The Gandharba
For as long as anyone can remember, the sarangi belonged to one community. Understanding who they were is not background colour — it explains why the instrument is built the way it is and why it plays what it plays.
Who
The Gandharba (गन्धर्व), also called Gaine (गाईने) — both terms are used and both are contested — are a community of the central and western Nepali hills whose hereditary occupation was music. They are classified today among Nepal's Hill Dalit groups. At the 2011 census there were 6,791 of them, effectively zero per cent of Nepal's population.
They are concentrated in the western hill districts — Kaski, Tanahun, Lamjung, Baglung, Palpa — with the single largest settlement at Batulechaur on the edge of Pokhara, something like fifty households. They have their own speech, Parse kura, alongside Nepali.
The name comes from the gandharva of the Ramayana and Mahabharata: the celestial musicians of Indra's court. The gap between that name and the community's actual social position is the shape of the whole story.
What they did
A Gandharba walked. He carried a sarangi, went from village to village and sang for whatever he was given — food, grain, a few coins. He sang Gaine geet: the deeds of kings and heroes, religious stories, songs of love and separation, and songs about the places and people he had passed on the road.
And crucially he sang the news. A Gandharba arriving in a village would improvise what had happened elsewhere into song — who had died, what the government had done, what was happening in the next valley — and be paid for it. In a country of steep hills, scattered settlements and, for most of its history, no newspapers or radio, this was the news. The Gandharba were the media.
Karkha, and the rest of the repertoire
Karkha is the great Gandharba form: heroic ballads recounting real historical events and real people. The sacrifice of Bhakti Thapa. The story of Padma Rani. Karkha has been sung since the time of Prithvi Narayan Shah, whose unification of Nepal is the era much of it describes — and it did not merely list events, it gave them a social reading, a human weight, a context. It is collective memory in melody, held by a community that mostly could not write.
Alongside karkha the older repertoire included Pingal, Mangal, Belol, Mahal, Malshree and Sawai, performed at pujas, weddings, fasts and festivals — sometimes with dancing, sometimes with swords, accompanied by sarangi, arbajo, madal, kathtal and mujura.
The arbajo
The sarangi had a partner and probably a predecessor: the arbajo, a large four-string plucked lute. It was the deeper, heavier instrument of the pair — coded male against the sarangi's female — and the two together were the proper Gandharba ensemble, used in ritual playing including the pujas that mattered most.
The arbajo lost. It is bigger and more cumbersome, and a man walking between villages all day carries the smaller instrument. The sarangi became the Gandharba instrument and the arbajo very nearly vanished — a handful of makers and players remain in Tanahun and Kaski, and it survives mostly because contemporary bands including Kutumba and Samundra have put it back on stage.
The cost
None of this was a comfortable life, and it is important not to romanticise it. The Gandharba were untouchable. Their own account, recorded by the anthropologist A. W. Macdonald, is that their position sank to among the very lowest under Rana rule — so the degradation is relatively recent history, not an eternal condition.
What that meant in practice, from ethnographic work in the community: a schoolteacher who would not touch a Gandharba child, and so had another Gandharba beat him. Water jugs at school that Gandharba children were forbidden to use, in a system where everyone already drank without touching the vessel.
Caste discrimination and untouchability were abolished by law in 1963. The practice did not end with the law. Many Gandharba left music entirely, changed their surnames and cut ties with other Gandharba families, because the profession identified the caste and the caste cost them. The instrument's decline and the community's discrimination are the same story.
Where it stands
Two things happened at once. From the 1970s, tourism gave Gandharba families a new market — and for many, selling sarangis to visitors became a larger part of the income than playing them, which is a strange fate for a performing tradition and the reason so many unplayable instruments exist. See Choose a sarangi.
And from the 2000s the instrument became genuinely fashionable. Bands put it on stage next to guitars; players who are not Gandharba took it up in numbers; it turns up in Nepali rock and film music. The sarangi is in much better health than it was in 1990.
Whether the tradition is, is a separate question. A wide audience for the instrument is not the same as young Gandharba learning karkha from their grandfathers, and it is the second that is running out of time. Read about the people working on exactly this in Players.