The history
About 2,000 years from drums made with river clay in an ancient Sanskrit text to a pair of small drums heard on Grammy stages, film soundtracks and drum machines.
The tabla is a pair of drums: a small wooden one for the right hand and a big metal one for the left. Its secret is the black spot on each drumhead, a paste that turns a thud into a note. Drummers in India were loading drum skins with paste for centuries, the tabla itself took shape in the courts of 18th-century North India, and in 1920 a young physicist named C. V. Raman finally explained why it sings.
c. 200 BCE – 200 CE
Earliest written description of pushkara drums and their materials
Natya Shastra, attributed to Bharata, India
Early 18th century
Oldest tabla gharana
Delhi gharana, attributed to Sidhar Khan Dhadi
c. 1745
Clear pictures of the tabla
North Indian paintings
1920
Scientific paper on harmonic overtones in Indian drums
C. V. Raman and Sivakali Kumar, Nature
1987
Electronic tabla using a microprocessor (maker's claim)
Taalmala, Radel, Bangalore
2024
Musician from India to win three Grammys at one ceremony
Zakir Hussain
200 BCE – 1600
Long before the tabla, Indian drummers played two-headed drums like the pakhawaj and mridangam. An ancient text already tells drum makers which earth and pastes to use on the skin.
150 BCE
c. 2nd century BCE
The Bhaja Caves are rock-cut Buddhist caves from about the 2nd century BCE. One carving shows a woman playing a pair of drums while another person dances. Some researchers, including the tabla player Aban Mistry, have pointed to it as a very early tabla-like pair, though it is not a tabla as we know it.
Why it mattered. It shows that playing two drums side by side is a very old idea in India.
0
c. 200 BCE – 200 CE
The Natya Shastra is an ancient Sanskrit guide to drama, dance and music. It tells how the sage Svati heard heavy rain drumming on lotus leaves and noticed high, middle and low sounds. The story says this gave him the idea for the first drums, which the text calls pushkaras.
Why it mattered. It is one of the oldest stories anywhere about where the sound of a drum comes from.
1
c. 200 BCE – 200 CE
The Natya Shastra describes the pushkara drums in detail: their sizes, the woods and hides to use, and a blackish earth from riverbanks for the drum. It also mentions pastes put on the drum skins to sweeten the sound. Scholars date the text to somewhere between about 200 BCE and 200 CE.
Why it mattered. It is the earliest written hint of the idea behind the tabla's black spot: putting something heavy on a drum skin to make it musical.
1300
c. 1300 (attributed, disputed)
A popular story says the poet Amir Khusrau invented the tabla around 1300 by cutting a drum in half. No painting, sculpture or document from his time supports it. Historians think the story may mix him up with a later musician with a similar name.
Why it mattered. It is a good reminder that a story being famous does not make it true.
1500
c. 15th–17th century
The pakhawaj is a long barrel drum with a skin at each end, played lying on its side. It became the drum of dhrupad, a grand and serious style of singing. Its bass head gets a dab of wheat dough before playing, and its treble head carries a black paste spot, like the south Indian mridangam.
Why it mattered. Many tabla strokes and compositions were first played on the pakhawaj.
1700 – 1780
A new, lighter style of singing called khayal needs a new drum. In 18th-century Delhi, drummers split the job between two small drums and play with their fingertips.
1719
1719–1748
Muhammad Shah ruled from Delhi from 1719 to 1748 and was nicknamed Rangila, the colourful one, for his love of the arts. At his court the khayal style of singing flourished under musicians like Niamat Khan Sadarang. Khayal is lighter and more flowing than dhrupad, and it suited a lighter drum.
Why it mattered. The music of his court helped create the demand that the tabla would fill.
1720
c. early 18th century
Sidhar Khan Dhadi is the earliest name linked to the tabla in historical records. He is said to have been a pakhawaj player who developed a gentler way of playing with just two fingers near the edge of the drum. His followers became the Delhi gharana, the oldest of the tabla schools.
Why it mattered. His crisp, fingertip style is what makes the tabla sound different from the booming pakhawaj.
1745
c. 1745
Clear pictures of the tabla only appear from about 1745 onwards. Historians such as James Kippen use evidence like this, not legends, to date the drum. Its shape kept changing until the early 1800s.
Why it mattered. Pictures give the best evidence we have that the tabla took shape in the 18th century.
1775 – 1900
Families of drummers move from Delhi to other cities and invent their own styles. Six schools, called gharanas, still shape how every tabla player learns.
1780
c. late 18th century
Drummers from Sidhar Khan's family moved from Delhi to Lucknow, invited by the Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula. There they played for Kathak dancers and for singers at court. Their style grew bolder and more resonant to match the dance.
Why it mattered. The Lucknow gharana showed the tabla could power dance as well as song.
1797
c. 1797 onwards
Ram Sahai went from Benares to Lucknow as a boy to learn from Modhu Khan. At about 17 he is said to have played for the new Nawab for seven nights in a row. Back home in Benares he spent months working out a new, powerful style, which became the Benares gharana.
Why it mattered. The Benares style could accompany soft singing and thunderous dance alike, and it is still one of the most played.
1800
c. late 18th – early 19th century
Kallu Khan and Miru Khan learned from Sitab Khan, a master of the Delhi gharana, and took his teaching home to their village of Ajrara. There they built longer, trickier patterns of spoken drum syllables, called bols. Their school is called the Ajrara gharana.
Why it mattered. It showed how one tradition can branch into new styles.
1810
c. early 19th century
Haji Vilayat Ali Khan learned from several masters and blended their ideas into a new style named after his home town. His title Haji is said to come from making the pilgrimage to Mecca several times. He is remembered for winning a tabla contest said to have lasted 15 days.
Why it mattered. It became the youngest of the six classic schools and mixed ideas from the older ones.
1850
c. 19th century
In Punjab a famous pakhawaj tradition began with Lala Bhavani Das. Later players in Lahore, including Qadir Bakhsh and Fakir Bakhsh, moved its big, bold compositions onto the tabla. This became the Punjab gharana, the school of Alla Rakha and Zakir Hussain.
Why it mattered. It carried the power of the old pakhawaj into the new drum.
1919 – 2010
C. V. Raman shows that the loaded drumhead gives musical, harmonic overtones like a string. Later physicists work out the maths and watch drum makers tune a head layer by layer.
1920
1920 (experiments begun 1919)
Most drums ring with messy, unmusical overtones. Raman and Kumar wrote in the journal Nature that Indian drums like the tabla and mridangam are a remarkable exception. The loaded drumhead gives overtones in a neat harmonic series, just like a violin string.
Why it mattered. It was the first scientific explanation of why the black spot turns a drum into a tuned instrument, and Raman went on to win the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for separate work on light.
1934
In the first volume of the Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Raman described the drums in more detail. He showed that the drumhead can split into patterns that act like a string divided into one, two, three, four or five parts. That gives five tones in harmonic order, while the higher, messier tones die away.
Why it mattered. It turned drum makers' old craft into physics anyone could test.
1954
Ramakrishna and Sondhi treated the tabla head as a composite membrane: a light skin with a heavier disc in the middle. Their calculations showed that the right size and weight of disc makes the first several modes almost harmonic. They published it in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
Why it mattered. It explained with maths what Raman had heard, and later researchers still start from it.
1982
Rossing and Sykes followed the tuning of a mridanga, a south Indian drum that shares the tabla's trick. They recorded its sound as more than 100 thin layers of paste were added. Step by step, the overtones moved into harmonic order.
Why it mattered. It showed exactly how the drum maker's patient layering creates the tuning Raman found.
1930 – 1990
Tabla players step out from the back of the stage to play solos, win national awards and shape the sound of Hindi film songs.
1950
1940s–1950s
Anokhelal Mishra of the Benares gharana was nicknamed Jadugar, the wizard. He could play the pattern 'na dhin dhin na' clearly at astonishing speed. He played on All India Radio and with great musicians like Ali Akbar Khan and Vilayat Khan, but died young at 44.
Why it mattered. His clarity at speed set a standard that tabla students still chase.
1954
For centuries the tabla mostly accompanied singers and dancers. Ahmed Jan Thirakwa of the Farukhabad gharana became famous for playing it as a solo instrument. In 1954 he received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, India's top national honour for performers, and in 1970 the Padma Bhushan.
Why it mattered. He showed audiences that a tabla player could hold a stage alone.
1965
Kishan Maharaj of Benares was famous for dazzling cross-rhythms and endings called tihais. In 1965 he played at the Edinburgh Festival and the Commonwealth Arts Festival in Britain. India later gave him the Padma Vibhushan, one of its highest civilian honours, in 2002.
Why it mattered. He helped take the grand Benares style to audiences outside India.
1975
1960s–1975
Samta Prasad of the Benares gharana played tabla for Hindi films such as Meri Surat Teri Aankhen (1963) and Sholay (1975). The composer S. D. Burman is said to have held up a recording until he could travel from Benares. Film composers R. D. Burman and Bappi Lahiri were among his students.
Why it mattered. Through film songs, the tabla became a sound nearly everyone in India knows.
1965 – today
The tabla reaches rock festivals, the Beatles, jazz fusion and electronic music. A Bangalore engineer builds a tabla machine, and Zakir Hussain becomes a world star.
1967
15 March 1967
George Harrison recorded 'Within You Without You' for the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Indian musicians from London's Asian Music Circle played dilruba, swarmandal and tabla. The tabla player, Natwar Soni, was only publicly identified decades later.
Why it mattered. Millions of rock fans heard the tabla on one of the best-known albums ever made.
1967
18 June 1967
At the Monterey International Pop Festival, Ravi Shankar played sitar with Alla Rakha on tabla. Alla Rakha's fast, fiery solo thrilled a crowd of rock fans, and the live album became Shankar's best-selling record. Two years later, on 15 August 1969, they played Woodstock in the pouring rain.
Why it mattered. It made the tabla famous with a whole new generation in the West.
1975
formed c. 1973–1975
English guitarist John McLaughlin formed the band Shakti with Indian musicians, including a young Zakir Hussain on tabla. Their first album was recorded live on 5 July 1975 at Southampton College in New York. They mixed Indian classical music with jazz at breathtaking speed.
Why it mattered. Shakti showed the tabla could lead in a band, not just keep time.
1987
Raj Narayan was an engineer and a flute player who started Radel in a garage in Bangalore in 1979. In 1987 he showed the Taalmala, an electronic tabla that plays rhythm cycles, by using it to accompany a flute recital. Radel says it was the first such instrument to use software and microprocessors.
Why it mattered. Students everywhere could now practise with a tabla beat at home, even without a drummer.
1991
For a long time the tabla was played almost only by men. Aban Mistry of Mumbai was among the first women to become a tabla maestro, and she was honoured after her death in 2018. In 1991 the Limca Book of Records listed Anuradha Pal as the first professional female tabla player, and in 1996 she started an all-women band called Stree Shakti.
Why it mattered. They opened a door that many young women drummers have walked through since.
1992
February 1992
Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart made the album Planet Drum with percussionists from India, Nigeria, Puerto Rico and Brazil. Zakir Hussain played tabla on it. It won the very first Grammy for Best World Music Album.
Why it mattered. It put the tabla at the centre of a new idea: a global conversation between drums.
1999
September 1999
Talvin Singh is a British tabla player and producer from London's Asian Underground scene. His debut album OK mixed tabla with electronic drum and bass, recorded in London, India and Okinawa. It won the 1999 Mercury Prize for the best British album of the year.
Why it mattered. It showed the tabla sounding perfectly at home in electronic dance music.
2024
4 February 2024
At the 66th Grammy Awards, Zakir Hussain won three awards: for Shakti's album This Moment, and for the track Pashto and the album As We Speak with Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Rakesh Chaurasia. He became the first musician from India to win three Grammys at one ceremony. India had given him its second-highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2023.
Why it mattered. It crowned the tabla as a truly global instrument.
2024
15 December 2024
Zakir Hussain, the son and student of Alla Rakha, died in San Francisco at the age of 73. He had played tabla since childhood and worked with musicians from every corner of the world. Tributes poured in from India and far beyond.
Why it mattered. His life carried the Punjab gharana from his father's lessons to stages all over the planet.
Did you know?
The black spot on a tabla, called syahi, is built from many thin layers of a paste containing iron filings.
When Rossing and Sykes watched a mridanga being tuned, more than 100 layers of paste went on the drumhead.
Most drums have messy overtones, but C. V. Raman found that the tabla's loaded head gives five tones in harmonic order, like a string.
The Natya Shastra says the first drums were inspired by heavy rain falling on lotus leaves.
Ram Sahai is said to have played tabla for the Nawab of Lucknow for seven nights in a row when he was about 17.
The people
c. early 18th century · Tabla player · India
The earliest name linked to the tabla, and the attributed founder of the Delhi gharana.
1780 – 1826 · Tabla player and teacher · India
Founded the Benares gharana after learning in Lucknow.
1888 – 1970 · Physicist · India
Explained in 1920 why the tabla's loaded drumhead gives harmonic overtones, and won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for work on light.
c. 1892 – 1976 · Tabla player · India
Farukhabad gharana master who made the tabla a solo instrument.
1914 – 1958 · Tabla player · India
Benares master nicknamed the wizard for his speed and clarity.
1919 – 2000 · Tabla player · India
Played with Ravi Shankar at Monterey and Woodstock, and founded a tabla school in Mumbai in 1985.
1921 – 1994 · Tabla player · India
Benares master who played on Hindi film soundtracks and taught R. D. Burman.
1923 – 2008 · Tabla player · India
Benares master of cross-rhythms, honoured with the Padma Vibhushan in 2002.
1940 – 2012 · Tabla player and scholar · India
Among the first women tabla maestros, she also researched the history of the drum.
1951 – 2024 · Tabla player and composer · India
Son of Alla Rakha, a founding member of Shakti, and winner of three Grammys in one night in 2024.
Living · Tabla player · India
Listed in 1991 as the first professional woman tabla player, and founder of the all-women band Stree Shakti.
Living · Engineer and flautist · India
Founded Radel and built the Taalmala electronic tabla in 1987.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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