Sarangi players left sarangi & did something else.

Due to lack of respect & inability to run their family expenses from little income generated from sarangi, many good sarangi players left sarangi & took up other musical activity.

VOCAL

The sarangi players who got converted to very successful vocalists are

U. abdul karim khan of kirana gharana

U. Badegulamali khan of patiala gharana who accompanied Inayatibai deronwali in his early career.

U. Amirkhan of Indore gharana, he was a son of sarangiya shahmir khan

surprisingly abdulkarimK & amirK never liked sarangi as an accompaniment to their vocal performance, instead they preferred harmonium,while badegulamaliK hardly preferred harmonium, he always enjoyed sarangi as an accompaniment to his vocal.

DIFFERENT INSTRUMENT

Now let us know the people who switched to other instrument from sarangi playing.

One was Patiala gharana musician U. Abdul Aziz khan, who played beautiful sarangi with female singer Chhamiya. On getting humiliated by getting too less reward, he broke sarangi & picked up veena, took out all the frets & created new instrument vichitra veena or Batta bin. It was played with big oblong glass or stone (called batta) sliding over the strings. He earned much respect as binkaar too.After partition on India, he shifted to pakistan. His younger brother U. Habibali earned good name as binkar

Another person was U. Ahmed raza, a disciple of U. abdul aziz khan who also took to batta bin. His sarangi can be heard in older tracks with U. ahmedjan thirakwa. He has one or two albums of batta bin to his credit.

Third person though occasionally but definitely played saraswati veena, i.e. U. abdul karim khan (KIrana gharana vocal stalwart). His veena tracks were published commercially too. He was into sarangi playing in his early career.

This is to my knowledge & I will be happy if somebody can add to this list.

Pitch difference in sarangi in pull/push bowing

Any stringed instrument follows one simple law of physics that pitch produced from the string is inversely proportional to its length, provided other factors like caliber of string, tension in the string, material of string are kept same. i.e. longer the string, lower the pitch & vice versa.

Now let us see what happens at the ends where string of resting, i.e. effective length of string. Lower down it is limited by the main bridge with the direction same as direction of bowing.i.e. in pull or push , string is always pushed against the bridge edge.

Coming to the upper boundary of string, it is created by soft skin of finger of convex nature from the side, i.e. in almost perpendicular plane to the edge of main bridge. so during pull movement of bow, the gut- string is initially dragged away from the finger, changing the point of contact of gut with finger i.e.increasing the effective length (=lowering the pitch) of string. Exactly opposite happens during push phase of bowing reducing the length (=raising the pitch). Thus in the beginner there is always a pitch difference in push & pull phase of bowing.

Obviously this does not happen in open notes like Sa, PA, SA as upper bridge is in the same plane as main bridge.

This is unique to sarangi & not found in violin, esraj, or other stringed instrument where string is pushed against the bridges in the same plane. This may make learning the sarangi more difficult apart from other factors.

Then what is the remedy ?