Image: inside a nineteenth-century North Indian lute, /sarinda/ (Metropolitan Museum accession no. 89.4.203) From remote mountain villages in Nepal, to the storerooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to a basement repair workshop in one of NYC’s oldest music stores, I have spent several years studying how to make and play a variety of Himalayan lutes.* Approaching the instruments as archives of music, culture, history, and technical knowledge transmission, I learn /through/ the lutes, not just /about/ them. This process cultivates what Tim Ingold calls “knowing from the inside” (2013), leading to several compelling outcomes. Despite looking very different from one another on the outside, each Himalayan lute is carved away from a primary piece of wood; I call this monoxyle (one wood) construction. I argue that this shared construction method, combined with several other factors, constitute Himalayan lutes as an instrument family. Inversely, their extrinsic morphological differences illustrate waves of human migration across the Himalaya—up from the Gangetic Plains and down from the Tibetan Plateau—for millennia. My research also illuminates how monoxyle lutes, in and beyond the Himalaya, have been hitherto misinterpreted in European-American lute classification systems. *Lute: any stringed instrument with a body and a neck.
