The black paste on a tabla is what makes the drum ring like a bell
Each head of a tabla carries a dark circle called the syahi, or ink, built up from layers of rice or wheat starch mixed with black powder. Its shaping reins in the drum's naturally messy overtones so the smaller drum sings a clear pitch, and making it well is what separates a fine instrument from an ordinary one.
The tabla is really two single-headed drums. The smaller one, played with the dominant hand, is carved from a cone of wood such as teak or rosewood, is roughly 15 centimetres across, and is tuned to a note of the soloist's key, usually the tonic. Wooden blocks under its straps are moved up or down to adjust tension, and a small heavy hammer tapped on the braided rim fine-tunes it. The larger bass drum is kettle-shaped and usually brass, though copper is prized as best, and the player presses the heel of the hand into its skin to bend pitch mid-phrase. Both sit on cloth rings while the drummer sits cross-legged.
Since the eighteenth century the pair has been the chief percussion instrument of Hindustani classical music, and it accompanies Hindu and Sikh devotional singing, Sufi qawwali and kathak dance. Strokes are taught orally from teacher to student using spoken syllables called bols, a precise system that grew up because Indian music relied little on written notation until the twentieth century.
Where the drum came from is argued over. The name likely comes from tabl, Arabic for drum, and one story credits the poet Amir Khusraw with splitting an hourglass-shaped drum in half. Nothing from his time supports that, and a long list of instruments compiled under the emperor Akbar in the sixteenth century never mentions a tabla. Scholars including Neil Sorrell and Ram Narayan dismiss the related legend of a pakhawaj being cut in two. The paired war drums of invading armies were large naqqara, nothing like the tabla in sound.
The case for older Indian roots rests on carvings of seated drummers with small paired drums, including a woman at the Bhaja Caves from the second century BCE, and on the Natyashastra, which describes similar paste patches. Clear pictures of the modern drum, however, appear only from about 1745.
Source: Tabla
