Spotlight

The Modern Violin Is Not Of Indian Origin

When did the violin first appear in Carnatic music? This question is of considerable interest to the student of Indian cultural history in general and to the historian of Indian music in particular. It is also of much interest to the lay music lover. There are some uncritical, extreme loyalists to whom the stamp of great antiquity is a must for anything to pass muster to be admitted into the register of importance and who would not rest content till they have traced an Indian origin to any and every fresh discovery or invention. In fact, I know of one enthusiast who would have us believe that the name violin is nothing but a phonetic deterioration of the Sanskrit bahu Leena and that no less an ancient personage than Ravana used to play on it! Loyalty and patriotism are good, but the proof is even better.

There is some proof, however, for the occurrence of the violin in its early form in India. Thus archaeological evidence in the excavation at Lothalar in Ambala is available to indicate the existence of a two-stringed musical instrument which was played with a bow of bone, coeval with the MohenjodaroHarappan civilisation. Considerable sculptural evidence is also available to argue the existence of the violin prototype from at least the eleventh century A.D. in South India. Thus a relief on a left-hand stone pillar before the adytum in the Agastys' vara temple in the Mysore district, is perhaps the earliest of its kind. This shows a semicircular belly with a long neck held erect and bowed in much the same way as the present-day violin.

This belongs to the early eleventh century. There is another bas-relief on a frieze in the Kulottunga Maligai in the famous Nataraja shrine at Chidambaram showing, contemporarily, what could be a violin prototype. Yet another sculptural representation is from the Mallikarjuna temple in Vijayawada consecrated by Tribhuvanamalla of Western Chalukyas in the eleventh century. Textual evidence for the occurrence of the violin prototype is not lacking. Haripaladeva offers what is probably the earliest such reference in his Sangitasudhakara in the last quarter of the twelfth century in describing the pinaka veena. It is, however, Sarangadeva who gives a detailed description of this instrument in the chapter on musical instruments in his encyclopedic Sangita Ratnakara (slokas 402-411). This description has a special interest because, in the entire instrumentarium of Indian music, this is the only instance in which the bow is described in detail and nothing is said about the instrument per se.

The bow was undoubtedly the prototype of its modern descendant. It was about 30 inches long with two tufts, each about one inch from the respective end. The playing length of the bow was about two thirds the bow length. The stick was called 'kaarmuka'. This was held with the thumb and the three fingers of the right hand omitting the little finger. Horsehair or other suitable hair was attached to the stick and was rubbed with rosin. In the early days, the violin bow in Europe resembled the viol bow, which was horsehair, 32.5 inches long, attached to a light-fluted stick ending in a long peak with almost no head. Tension was obtained by an outward curvature of the stick. On the Indian bow, tension was obtained by manipulating the tufts (shikha) on the stick. The bow of the violin was slightly shorter, till about the eighteenth century.

Its evolution was marked by the lightness of the stick, and space manipulation between stick and hair, both of which directly led to clarity in musical intervals, speed, staccato playing and the use of the violin as a solo instrument. The characteristics of the modern violin bow are the hatchet and inward chamber which were developed for the volume of the tone. The modern violin bow owes its pre-eminent position and state of perfection largely to the work of Francois Tourte (c.1750 — 1835) whose design was so final that no improvement has been possible till today despite the astronomical growth in technology.

The pinaka veena is described as having been played with its soundbox- or belly on the lap in a squatting position and keyboard against the left shoulder. The bow was drawn horizontally across the belly beneath the bridge. This, of course, does, not correspond to the playing position of the modern violin, but resembles more the sarangi, which, in fact, is called by European musicologists the Indian violin. There are several chordophones in Indian folk music which correspond to such play position and bow. The kamaicha of Rajasthan, the janta and the chikara of Madhya Pradesh and the sareja of Assam, may be mentioned as examples of this. However, there are a few chordophones of the same class which are close cousins of the violin in construction, bow and playing. Notable examples are the banam of Bihar, the pullavan kudam of Kerala and the ravanahasta of Rajasthan. These instruments, especially the former,' are very ancient and indigenous in origin and are not influenced by alien or exotic factors. In this sense, therefore, the violin may be regarded as existing in India from early times.

This, however, is no proof of the Indian origin of the violin because similarly shaped and similarly played archetypal instruments are found at different times in different parts of the world. The rebab and kamancha are, for instance, such instruments from Islamic countries. As a matter of fact, the rebab is mentioned as 'ravaabu veena' as long ago as the fourteenth century by Palkuriki Somanatha and later in the sixteenth century by Nijaguna Sivayog'i. This instrument was imported to the Malaysian archipelago in the sixteenth century and is popular there even today. But its play position corresponds to that of pinaki, sarangi, etc. The samisen of Japan is an ancient violin-like instrument held slantingly across the chest and bowed with a fan-shaped contrivance. The hwuchyn is a very ancient Chinese fiddle which corresponds to the dvitantri with a long bow of ancient Indian music. The Aegean lyra was probably among the forefathers of the modern European violin.

The thirteenth-century troubadour fiddles of Germany and France bear close kinsmanship to their later analogues. Its early variety, the viella, is described by Jerome of Moravia in a Latin treatise (c.1250 A.D) as a bowed instrument of waisted body with five strings (tuned to d, G, g, d d" for religious music but to G, d, g, d' and g' for secular music). The French hurdy-gurdy was prototypal of the violin in the middle ages but provided keys on the fingerboard. (It is beyond the scope and purpose of this article to trace the evolution of the violin in Western music). Fiddles of various shapes and sizes and having a different number of strings have been known to the folks of the world from quite early times. Besides the samisen and hwuchyn, mentioned earlier, may be cited the one-stringed fiddle from Ethiopia and Yugoslavia, the two-stringed fiddle from North Africa, the three-stringed fiddle from Persia, Thailand and Caucasus, the five-stringed fiddle from Bulgaria and so on. The fundamental similarities in their construction cannot be explained by derivation on the basis of temporal priority. In fact, such similarities should be explained through a basic tenet of anthropomusicology that similar states of cultural evolution, however separated in space or time, give rise to similar musical conditions.

Even a casual study of the development of bowed chordophones reveals that elongation, waisting and flattening of the belly of the violin family were favoured more in the West than in the East — Far, Near or Middle. Similarly, the development of the bow differed markedly from its European cousin. In view of the foregoing, therefore, it would be wrong to claim that the violin went from India in a primitive form, evolved into its present state and re-emerged in Indian music. All that may be claimed with reason is. that India also has had some bowed chordophones from very early times, in both art music and folk music, which probably were, or could have been, the forerunners of the modern violin. Re-emergence: Therefore, I shall pose the original question asked at the beginning of this article more precisely, and seek an answer: When did the violin appear in Carnatic music in its present form? In Kannada, in any case, its exotic origin is revealed in the very name 'piteelu' which is unquestionably derived by progressive phonetic deterioration: fiddle — fittle — pittle — pitil — piteel — piteelu. [In Tamil, the violin has been referred to as pitil.]

The first appearance of the violin in Carnatic music in its present form is now generally believed to be in the last decade of the eighteenth century or the early beginnings of the nineteenth century. It is claimed that the first person to learn violin in Carnatic music was Baluswami Dikshitar, the younger brother of the great Nadajyoti Muthuswamy Dikshitar, at the instance of Manali Chinnaswami Mudaliar who engaged a European violinist from the Madras Fort Band to train the young Baluswami for three years. It is further claimed that he was the first to adapt its technique to Carnatic music. Further propagation of the violin in South India is attributed to Swati Tirunal. The foregoing claims are demonstrably wrong. The first appearance of the violin in its present form is without doubt in Karnataka. It is first found represented in a mural, depicting a Bharatanatya scene in which violin is shown as an accompaniment, on the eastern wall of Darya Daulat in Srirangapattana near Mysore. The paintings on this wall were first executed undoubtedly in 1784 A.D., during the reign of Tipu 20 at Srirangapattana. The violin again appears in a beautiful wooden carving on the right-hand corner of the ratha (wooden car) of Sri Rarganatha standing near the Sri Ranganatha temple in Srirangapattana.

This car is dated about 1850 A.D. Now, Baluswami Dikshitar was born on 26 June 1786. He must have learnt the violin towards the close of the eighteenth century, say between 1795 and 1800, for three years. It is reasonable to assume that it must have taken at least another five years to adapt the instrument and stabilise it in Carnatic music. This pushes the date further to, say, 1805 A.D. The Darya Daulat painting shows the violin already in accepted usage in 1784 A.D., which proves that itmust have appeared for the first time at least a generation earlier for it to have been established in Carnatic music first and then passed into usage in Bharatanatyam as a musical accompaniment. This argues its first appearance around 1750 A*.D. or slightly later.

A century later, it was so well established and accepted that it was depicted on the sacred ratha of Sri Ranganatha in a traditional setting. Its first appearance was during the reign of Tipu, and therefore was first regarded as exotic by traditionalists and conservatives. The instrument was unquestionably introduced into the royal court of Tipu by the European bands that the French brought with their army and/or with their officers at least some of whom must have included violin music as part of their education. However, in the next hundred years, during the reign of Krishnaraja Wodeyar III, in which the above ratha was made, the instrument must have been well accepted into the fold of classical music. Again, Swati Tirunal, who ruled between 1813 and 1847 A.D, is credited with importing the violin — three of them — and inaugurating its use in his court. Thus he presented Vadivel, the youngest of the Tanjavur Quartet, with an ivory violin in 1834 A.D. which is even today preserved as a family heirloom by his descendents. It is thus selfevident that this was very much later than the first, introduction of violin in Karnataka. It is an interesting coincidence that the first innovation in violin in its career in Indian music also took place in Karnataka — in the form of seven strings. But it was no coincidence that the maestro Mysore Chowdiah brought about this innovation. Ever keenly on the lookout for ideas for improving the instrument, in about 1927 he paired each of the last three strings with an additional string at the distance of an octave.

This readily found favour and acceptance at the hands of the then colossuses of Carnatic music. He later innovated further by adding twelve 'vibration' strings as in sitar and created the nineteen-stringed violin. However, the former has survived him only occasionally [mainly in the hands of his disciples R.R. Keshavamurthy and V. Sethuramiah] and the latter has not. This is because the tuning demands considerable skill, care and patience while the results are always not commensurate with the time, patience and energy expended. A similar experiment by V.G. Jog in Hindustani music also failed for much the same reason. One other later innovation on the violin, interestingly enough, again came from Karnataka, but in the domain of Hindustani music. This was a five-stringed vioiin created by Ratnakara Bhatta Gulvadi. He introduced a fifth string, tuned to tara shadja — sa in the upper octave — in the violin.

This was calculated to obviate the difficulty of stretching the finger into unnatural positions to reach the upper tone regions in Carnatic music and the bass regions in Hindustani music below middle octave panchama (pa). This had the further advantage of accommodating both panchama sruti and madhyama sruti tuning without changing the accordatura. Despite these obvious advantages, it has not gained popular adoption, probably largely because it has not yet had the benefit of exposition by brilliant and popular violinists in either system. It may be truly said that the violin has added a new dimension to Indian music, both Carnatic and Hindustani. It is equally true to say that Indian music has not yet added any new dimension to its evolution. 

Prof R. Sathyanarayana

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