The instruments
Two things to know before the list. First, almost everything here is built for melody plus drone rather than harmony — chords barely feature. Second, the drum is not keeping time in the Western sense; it's playing a composed cycle you can follow.
Drums
| Tabla | A pair — small wooden dayan, larger metal bayan. The black circle is a tuning paste applied in layers. The vocabulary of strokes (dha, dhin, na, tin) is spoken aloud as bol before it's played |
| Mridangam | The Carnatic double-headed drum, played horizontally on the lap. The southern counterpart to tabla |
| Dhol | Loud, slung from the shoulder, two sticks. The engine of bhangra and every baraat |
| Dholak | Smaller, hand-played, the household drum — folk songs, weddings, bhajans |
| Ghatam, kanjira | A clay pot and a small frame drum, both Carnatic. The ghatam is exactly what it looks like: a pot |
Strings
| Sitar | Long neck, curved frets that can be pulled sideways to bend a note by several tones, and sympathetic strings underneath that ring on their own — which is where the shimmer comes from |
| Sarod | Fretless, metal fingerboard, played with a coconut-shell plectrum. Deeper and more austere than the sitar |
| Veena | The Carnatic classical string instrument, and the older of the family |
| Sarangi | Bowed, and famously the closest instrument to the human voice. Central to ghazal and thumri |
| Santoor | Hammered dulcimer from Kashmir, struck with light wooden mallets |
| Tanpura | Plays no melody at all — just four strings cycled continuously to hold the drone the whole performance sits on. It is arguably the most important instrument on stage |
| Violin | Adopted into Carnatic music in the eighteenth century, held between shoulder and ankle while seated. Now completely native to it |
Wind and reed
| Bansuri | Bamboo flute, no keys. Associated with Krishna, and capable of extraordinary expressiveness for a tube with holes in it |
| Shehnai | Double-reed, piercing, considered auspicious — which is why it opens weddings. Bismillah Khan made it a concert instrument |
| Harmonium | A hand-pumped European import from the nineteenth century, now completely absorbed. Every bhajan group, ghazal singer and qawwali party has one |
| Nadaswaram | The much larger southern reed instrument, played at temples and weddings, usually paired with the thavil drum |
Western music moves between chords; Indian classical music holds one tonic constantly and explores the relationships against it. The tanpura provides that fixed reference, and once you hear it as the floor rather than as background noise, the melodic movement above it starts making sense. More in classical music.
Traditions vary by region, gharana and teacher — where practice genuinely differs, this page says so rather than presenting one version as the rule.
See also: classical music: hindustani and carnatic · kathak · bhajan and kirtan
Last updated: 2026-08-12
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