In January 2015, Kavish Seth was travelling the country as part of the Jagriti Yatra, a two-week train journey for young entrepreneurs to meet prospective role models. He was 22 years old, a recent graduate in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, and hoping to forge a career as a musician—although he worried about how restrictive the metropolitan indie scene would be.
Seeking to kill time on the train between Nalanda and Gorakhpur, he pulled out his guitar and started playing. A co-passenger looked at him and said, “Ye kya bahar ka baja rahe ho? Kuchh apna bajao”—Why are you playing a foreign instrument? Play an Indian one.
The Jagriti Yatra helped Seth address his concerns about a music career. Neha Arora, a fellow traveller, offered to work with him to start Zubaan, a collaborative project that brings together independent artists from all over the country. It organises concerts that provide musicians with a platform to perform original compositions and introduce their local culture to varied audiences. Over thirty artists have joined the collective, which has chapters in Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.
Despite Zubaan’s success, the encounter with the co-passenger on the train stuck with Seth. “I was taken aback by his words, but later felt that he was making sense,” he told me. For a long time, he had wanted to do something original in his life. “I decided to make a new musical instrument.” Over the next year, Seth thought about what this new instrument would be like. He thought about the sounds it would accommodate, the shape it would take, the material he would use and many other minute details.
Seth was apprehensive about learning the instruments used in Indian classical music because of certain misconceptions. “At that time, I used to feel that one plays only ragas on Indian classical instruments and it would take a lot of time,” he said. “The concept was weary and seemed highly difficult and challenging at that point in my life. I thought it was better to avoid it. Also, I thought carrying the sarod or sitar to various places would be a problem. They are so heavy, unlike a guitar.”
First, Seth tried out a number of new stringed instruments. “I checked wood sarod, rabud”—a hybrid between a rabab and an oud—“fretted ouds, shakti guitar, nada guitar, microtonal guitar and so on,” he said. “It broadened my knowledge about the making of a new instrument, as I saw a lot of new inventions.”
Once he had an idea of the tone he wanted, Seth worked to devise the soundboard he would use. He travelled from his home in Mumbai to Delhi to meet Nizamuddin Niyazi, a veteran musician who specialised in making stringed instruments. Originally from Lucknow, 65-year-old Niyazi began learning his trade when he was eight, watching an instrument repairman who worked near his childhood home. “Formal studies never interested me, but I could spend hours watching him work,” he told me when I visited his shop in the East Delhi neighbourhood of Laxmi Nagar. A number of newly-strung instruments were on display in the one-room establishment, while a couple of photographs on the wall showed him with the sitarist Nishat Khan. It was here that Seth and Niyazi began improvising.
“The first experiment was done on the guitar in a very strategic manner, where we replaced the wooden strip below the bridge with skin and saw the required difference in tone,” Seth said. “From there on, I made the design of the instrument with primary features and made improvements after a lot of design iterations with Nizamji.” The wood was crafted in Kolkata, while the rest of the work was carried out in Delhi and Mumbai. His project was supported by the Bengaluru-based India Foundation for the Arts.
After three years of trial and error, the result was an instrument Seth named noori. “I used to call my ex-girlfriend Noori, and I also like the word very much,” he said, adding that “Noori means light, and this idea has shown me the way forward in my life.” His work with the instrument, he told me, expanded his horizons. “I would say the noori has made me rooted in the Indian tradition of the arts and at the same time allowed me to be a modern who is exploring diverse cultures.”
The noori has a soundboard that looks like a sitar or guitar, and its neck resembles a rabab. It weighs around four kilograms, which makes it much easier to carry around than conventional Indian instruments. It has 14 strings in total—six for melody, six for resonance and two chikaari strings that provide a constant drone. It can play the sounds of the rabab, drums, guitar and sarod, allowing Seth to seamlessly blend eastern, western and Indian tunes. “If you play the noori behind a curtain,” Niyazi told me, “you can’t make out which instrument among the four is being played.” As Seth demonstrated the instrument in Niyazi’s shop, I closed my eyes. Niyazi was right—I could hear all four sounds. It did not seem possible that they were all being played by the same instrument.
Seth explained that much of what is known as “world” music uses a monophonic melody. Indian music, for instance, uses 22 shrutis, or microtones, in one octave, while Arabic music uses 24 quarter-tones. Western music is more polyphonic in nature, with the 12 notes used for chords and harmonies. “This instrument can play all the notes along with all the chords, and hence is able to become a meeting point for different schools of music—Western, Arabic and Indian. It allows monophonic music to be played together with the conventional polyphonic music, making collaborations easier between world musicians.” The ability to play different styles has come in handy for his work with Zubaan, which involves constant interaction with musicians from diverse cultures and genres.
Seth has patented the new instrument—Niyazi, who died in January, is credited as the co-inventor—and, in order to get feedback before adding final touches, is circulating it among professors of design at IIT Bombay. He told me that creating the instrument took this long because “there are very few skilled professionals like Nizamji who make such a thing. This is because people like him are not very well-appreciated for their art and hence, not paid enough. You can innovate only when your basic needs are covered.”