Santoor: The Instrument That Carries Kashmir's Musical Identity

The Instrument Itself: Construction and Sound

Before the history and the debate, the object.

The santoor is a struck string instrument built on a trapezoidal resonating box, wider at one end and narrower at the other, over which strings are stretched in courses, each course consisting of multiple strings tuned to the same pitch. The player sits behind the instrument and strikes the strings with a pair of light, curved mallets called 'mezrab' or 'shahi' in the Kashmiri tradition, producing notes through the impact of the mallet on the string rather than through plucking or bowing.

This mode of sound production gives the santoor a specific character that distinguishes it from other string instruments. The attack of each note is immediate and percussive, but the sustain that follows carries a rich wash of overtones as the multiple strings in each course vibrate together and interact with the resonating body. The result is a sound that is simultaneously precise and atmospheric, each note clear in its articulation but surrounded by a halo of harmonic resonance that gives the instrument its meditative quality.

The Kashmiri santoor used in Sufiana Kalam has approximately one hundred strings stretched across around twenty-five to thirty courses, the exact number varying between instruments and makers. The strings are arranged so that the instrument covers a melodic range sufficient for the Maqam-based compositions of the Sufiana repertoire.

The instrument is built by specialist craftsmen in Kashmir, and the construction knowledge is held within a small community of makers. The choice of wood for the resonating box, the precise geometry of the trapezoid, the tension and gauge of the strings, and the weight and curve of the mallets all affect the instrument's sound in ways that experienced players and makers understand intuitively but that resist simple documentation. The knowledge of how to build a santoor well is, like the knowledge of how to play it well, transmitted through proximity and practice rather than through written instruction.

The visual appearance of a well-made Kashmiri santoor has its own beauty. The wood, often walnut, is finished to a warm luster. The strings, arranged in their ordered courses across the resonating surface, have an architectural quality, a sense of designed precision that reflects the instrument's formal sophistication. Sitting before a santoor before it is played, you understand that you are looking at an object that has been refined over centuries.

Persian Roots, Kashmiri Adaptation

The santoor's ancestors are found across a wide geography. Struck string instruments built on similar principles appear in Persian classical music as the santur, in the hammered dulcimer traditions of Europe, in the Chinese yangqin, and in various other regional forms across the Middle East and Central Asia. The spread of these instruments along trade and cultural exchange routes means that the santoor belongs to a global family of related instruments, each adapted to the specific musical requirements of its context.

The specific form of the santoor found in Kashmir arrived, according to the most widely accepted account, with or through the Sufi missionaries who came to the valley from Persia and Central Asia beginning in the 14th century. Shah Hamdan and the community of disciples and craftsmen who accompanied him brought with them not just theological frameworks and devotional practices but material culture, including musical instruments that were adapted to the Kashmiri context over subsequent generations.

What happened in Kashmir over the following centuries was not simple importation. The instrument was modified; the playing technique developed in response to the specific requirements of the Sufiana Kalam repertoire and performance context; the construction was refined using locally available materials, including Kashmiri walnut; and the instrument became sufficiently embedded in Kashmiri musical life that it ceased to feel like a foreign import and became identifiably Kashmiri.

By the time the santoor entered documented history in any detail, it was already understood as native to Kashmir in a meaningful sense, the way any tradition becomes native after sufficient generations of adaptation and ownership. Its Persian ancestry was acknowledged, but its Kashmiri identity was not in question.

This process of adaptation and naturalization is important to understand because it complicates any simple narrative about the instrument's origins. The santoor is not purely indigenous to Kashmir in the sense of having no external ancestry. But it is not simply an imported Persian instrument either. It is what happens when an instrument meets a culture over many generations: something new, belonging to the place that made it its own.

The Sopori Family: Custodians Across Generations

Before Pandit Shivkumar Sharma became the name most associated internationally with the santoor, the instrument was sustained across generations by families of practitioners who maintained it within the Sufiana Kalam tradition, passing the knowledge of construction and performance from one generation to the next without the benefit of institutional support, documentation, or global recognition.

The Sopori family is the most significant of these custodial lineages. For generations, the Soporis maintained the santoor tradition in Kashmir, preserving the repertoire, the playing technique, the instrument-making knowledge, and the performance context of Sufiana Kalam. Their role was that of the hereditary specialist musician found across South Asian classical traditions, the family that holds a tradition not through individual choice but through inherited obligation and deepening skill.

Pandit S.N. Sopori was among the most significant santoor masters of his generation within the Sufiana tradition, and his son Pandit Bhajan Sopori became one of the most accomplished and articulate advocates for the instrument's classical possibilities, eventually developing his own approach to santoor performance that engaged with Hindustani classical music while maintaining a conscious connection to the instrument's Sufi roots.

The Sopori family's contribution to the santoor's survival and development is often overshadowed in popular narratives by the global fame of Pandit Shivkumar Sharma. This overshadowing is itself a kind of cultural injustice, reflecting the way that individual celebrity can absorb the credit for what is actually a multigenerational communal achievement. The santoor that Pandit Shivkumar Sharma brought to the world's concert stages was an instrument already refined and sustained by generations of Sopori family practice and by the broader community of Sufiana Kalam practitioners whose collective work made the tradition worth bringing.

Understanding this context does not diminish Pandit Shivkumar Sharma's achievement, which was considerable and genuine. It places it correctly within a longer story.

Pandit Shivkumar Sharma: The Bridge Builder

Pandit Shivkumar Sharma was born in Jammu in 1938 into a family with deep musical roots. His father, Uma Dutt Sharma, was a vocalist and tabla player who recognized early his son's exceptional musical aptitude and began training him seriously from childhood. The young Shivkumar Sharma was initially trained in vocal music and tabla before his father, with considerable foresight, directed him toward the santoor.

The decision was not obvious. The santoor at that point was firmly associated with the Sufiana Kalam tradition and had no established place in Hindustani classical music. It was considered by many in the classical establishment to be a folk or regional instrument, capable of producing pleasant sounds but not the sustained melodic development, the intricate ornamentation, and the structural complexity that Hindustani classical performance demanded.

The technical challenges of adapting the santoor to Hindustani classical performance were substantial. The instrument's struck-string mechanism makes the production of the meend, the smooth glide between notes that is fundamental to Hindustani melodic expression, extremely difficult. In vocal music and on fretless string instruments like the sitar or sarod, meend is produced by physically sliding along the string. On the santoor, where the strings are fixed and the mallet simply strikes them, a different approach was required.

Pandit Shivkumar Sharma spent years developing techniques to suggest 'meend' on the santoor, using rapid successive strikes on adjacent strings to create the impression of a glide and refining his touch so that the instrument could produce the full range of expressive effects that Hindustani performance required. He also modified the instrument's construction, adjusting the number of strings and the tuning arrangement to suit the requirements of raga-based performance rather than the Maqam system of Sufiana Kalam.

The result was effectively a new instrument, related to the Sufiana santoor but adapted for a different musical purpose. Pandit Shivkumar Sharma introduced this adapted instrument to the Hindustani classical stage in the 1950s and spent the following decades establishing it as a legitimate and serious classical instrument. His recordings, his collaborations with other major classical musicians, including his long partnership with flautist Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia under the name Shiv-Hari, and his international tours brought the santoor to audiences who had never heard it and would not otherwise have encountered it.

By the end of his career, Pandit Shivkumar Sharma had transformed the santoor from a regionally specific devotional instrument into a globally recognized voice of Indian classical music. His achievement in this regard is genuinely remarkable. The question it raises is equally genuine.

The Sufiana vs Classical Debate: What Was Gained and What Was Set Aside

The elevation of the santoor into Hindustani classical music has produced something that the tradition's advocates celebrate and its critics examine with more ambivalence. Understanding both responses requires engaging honestly with what the adaptation involved.

What was gained is visible and substantial. The santoor now has a global audience. Recordings of Pandit Shivkumar Sharma's performances have been heard by millions of people across the world who would never have encountered the Sufiana Kalam tradition from which the instrument emerged. Young musicians across India have taken up the instrument, and the number of santoor students and practitioners has grown dramatically compared to what it was before its classical adaptation. The instrument is now included in the curriculum of major music schools and universities.

This expansion has also brought resources and attention that benefit the instrument's construction tradition. Santoor makers in Kashmir have a wider market than the Sufiana practitioner community alone could provide, and the increased demand has in some cases supported the survival of instrument-making knowledge.

What was set aside is less immediately visible but important. The modified santoor used in Hindustani classical performance is a different instrument in tuning, in construction, and in playing technique from the Kashmiri santoor of Sufiana Kalam. The two are related but no longer identical. A student who learns santoor in the Hindustani classical tradition is not learning Sufiana Kalam; they are learning a different practice that uses a related instrument.

This matters because the global identification of the santoor with Hindustani classical music, driven primarily by the fame of Pandit Shivkumar Sharma, has created a situation where the instrument's Sufi origins are frequently mentioned as historical background but rarely engaged with as a living tradition of equal value and validity. Sufiana Kalam is acknowledged as the source from which the instrument came, but it is positioned as a predecessor rather than parallel, as an origin story rather than a continuing practice.

The result is an asymmetry that the Sopori family and other advocates for the Sufiana tradition have noted with varying degrees of directness: the instrument has been globally celebrated, but the tradition that created and sustained it remains marginally supported. The fame flows in one direction; the resources for preservation and transmission do not flow back in proportion.

Whether this constitutes appropriation in any meaningful sense is a question that practitioners and scholars answer differently. The word carries strong connotations that may or may not fit precisely here. What is clear is that the relationship between the santoor's two identities, Sufi devotional and Hindustani classical, involves an imbalance of recognition and resources that the more complete story of the instrument requires us to acknowledge.

The Kashmiri Santoor in the Present

The santoor today exists in multiple simultaneous realities, and understanding the instrument's present means holding all of them in view.

In the Hindustani classical world, the santoor is established and celebrated. The students and disciples of Pandit Shivkumar Sharma continue to perform and teach. A new generation of santoor players, many of them trained in conservatory settings, are developing the instrument's classical voice further, exploring compositions and improvisational approaches that build on the foundation he laid. The instrument's place in the Hindustani classical canon is no longer contested.

In the Sufiana Kalam tradition, the santoor continues to be played by the small community of practitioners who maintain the tradition, as described in the previous blog in this series. The Sopori family and others continue to represent the Sufiana approach to the instrument, and Pandit Bhajan Sopori, in particular, advocated for the recognition of this tradition with considerable energy and articulacy before his passing in 2022. His loss was significant for the tradition's most visible contemporary advocacy.

In Kashmir itself, the santoor occupies a complex cultural position. It is simultaneously a symbol of Kashmiri cultural identity, appearing in the imagery and iconography with which the valley represents itself, and an instrument whose most famous practitioner was from Jammu rather than the valley. The instrument's association with Kashmir is genuine and deep, rooted in centuries of Sufiana practice, but the story of how it became globally known is centered on a figure who came to it from outside the Sufiana tradition.

The instrument-making tradition in Kashmir, concentrated among a small community of specialist craftsmen in Srinagar, continues. But the number of makers with full knowledge of traditional construction techniques is limited, and the economics of instrument-making in a difficult region are precarious. The instruments made for Hindustani classical performance and the instruments made for Sufiana Kalam have diverged in their specifications, reflecting the different requirements of the two traditions.

Learning the Santoor: Two Paths

If you are a musician interested in the santoor, the tradition you approach it through matters more than most instruments, because the two paths lead to genuinely different places.

The Hindustani classical path, the more widely available one, involves training in the raga system; the specific techniques developed for classical performance, including the methods for suggesting meend and ornament on a struck instrument; and the repertoire of compositions and improvisational frameworks that Hindustani performance uses. Training is available through music schools, private teachers, and, in some cases, recorded instruction. The community of Hindustani santoor players is relatively large by the standards of Indian classical music.

The Sufiana Kalam path is considerably narrower and more difficult to access. It requires engagement with the Maqam system rather than the raga framework, with the specific repertoire of Sufiana compositions in Persian, Kashmiri, and Punjabi; with the performance context of shrine and hospice rather than concert stage; and with the playing techniques specific to the Kashmiri santoor as distinct from its Hindustani adaptation. Practitioners who can teach this path are few, mostly based in Srinagar, and the training requires sustained presence and commitment.

The two paths are not mutually exclusive in principle, though they are rarely pursued simultaneously in practice. Musicians like Pandit Bhajan Sopori, who maintained engagement with the Sufiana tradition while also performing in classical contexts, represent a kind of bridge. But such bridges are rare and require a particular combination of circumstance, commitment, and talent.

For a traveler in Kashmir with musical curiosity, the most meaningful encounter with the santoor is likely to be a live performance, whether at a Sufiana Kalam event at one of the Srinagar shrines, at a cultural festival, or through the kind of facilitated introduction that a culturally informed guide can arrange. Hearing the instrument in its Sufiana context, in the acoustic environment of a shrine courtyard or a traditional gathering space, before or alongside any recorded classical performance, gives you the fullest possible sense of what the instrument is and where it comes from.

What Kashmir Hears When the Santoor Plays

There is a quality to the santoor's sound that people who know Kashmir well sometimes describe as intrinsic to the valley's own character, something in the instrument's combination of clarity and resonance, its capacity for meditative sustain, and its particular way of filling a space without overwhelming it, that seems to match the quality of certain Kashmiri afternoons, when the light comes off the water of the lakes at a low angle and the mountains are sharp against a sky that has more depth than sky usually has.

This may be romantic projection. Or it may be that an instrument developed over centuries in a specific landscape absorbs something of that landscape into its character, the way food grown in particular soil carries the mineral signature of that soil. The santoor sounds like Kashmir to people who have heard both, and this is not nothing.

For a traveler approaching Kashmir with the intention of understanding it more fully than its surface beauty allows, the santoor is a doorway. The instrument's history carries within it the story of the Sufi missionaries and the traditions they brought, the story of the families who maintained those traditions across centuries of changing political conditions, the story of how a regional devotional instrument became a global classical voice, and the unresolved question of what that journey cost and what it preserved.

To hold the instrument's full story, the Sufi courtyard and the concert hall, the Sopori family and Pandit Shivkumar Sharma, the maqam and the raga, the shrine and the stage, is to hold a significant portion of Kashmir's cultural complexity in a single object.

That is a great deal for one instrument to carry. The santoor has been carrying it for seven centuries. It shows no sign of putting it down.

When the santoor plays in a Kashmiri shrine at the end of the day, and the sound moves across the water and up into the hills, you understand why seven centuries of people found in this instrument a reason to be still. Some things don't need translation. They only need listening.