen followers, walking towards the coastal village of Dandi to break the government’s monopoly on salt production. 

Along the 240-mile route, villagers swept and watered the roads ahead of the marchers and showered them with flowers, and the walking crowd grew larger with each passing day. By the time Gandhi reached the sea on 5th April and broke the law the next morning by making salt, the march had grown from a small band of volunteers into a movement carried forward by entire communities along its path. 

Gandhi had initially hesitated to involve women directly in the march, but Sarojini Naidu and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay were among those who insisted on taking part. When Gandhi was arrested in May 1930, just before the planned raid on the Dharasana Salt Works, it was Naidu who stepped forward to lead the volunteers in his place. Across the country, women picketed liquor shops and stores selling foreign cloth, made salt illegally in their own homes, and courted arrest alongside the men, a scale of participation that British officials themselves noted as an unprecedented turn in the freedom struggle. 

Quit India and Its Many Fronts 

By August 1942, with the Second World War underway and negotiations over India’s future stalled, the Congress made its most direct demand yet: an immediate end to British rule. On 8th August, Gandhi addressed a session of the All India Congress Committee at Bombay’s Gowalia Tank Maidan, giving India the mantra of ‘Do or Die’. Within hours, the British moved to crush the movement before it could properly begin, arresting Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and nearly the entire Congress leadership overnight. For a moment, it looked as though the Quit India Movement might collapse before it had truly started. Instead, it was carried forward by those the British had not thought to arrest. 

The next day, 9th August, a 33-year-old Congress worker named Aruna Asaf Ali took the stage the senior leadership had just been dragged from and hoisted the Congress flag at Gowalia Tank Maidan before the waiting crowd, formally launching the movement in the leaders’ absence. She went underground soon after, evading capture for years while helping coordinate the resistance from hiding. 

Elsewhere in Bombay, a 22-year-old postgraduate student named Usha Mehta took up a different kind of resistance. With press censorship tightening, Mehta and a small group of associates built a clandestine radio transmitter that went on air on 27th August 1942 as the Secret Congress Radio, broadcasting news of the movement, Gandhi’s messages, and nationalist songs to listeners across the country, reportedly reaching as far as Japanese-occupied Burma, from wavelength 42.34 metres. Mehta and her team moved the transmitter constantly to stay ahead of British trackers, until she was finally arrested that November and imprisoned for four years, having refused to give up her associates even under interrogation. 

Beyond Bombay, the movement took root in ways the Congress leadership, locked away in prison, could not have coordinated. In pockets of the country where British administration had crumbled under the weight of protest, ordinary people set up parallel governments of their own: in Ballia, Chittu Pandey led locals in briefly taking over the district administration; in Tamluk in Bengal, the Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar ran cyclone relief and local justice for close to two years; and in Satara, the Prati Sarkar organised village courts and welfare work well into 1945. None of these governments lasted, and most were eventually reclaimed by British forces. But together, they demonstrated something the British could not easily suppress, that after August 1942, the demand for freedom no longer depended on any single leader to carry it forward. 

From a flag torn down in Jabalpur to a radio broadcasting in secret, India’s freedom was built as much by these lesser-told acts of defiance as by the leaders whose names we remember first. As we mark Quit India, International Youth Day and Independence Day this August, it is worth remembering that the freedom struggle was never carried by one voice alone, but by thousands who each found their own way to answer it. 

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