The Harp in India Today

Abstract

hen Victor Mahillon published his catalog of the instrument collection at the Brussels Conservatory over one hundred years ago, he opened the era of modern studies in organology. Inspired by the Mahillon catalog, Hornbostel and Sachs created their well-known classification system in 1914, and today many pioneers in ethnomusicology such as Baines, Hickmann, Kirby, Kunst, Marcel-Dubois, Schaeffner, and Wachsmann are remembered for their major contributions to the study of musical instruments. Among instruments, the harp has long been attractive to scholars. Not only is it played in many parts of the world, it usually occupies a position of prominence where it is played. It is also very old. The earliest depiction is on a Sumerian vase of approximately 3000 B.C. (Wachsmann, 1961:42), and in Egypt the harp began to appear in stone reliefs at about the same time the pyramids were built, around 2600 B.C. (Hickmann, 1954:127). Archaeological studies of the Indus River civilization of the same period have not revealed any evidence for the harp, but Sachs interprets a character in the ideographic script of the Indus River civilization as clearly representing a harp (1940:152). From a later period the evidence for harps on the Indian subcontinent is abundant. During the 1000 years from the 2nd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. stone sculptors included harps in the bas-reliefs at Buddhist sites across north and central India, from Butkara in the ancient kingdom of Gandhara (in present-day Afghanistan) to Mathura, Sanchi, Bharhut, and Bodhgaya in the Ganges basin, and as far south as the Ajanta and Ellora caves, Bhaja (near Bombay), and Nagarjunakonda and Amaravati on the Krishna River east of Hyderabad.' Other representations were sculpted in terra cotta and imprinted on a celebrated gold coin, both from the Gupta period (4th-6th century A.D.), the latter showing the emperor Samadragupta himself playing the harp. Still other harps were inscribed on a copper water vessel and sculpted in bronze. The map and table in Figure 1 summarize our knowledge of the Indian harp from this period. There are two basic harp shapes-arched or angled. The Indian harps are all of the arched variety, as are the earliest Sumerian and Egyptian harps. Angled harps appear first on Assyrian cylinder seals of the second millennium B.C. (Griffeths and Rimmer, 1980:192). Arched harps hold a 9