The veena began as a harp and became India's goddess-held lute
Statues of Saraswati, Hindu goddess of arts and learning, cradle a long-necked instrument with a gourd at each end. That is the veena, a name ancient Sanskrit applied to almost anything with strings. Over two thousand years it shifted from arched harp to stick zither to lute, and spawned dozens of relatives.
The oldest Vedic texts, including the Rigveda and Atharvaveda from before 1000 BCE, use the word vana for a stringed instrument of any kind, bowed or plucked, fretted or not; the term gradually became veena. The Natya Shastra, the oldest surviving Hindu treatise on the performing arts, probably finished between 200 BCE and 200 CE, spends 35 verses on a seven-string instrument and opens with a lovely idea: that a perfected human throat is itself a veena of the body.
The instrument Bharata Muni described was probably closer to an arched harp than to anything played today. Gold coins of the Gupta emperor Samudragupta show him plucking such a harp with both hands, strings held parallel to his body. Lute and zither forms appear in Hindu and Buddhist cave reliefs of the early common era, and by around the 6th century CE sculptures of Saraswati mostly show the zither style.
Two classical designs dominate now. The rudra veena of Hindustani music is a stick zither with two big equal gourds, played slanted with one gourd on the knee and the other above the shoulder; mythology credits the god Shiva with making it, though it has largely given way to the sitar in northern concerts. The Saraswati veena of Carnatic music replaces the lower gourd with a pear-shaped wooden body and is held at about 45 degrees across the player. Both have 24 frets, four melody strings and three drone strings, span three octaves, and let players slide between notes in the ornaments ragas demand. Makers size each one to the musician, often finishing the end as a swan.
The family is sprawling. The Mayuri veena has a carved peacock resonator dressed in real feathers; the Kachapi uses a wooden tortoise. The fretless Vichitra veena is stopped with a glass ball and sounds eerily like a humming singer. The Mohan veena was built in the 1940s by Radhika Mohan Maitra from a sarod and a Hawaiian guitar, and a Pakistani lawyer, Raza Kazim, created the Sagar veena in 1970.
Source: Veena
