The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan c11.6

c11.6

Perhaps the most reliable proofs of the antiquity of Indian instruments can be found, not so much in the Sanskrit, but in the Pâli works remaining. For to these Buddhist treatises it is an easier matter to assign dates that can be tolerably accurate. In the Milindha Panha,³ a Pâli work, written a little after the Christian era, is a description of the vina, also of the shell-trumpet (s'ankha) and the flute (here rendered vaṅsa—a reed). And in the Mahaparambhana Sutta, a still older work of about 400 B.C., we find mention of the Bheri, a word still used for the Nâgara, or large kettle-drum, and also of the mridang (here rendered muttinga; *cf.* mathala, the Southern Indian name of the mridang). The same work contains mention of the vina and pañava, the latter being a drum. And these instruments, with the addition of one called dendima, are found in a contemporary work called Sāmañña-phale-sutta, and in the Vimāna-vatthu also. The dendima is possibly the modern dinni, a small side-drum used by religious mendicants in Southern India at the present day.