HYDERABAD: Nestled in one of the narrow bylanes of Secunderabad, past rusted shutters and tea stalls humming with old film songs, a different rhythm, the soft thump of stretched leather, the resonant ring of wood meeting hand, takes over.
Inside a modest shop filled with half-tuned tablas and their wooden cousins, the dholaks, a family of craftsmen continues a 180-year-old legacy, repairing rhythm itself.
Three brothers sit cross-legged on the floor, each lost in his own beat. Mohammed Ibrahim adjusts the taut leather of a tabla’s pudi (drum skin), tapping it lightly with a hammer until it sings. “We are trying to
keep the craft alive,” he tells TNIE, his words almost drowned by the tabla’s gentle resonance. “Our father learnt it from his father, and his father before him and so on. It’s not just work — it’s sound, touch and memory.”
For generations, the family’s hands have shaped the instruments that carry the city’s devotional and festive pulse. Their tablas and dholaks find their way into temples, churches, and qawwali and bhajan gatherings — the unseen backbone of countless performances. “Sometimes an artiste brings his tabla in a hurry before a concert. Sometimes it’s an old family piece from someone who just wants to hear it sing again,” Ibrahim says. “A small repair costs about `600 to `1,500, depending on what’s needed. A new tabla starts around `2,500.”
The materials, goat skin, syahi paste, and the round wooden shells, arrive from Maharashtra. Yet, despite changing times, nothing here is mechanised. “We don’t have any outside workers,” says Mohammed Zafar, his fingers stained dark from the adhesive. “Each tabla has two hearts — the wooden shell and the leather skin.
The trick is in the tension. Too tight, it cracks; too loose, it dies. To find that perfect note, you need years of listening, not just making.”
The workshop smells faintly of glue, dust and age-old music. The floor bears burn marks from oil lamps once used for late-night tuning. “We used to come here after school,” Ibrahim recalls, his face softening. “Our father would say, ‘First, do your homework, then learn to listen.’ Even when we renovated the shop recently, we didn’t change the layout. The same spot where our father sat, that’s still where the main tabla is tuned.”
Customers, too, treat the place less like a shop and more like a shrine of sound. A young man arrives carrying a worn-out tabla wrapped in cloth. “It was my grandfather’s,” he says quietly.
“He used to play at family gatherings. Now, it’s cracked, but I want to bring his sound back. That’s how I’ll remember him.”
Another regular, watching Zafar at work, adds, “These days, if something breaks, we replace it. But music isn’t like that. A little repair brings back not just the sound, but everything that came with it.”
As evening light filters through the dusty glass, the brothers resume their rhythm. One tabla hums, another answers, and soon the air fills with the pulse of a city’s forgotten heartbeat. In a world chasing speed, the family continues to move at the tempo of patience, keeping alive an art that, like rhythm itself, refuses to fade.