How the Harmonium Outlived its Haters
Gandhi, Tagore, and Nehru despised it. All India Radio banned it. Yet today, we can’t imagine our music without it.
When Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” opens, you hear a 40-second passage of an instrument you might not expect on an American rock album: the harmonium. The sound is plaintive, droning, almost devotional, and for most South Asian listeners, immediately familiar.
The harmonium is so ubiquitous in the Indian subcontinent that it seems like it’s always belonged there. Think: composer R.D. Burman, who literally can’t be photographed without a harmonium. Or qawwali maestro Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, often accompanied by a harmonium. Then there’s composer A.R. Rahman, who most recently performed in London’s Royal Albert Hall with a harmonium, of course.
But what if we told you the instrument isn’t from the subcontinent at all. So how did an outsider — one that India, Pakistan, and present-day Bangladesh once banned and Rabindranath Tagore called the “bane of Indian music” — become one of the region’s most recognizable sounds?