The man who spends two months on a single Kashmiri rabab

In a workshop on the edge of Srinagar, Mushtaq Ahmad Dar selects mulberry wood the way his father taught him at the age of eight. Thirty-two years later he still gives each instrument nearly two months before he lets it go. What he cannot find, he says, is someone young enough to take it over.

He is forty, and he is the third generation of his family in this trade. His father put the tools in his hands when he was eight; the apprenticeship never really ended. Dar now builds the Rabab, the Santoor, the Saz-e-Kashmir, the Kashmiri sitar, the Sikh rabab and the surnai — the instruments of Sufiana Mausiqi, the classical Sufi music of the valley, built on melodic modes called maqamat and played for centuries in private gatherings rather than concert halls.

Nothing about the work rewards haste. A santoor alone carries a hundred strings across twenty-five bridges, grouped in courses of four tuned to the same note and struck with light wooden mallets held loosely between the fingers. Dar and his workers shape and finish every piece by hand. Orders come from across Jammu and Kashmir and from other parts of India, and each one waits its turn.

The craft has a history of running out. In the Zaina Kadal quarter of downtown Srinagar, on the banks of the Jhelum, Ghulam Muhammad Zaz has made santoors, sarangis and rababs since 1953 — the eighth generation of a family workshop roughly two centuries old. His instruments went to Shiv Kumar Sharma, who carried the santoor out of Kashmiri ensembles and onto the Indian classical stage, and to Bhajan Sopori, who kept it rooted in the Sufiana line. Zaz received the Padma Shri in 2023. He has no successor.

An instrument outlives the hands that shaped it; the knowledge does not.

Recognition has reached Kashmiri craft in general and passed the instrument makers by. Srinagar entered the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in 2021 under Crafts and Folk Art, and the World Crafts Council named it a World Craft City in 2024. The region's protected crafts include Pashmina, Kani shawls, walnut carving, papier-mâché and hand-knotted carpets. Musical instruments are on none of those lists.

So Dar trains apprentices himself, and asks publicly for what he cannot supply alone: young people willing to learn, and some measure of support for the artisans still doing it. He is not describing a loss that has happened. He is describing one that is still avoidable, and the window in which it is.