Parts of the sarangi
One block of wood, two chambers, a skin head, four strings and a bow. There is very little to it, which is why so much depends on the hands.
The body
Look at the front of the instrument and you see two openings, one above the other, with a waist between them:
- The lower chamber is the resonator. Its opening is closed with dried goat or sheep skin, glued around the rim. This is the soundboard, and the bridge stands on it — so the strings press their vibration directly into a stretched membrane rather than into wood. That is what gives the sarangi its slightly nasal, voice-like rasp instead of the smooth tone of a violin.
- The upper chamber is left open. It lightens the instrument and opens up the sound.
- The neck continues from the upper chamber and is fretless and short. There is nothing on it to tell you where a note is.
- The pegbox holds four tuning pegs, turned by hand. Friction pegs: they hold by being wedged, not by a gear.
- The bridge is not glued. It is held in place by the downward pressure of the strings, which means it can shift — and that a careless string change can drop it inside the body.
The four strings
This is the part worth learning properly, because it explains the sound. The middle two strings are tuned to the same note — Sa, your tonic — and are bowed as a drone. The two outer strings carry the melody: the thick one below Sa, the thin one above. Together the outer pair covers almost two octaves.
| String | Tuned to | Job | Hear it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thinnest | Pa — a fifth above Sa | High melody | |
| Second | Sa | Drone | |
| Third | Sa | Drone | |
| Thickest | Pa — a fourth below Sa | Low melody |
Every pitch on this page is measured from Sa, which you set in the practice bar at the foot of the page. Move Sa and all four strings move with it — exactly as retuning the real instrument would.
Where the notes fall
With no frets, a note is wherever you put your finger. The diagram below places each note where it physically lands on the string — which is not evenly spaced. Notes crowd together the further up you go, because pitch doubles over half the string.
Click any note to hear it. The two drone strings are drawn but carry no positions, because they are never stopped.
Finger numbers here are a reasonable starting suggestion, not a tradition — see Where the notes lie for why this instrument has no canonical fingering chart.
A note on the other sarangi
If you search for "sarangi" you will mostly find a different instrument: the Hindustani classical sarangi of North India. It is bigger and far more complicated — three thick gut playing strings, stopped with the fingernails rather than the fingertips, and beneath them some thirty-five sympathetic strings called tarab which are never bowed at all and ring on their own, wrapping every note in a halo. It was the instrument of the North Indian courtesan salons, and Pandit Ram Narayan (1927–2024) turned it into a solo concert instrument.
It is a cousin, not a bigger version of this. The Nepali sarangi has no sympathetic strings; where the classical instrument gets its wash of sound from thirty-five wires resonating, this one gets it from two middle strings that you bow yourself. The rest of this room is about the Nepali instrument.
And the instrument that used to come with it
The sarangi had a partner: the arbajo, a plucked lute, believed to be the older of the two and used in Gandharba ritual playing. It has fallen almost entirely out of use — the sarangi became the Gandharba instrument and the arbajo became a museum piece. See The Gandharba.