Two months of mulberry: the instrument-maker of Narbal

Mushtaq Ahmad Dar was eight when his father put a chisel in his hand. Thirty-two years later, in the village of Narbal outside Srinagar, he still spends roughly two months on a single santoor, and worries that no one is standing behind him to take over.

Narbal lies about fifteen kilometres northwest of Srinagar, on the road that climbs towards Gulmarg. Dar, now 40, works there mostly to order, for buyers across Jammu and Kashmir and further into India. His range is unusually wide: the rabab, the santoor, the bowed saz-e-Kashmir that a player rests upright on the knee, the Kashmiri sitar, the surnai, and the Sikh rabab — the instrument that traces back to Bhai Mardana, who accompanied Guru Nanak, and whose revival among rababi players in Punjab and the diaspora now sends commissions back to Kashmiri workshops.

He learned all of it from his father, who received a State Award for his santoor-making. That instrument is the most demanding of them: a trapezoidal box strung with around a hundred strings across some twenty-five bridges, struck with two light walnut mallets. The Sanskrit name is simply a count — shata-tantri veena, the hundred-stringed veena. Dar will not hurry it. Quality, he says, comes before speed, and two months is what a good one takes.

These instruments belong above all to Sufiana Mausiqi, the classical music of Kashmir, whose ensemble sets santoor beside saz-e-Kashmir, sitar, rabab and the small paired kettle drums. For decades the players who bought them drew salaries from Radio Kashmir Srinagar, on air since 1948. The santoor itself travelled: Shivkumar Sharma carried it out of the valley and onto the Hindustani concert stage, first in Mumbai in the mid-1950s, later into film scores. He died in 2022.

The makers have not travelled so well. In downtown Srinagar, at Zaina Kadal, Ghulam Mohammad Zaz keeps a small shop as the eighth generation of his family in the trade, with no one to follow him; he received the Padma Shri in 2022, an honour arriving at what looks like the end of a line. Dar knows the arithmetic. A skilled artisan, he insists, can earn a substantial living from this work. What is missing is the path in — dedicated government schemes, recognition that reaches the bench rather than the ceremony.

Not many people are taking up or learning this art, but I would like to say that everyone should stay connected with art.

So he keeps selecting wood, one plank at a time, and counting out the weeks each instrument owes him.