At about the same time that the last Mogul Emperor Bahadur Shah II was to
witness his final days on the throne, a Bengali named Damodar Adhikari was
born into a family of brahmin priests in Calcutta. He took an interest in
both sitar and surbahar, and although he never became well known for his
mucicianship, his engagement in the musical arts led him to investigate the
manufacturing of the popular instruments of his time, namely, sitar,
surbahar, and veena. In 1882 he established a workshop with the assistance
of three or four other instrument makers. As he had no knowledge of
instrument making at this time, he took the assistance of one Natabar Lal
Das, son of Anantalal Das, one of the best instrument makers of the time.
After gaining much experience under the tutelage of Natabar, Damodar became
a competent instrument maker. Under the name Damodar and Sons, the shop
turned out numerous sitars and esrajes ( a fretted stringed instrument
played with a bow.) How many veenas and surbahars they made is uncertain;
but they knew and followed the tradition of veena making, which required not
only skilled craftsmanship but also the recitation of mantra and the proper
performance of certain offerings as each part of the instrument was made.
Natabar knew what to do, and Damodar, a priest by caste, was able to
actually do it.
Although Damodar laid the foundation for a successful business, it never
achieved high acclaim. In fact there were other shops at that time that were
better established. However, that trend was to change after Damodar’s
premature death in 1905.
Damodar left two sons behind. The eldest was Kannailal and the other was
Nityananda. They were still teenagers when their father died and had not had
enough experience to oversee the manufacturing process. Fortunately, Natabar
Lal agreed to remain with the firm and train the two boys as his apprentices
in the fine art of making sitar, surbahar, esraj, and veena.
At about the same time two other important figures manifested to help the
two boys continue their apprenticeship. These two men had been friends of
Damodar and every evening they would come to the shop for some informal
talk. Remarking the eagerness of Nityananda to learn all the aspects of
instrument making, they took up the task of training him in their respective
arts. Amulya Bhaskar, one of the finest carvers of the time, taught
Nityananda his craft; and Puraschandra Sen, a fine commercial artist, taught
him drawing and engraving.
Instruments made before the twentieth century were not heavily engraved with
designs on celluloid. Fine woodcarving was also not a trademark of older
sitars. Nityananda took a keen interest in both engraving and woodcarving
and incorporated these two skills into his instrument making. One can see a
small example of that engraving on the sitar that he made for himself. He
later developed a tool for engraving on celluoid. Nityananda’s influence on
this aspect of instrument manufacturing was so strong that eventually all
the other manufacturers of instruments eventually copied this trend.
As the two brothers developed their skills, the shop gained in popularity.
Musicians began to congregate there and engage in traditional Bengali gossip
sessions that had as their primary focus music and musical instruments.
When Natabar died around 1910, the name of the shop changed to Kannailal and
Brother. Although the shop was named after the elder brother, it seems that
the younger Nityananda was the artist and innovator in the family.
The shop of Kanailal and Brother was located in a cultural oasis, known as
the Barabazar area of Calcutta. Both the renowned poet-philosopher
Rabindranath Tagore and the maharaja Sourendra Mohan Tagore, a great patron
of the arts, lived in the same area. Many musicians, poets, and writers
inhabited this cultural belt of early twentieth century Calcutta and gave it
the aesthetic color and feeling that is to this day an inspiration for many
of Bengal’s contemporary artists. Although today that artistic flavor has
been replaced by the sounds of old buses, trucks, and taxi cabs, one can
still find many music and stone sculpture shops in the Barabazaar area.
Kanailal died a premature death sometime in the 1930’s leaving his brother
Nityananda to maintain and develop the instrument business. A skillful
craftsman Nityananda not only raised the level of instrument making and
carving to a very fine art but also invented some tools for engraving and
for wood boring the long neck of the rudra veena.
Nityananda’s influence on the production of the modern sitar cannot be
underestimated. From the early days of his instrument-making career, he was
setting the standard for sitars. He rounded the edges of the frets. Until
that time the frets, although curved across the neck of the sitar, had a
flat edge with tracks on either side that provided support for binding the
fret to the sitar. Called Ganga -Yamuna frets, they were so named because of
the two parallel tracks bordering the main body of the fret. Nityanada
discovered that the rounded fret gave a finer tone and were also easier to
tie. He made the neck of the instrument into a concave curve. The necks
prior to that time were squarer than they are today and as a result, the
instrument was more difficult to handle. He standardized the measurements of
the instrument and refined the proportions of all its parts so that one
could pull the wire over a span of five notes from one fret.
In the early twentieth century, some sitar players played on a rather small
sitar, mainly at higher tempos. Others from the Jaipur area played on a
larger sitar called a sitar-been and concentrated their music into the
Maseetkhani baj. Then again, some sitar players who wanted to develop the
slower unaccompanied part of the music, required a second instrument called
a surbahar, a larger deeper toned instrument, which looks like an oversized
sitar, but is more like a rudra veena.
Until the 1930’s there was hardly a sitar player who could demonstrate
equally the two styles of sitar. Some played the faster Rezakhani baj and
others played the slower Maseetkhani style. Few played the unaccompanied
portion called alap on the sitar. With the methods that Nityananda found for
adjusting the proportion of the sitar, players could now handily play all
the aspects of Indian music on one instrument. Artists nowadays give equal
attention to alap, Maseetkhani and Rezakhani. The small sitar disappeared
and although the surbahar is still around, it lost the popularity that it
had during the last part of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, however, there
seems to be a resurging fascination with the surbahar.
Nityananda adjusted the thickness of the neck and the size of the bridge and
the thickness of its legs. He proportioned the height of the ara (the bone
piece which holds the strings in place on the pegbox side). He adjusted the
scale length so that the bass note and the highest note would have a similar
tonal quality. This is very difficult on an instrument with such a long fret
board. He fixed the method by which the neck is attached to the gourd so
that the playing wire falls in the middle of the instrument and the bridge
sits in the middle of the tabli (the flat wooden cover on top of the gourd).
Positioning the bridge in this away allows the whole tabli to vibrate
evenly. He also made similar adjustments to other instruments such as the
veena, esraj and surbahar.
Other craftsmen trained in the Kanailal and Brother shop. They would
generally be involved with the tedious aspects of instrument making such as
making frets and pegs. However, their exposure to Nityananda’s fine work
gave them the opportunity to observe and learn. After learning, these
craftsmen would go and work in other musical shops in Calcutta. As they had
witnessed the work of Nityananda and his brother, they would try to copy
their production of the sitar, particularly the more visible aspects. In
this way the sitar became more and more standardized throughout Calcutta.
These craftsmen never received the full training, especially in regard to
the refined inner qualities of the instrument. It was therefore impossible
for them to reproduce the sitar that was stamped with the name of Kanailal
and Brother.
The trademark of the Kanailal sitar was its fine tone. If words could
describe tone, then one might say that it had a sound whose texture
contained evenly layered overtones as fine as smooth sand, no grain larger
than another. The result was a note that had a precise center with a
radiating periphery. While pulling from one note to another which is very
common in sitar, one can hear this proportioned granulation of the sound.
The Kanailal sitar became so popular that it was highly demanded throughout
India from the 1920s to the 1960’s. Every great sitar player of that period
including Enayet Khan, Waheed Khan, Mushtaq Ali Khan, Vilayat Khan, Ravi
Shankar knew the ‘Kanailal and Brother’ shop on Upper Chittpur Road. and
owned one of their instruments.
Nityananda also made sarodes for the great sarodiyas of the time including
Keramatullah Khan, Kukubh Khan Amir Khan, Radhika Mohan Moitra, and Shyam
Ganguli. He also made instruments for the maharaja Sourendra Mohan Tagore.
During his lifetime Nityananda made about four veenas according to the
instructions he had received from Natabar Lal.
Nityanada retired in l960 leaving the shop to his son Murari and nephew
Govinda. He expired on October 22, 1972.
Murari and Govinda continued to make instruments according to the tradition
established by their fathers and grandfather. In fact, one may find one of
their sitars, surbahars, and veenas, in practically every part of the world
today. Murari Adhikari made instruments for Ziamoinuddin Dagar, Asat Ali
Khan, Imrat Khan, and Ravi Shankar (sitar and surbahar).
Murari made his first veena for Ziamoinuddin Dagar in l960. Ziamonuddin made
frequent visits to the shop on numerous occasions and demonstrated vocally
the type of sound that he wanted. Murari did the research and made the
necessary adjustments to make the instrument sound the way Ziamoinuddin
wanted. Ziamoinuddin was quite please with that veena and as a result Murari
had the opportunity to make veenas for many of his students.
Murari introduced some changes in the manufacturing of the veena just as his
father had done for the sitar. He made about 50 veenas during his
professional career and they are presently in the hands of players all over
the world.
As trends in musical taste changed dramatically after independence in 1947,
the name of Kanailal and Brother became more associated with the traditional
sitar. Modern artists after the 1950’s began looking for a ‘modern’ sound
that was blunter, louder, and without overtones. The traditional sitar with
its rich array of overtones was difficult to control when amplified through
the microphone and new artists found the ‘dryer’ sound to be more appealing
when it was interfaced with amplification.
These changes were to gradually have their toll on the Kanailal tradition.
Neither Murari nor his brother wanted to change their family tradition to
suit the market. Although they did make sitars according to market demand,
they were never satisfied. Eventually, the market buyers turned against them
and chose other manufacturers in their place. The shop was permanently
closed in 1995 and thus a tradition spanning three generations and over one
century came to an end.
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