Dayanita Singh: Museum of Tanpura

A clothbound documentation of Singh’s travels with India’s great classical musicians over six winters.

In the early 1980s, with her very first camera in hand, Dayanita Singh (born 1961) traveled throughout India for six winters with the tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, photographing several great classical musicians and creating an image archive of them on stage and backstage, in their homes and on the bus transporting them from concert to concert. When the time came for Singh to edit her work into a book, she chose to focus on the tanpura—a long-necked, four-stringed drone instrument that both evokes and supports the musician’s voice, both during performance and the process of daily practice of riyaz. Museum of Tanpura celebrates the tanpura as a musician’s constant companion, the environments and relationships which bring music into being, and embodies what Singh sees as her greatest lesson from the performers she befriended—the rigor and aesthetics of riyaz.