The mridangam leads the rhythm section in Carnatic music. The tabla does the same in much Hindustani music. Both are hand drums with a black spot on the playing surface, and they are easy to treat as counterparts. They differ in how they are built, how their strokes are named and what they are asked to do.
One drum, or two
The mridangam is a single barrel-shaped drum, its shell hollowed from one piece of wood, with jackwood preferred. It lies across the player’s lap with a head at each end. The smaller right head is layered hide with a hard black center, the karanai, built up from many thin coats of a paste of metal dust and cooked rice. It is tuned to the performer’s tonic. The left head gives the bass. Before playing, a temporary paste of wheat flour or semolina (rava) mixed with water is pressed onto it, and it can be adjusted during the concert. Tension comes from leather straps running the length of the drum, adjusted by striking the braiding.
The tabla is a pair of single-headed drums. The right-hand drum, the dayan, is wooden and tuned to the tonic. The left-hand bayan is larger, usually metal, and supplies the bass, whose pitch the player can bend with the heel of the hand. Each carries a permanent black paste, the syahi, centered on the dayan and placed off-center on the bayan. Players tune with a small hammer.
Speaking the strokes
Both traditions give their strokes spoken syllables, but the vocabularies are separate. Carnatic drummers learn solkattu, syllables such as ta, di, tom and nam, recited while the tala is counted on the hands. One syllable can stand for several strokes. The tabla’s syllables are called bols. A theka is a string of bols that represents a rhythmic cycle and anchors much Hindustani accompaniment.
On stage
The mridangam accompanies Carnatic vocal and instrumental concerts and Bharatanatyam. The tabla accompanies Hindustani vocal and instrumental music and Kathak, and it has a solo repertoire with forms such as peshkar and qaida. In Hindustani music the closer relative of the mridangam is the barrel-shaped pakhawaj, not the tabla.
With either drum, the left hand’s bass is a useful place to start. It shapes the sound beneath the sharper strokes of the right.
For how rhythm is organized, see Tala: Hearing Time in Cycles and Hearing a Tani Avartanam. For other instruments, see Meet the Art Forms.
Image: T. S. Nandakumar (mridangam) and Suresh Talwalkar (tabla) in a lecture-demonstration, 2014. Photo: GhatamLover, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
