5 Of India's Rarest Handmade Musical Instrument Makers

An instrument built by hand carries a signature no factory can replicate, and in India, the artisans who still know how to make one are, in several cases, down to a single surviving name. What follows are five crafts where the instrument and the maker's own family history have become inseparable.

The Sitar And Tanpura Makers Of Miraj, Maharashtra

Miraj, a small town in Maharashtra's Sangli district, has been making string instruments since roughly 1850, and one family there carries a surname that says so directly: Sitar Maker, handed down for nine generations to the craftsmen who still build tanpuras for classical musicians today. The Miraj Musical Instruments Cluster, the town's apex body, counts more than 450 artisans across some 25 hereditary families, most still working out of the Shaniwarpeth neighbourhood, producing 60 to 70 sitars and around 100 tanpuras a month using wood sourced from Karnataka's forests and pumpkin gourds grown specifically in Solapur's Mangalvedha region for their resonance. Instruments bearing the Miraj name have gone to Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and Rashid Khan, and, more recently, to playback singers including A.R. Rahman, Sonu Nigam and Hariharan. Counterfeit instruments sold elsewhere under the Miraj name became common enough that the cluster pursued a formal Geographical Indication tag, granted in March 2024, to protect a reputation three centuries in the making.

The Saraswati Veena Makers Of Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu

The veena's current form, with 24 fixed frets set into hardened beeswax and charcoal, was developed in Thanjavur during the reign of Raghunatha Nayak in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the town remains the only place in India where the Saraswati veena is made. Each instrument is carved from a single strain of matured jackwood found specifically around Thanjavur, chosen for its fine pores and acoustic resonance, and the making of one, from selecting the timber to hand-fitting each fret, is a task passed down within a small number of families working out of crowded houses along South Main Street. The craft was awarded India's first GI tag for a classical musical instrument in 2013, but the recognition has done little to change the economics of it: a veena that retails for Rs 25,000 to 35,000 typically nets its maker as little as Rs 10,000, and younger family members increasingly decline to enter a trade the previous generation describes, without exaggeration, as barely sustaining a livelihood.

The Ghatam Makers Of Manamadurai, Tamil Nadu

Manamadurai, a town on the banks of the Vaigai river in Tamil Nadu's Sivagangai district, has built its potters' reputation on a specific local clay, drawn from three separate water bodies and combined in fixed proportions to withstand the firing required to turn it into a ghatam, the clay pot that anchors the rhythm section of Carnatic music. The tradition frames its own process around the panchamahabhutas, the five classical elements: earth in the clay, water in its mixing, fire in the kiln, air moving through the fired pot's pores, and space in the hollow the finished ghatam encloses. Manamadurai's wider pottery tradition, of which ghatam-making is the most demanding and specialised branch, received a Geographical Indication tag in 2023, formal recognition for a craft that requires a potter to shape a perfectly round base by hand, since a ghatam's pitch and tone depend on a precision no mould can reliably deliver.

The Last Santoor Maker Of Srinagar, Kashmir

Ghulam Mohammad Zaz, in his late seventies and working from a small workshop on the banks of the Jhelum in Srinagar's old city, is believed to be the only artisan left in Kashmir who still builds the santoor entirely by hand. The Zaz family name has been synonymous with santoor, rabab, sarangi and sehtar making for around 300 years, ever since the hundred-stringed instrument arrived in the valley with Persian influence in the 15th century, and Zaz represents the eighth generation of that lineage, having learned by watching his father and grandfather work by candlelight rather than through any formal instruction. Each santoor begins with walnut wood seasoned for a minimum of five years, is carved and hollowed to tune its resonance, and is fitted with 25 hand-shaped bridges before its hundred strings are set, a process that takes months and currently sells for around Rs. 50,000. Zaz has said plainly that he has no guarantee anyone will continue the work after him.

The Only Kamaicha Maker In India, Hamira, Rajasthan

The kamaicha, a 17-string bowed instrument carved from a single mango-wood log with a resonator covered in goat hide, is the identity instrument of Rajasthan's Manganiyar community, and for a period in the early 2000s, it came close to having no maker left at all. Shankara Ram Suthar, a carpenter by caste rather than a hereditary Manganiyar musician, had stopped building kamaichas and moved to Pune to make sofas when the late Padma Shri Sakar Khan, one of the instrument's foremost players, personally asked him to return to Hamira and take up the craft again. He is now understood to be the only person in India who builds the kamaicha's body, a piece of cross-community craftsmanship in itself, since the finished frame is handed to Manganiyar families to fit with strings, three made from goat intestine and the remainder in steel, before an instrument is considered complete. Suthar has since begun training his own son in the work, the only line of succession the craft currently has.

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