Dotora

A.K.A. Dotar or Dotara

By Mir Ali Akhtar
and
David Courtney

The dotora (a.k.a. dotar, or dotara) is an instrument much associated with the mus­ical cul­ture of the Bengali peo­ple.  This instrument is found throughout West Bengal, Bangladesh, and even Assam, and Eastern Bihar.  This instrument is greatly favoured by the wandering minstrels known as the Baul.  This instrument may be thought of as a Bengali version of the rabab.  Although the name is the same, this instrument should not be confused with the simple two stringed dotar found through out South Asia.

The origin of the terms “dotar” or “dotora” are inter­est­ing.  The word is found in Bengali (i.e., Bangla Bhasha), which is a member of the Eastern Group of Indo-Aryan lan­gua­ges (Grierson,1903).  The etymology is based upon three compo­nents, Do-Tar-A. In Bengali “do” means “two”; “tar” means “string”; and the “a” appended to the end means “of”.  There­fore, the word dotara, means “of two strings”.  Naturally there are regional variations to pronunciation.  Especially note that the term “tar” as one would find in Hindi and Urdu, ac­quires the more open Bengali pronunciation of “tor”.   Other regional variations are also easily found.  For insta­nce, in the Rangpuri dialect it is pronounced “dotra” but it is also pronounced “dotora” in Rangpuri’s more poetical forms, (e.g., vaoaiya lyrics.)  It is inter­est­ing to note that, although the term “dotora” implies two strings, most in­stru­ments have a minimum of four strings, and even six is not unusual.

As with any folk instrument, regional variations in construction abound; how­ever, there are two main styles.  In Bangladesh, one of these is found in the north and the other is found in the south.  These show seve­ral differences in both construction, tone, and usage.

The figure below shows a typical example of the southern version of the dotora.  This version is com­monly used in a wide variety of Bengali music.  Notice the carving at the upper end of the necks, these are us­ually designs of animals, peacocks or other birds.  It is inter­est­ing to note that this version is also known as swaraj and surasanggraha, or rahr Bangla

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Dotora typical of the type found in Southern Bangladesh

The southern Bangladeshi style of dotora is in many ways reminiscent of the sarod.  It tends to use metal strings.  Very often it also uses a metal finger board.  These give it a very bright sound.  This style is es­pec­ially pop­ular among the bauls and the fakirs.  This is the style dotora which is most often comes to mind whenever the dotora is re­fer­red to.

There is an­other style of dotora which is not so well known.  In Bangladesh, this version of the dotora tends to be found in the tribal areas in the north; but this style is also found in West Bengal, Assam, and Eastern Bihar.  This version is shown in the figure below:

Dotora typical of Nort­hern Bangladesh

We see that there are nu­mer­ous differences bet­ween this style and the more widely known southern version.  One should note that this version is less adorned.  Also, this style of dotora tends to use strings made of gut or cot­ton fibre.  Fur­ther­more, this version has a wooded fingerboard instead of the metal plate often found in the Southern version.  This dotora is much closer to a rabab in both sound and construction.  Its sound is gen­erally con­si­dered to be more appropriate for the vaoaiya, bhaaiwaiya, jaalpariya, and mahishali styles of music.  This type of dotora is also some­times re­fer­red to as a bhhawaiya dotar.

Construction and Parts of the Dotora

It is appropriate for us to look at the construction of the dotora in greater de­tail.  The overall form of the dotora is of a resonator and a neck, a num­ber of pegs and strings, (usually four), and a skin to cover the resonator.  These will be des­cribed in greater de­tail.

Parts of the Dotora (top view)

Parts of the Dotora (side view)

Parts of the Dotora (playing surface)

Body and Resonator

The body of the dotora is prob­ably the most impor­tant part of the instrument.  It is upon this body that all of the pegs, strings, and membrane will be at­ta­ched.

One item to pay par­ti­cu­lar attention to is the carving (or lack there-of) at the upper-most por­tion of the instrument.  This decoration is us­ually of a bird or animal motif, and it is a ubiquitous part of the southern style of dotora (swaraj).  This is gen­erally called “mogra”.  Unlike the southern form, the nor­thern version does not have any top decoration.  One should note that these days, one is starting to see these animal decorations (mogara) even on some nor­thern Bangladeshi dotoras.

Let us look at the fash­ioning of the body of the dotora.  It is impor­tant to re­mem­ber that although it is fash­ioned from a sin­gle piece of wood, this main body is of at least three sec­tions, and possibly a fourth.  These sec­tions are the bati (i.e., the bowl of the resonator), dhor (i.e., the neck), and the muga (i.e., hollow por­tion for fixing tuning knobs).  The op­tional fourth piece is the decorative piece at the end (mogra) Let us now look at the fabrication of the body in greater de­tail.

The first and foremost job in making the body is to start with a suitable piece of wood.  This wood is us­ually of jackfruit, neem, or lo­cal chaiton.  It should also be of suitable dimensions.  This should be two feet long, six inches high, and 6 inches wide.  It should be even longer if one is going to allow room for the decorative piece (mogra). The shape is carved and gouged using standard carpentry tools.

Here are the measurements for the var­ious parts of the body:

Bati – The bati is the bowl, or hollowed out sec­tion, which forms the main por­tion of the resonator.  Its diameter should be roughly five inches, and the height at the cen­tre should be about 4.5 inches.  There is a fair amount of latitude con­cerning the shape.  It does not have to be round, a cer­tain elliptical quality is quite accept­able.  But, one should not neglect to leave a protrusion at the base of this resonator; this will be used to attach the strings.

Dhor – This is the neck.  Its length is 17 – 18 inches.  The width at the base of the resonator (i.e., the bati) is around 2.5 inches.  Height of the neck (i.e., the dhor) and the length is up to the artist’s individual preference.  Every musician has a par­ti­cu­lar “feel” that they like.

Muga – This is the peg box.  It is the hollow sec­tion where the tuning pegs connect.  The overall length should be about four inches; the width should be about two inches and it should be what­ever depth that will allow a comfortable placement for the tuning pegs.  One should leave seve­ral inches from the top end of peg box (opposite side of resonator end) to put what­ever decorative headpiece one may de­sire.  The muga (peg box) must then be hollowed out to forma rectangular op­en­ing.  This op­en­ing is known as the “mugastan” (literally “the place of muga“).

Mogra – If one is making a southern style of dotora, then allowance must be made for the decorative piece at the end (mogra).  This is ba­si­cally an ar­tis­tic call.  One may allow for anywhere from one or two inches up to eight inches depending upon how fancy one wishes to be.  Themes of birds and animals is the norm, but by no means is it obligatory.

The carving of the wood for the main body is now finished.  How­ever, the body is not finished un­til the membrane is at­ta­ched.

Chauni – The chauni is the membrane that covers the bati.  The attachment of this skin is performed as follows:

The skin of a large lizard, or the rawhide of a young goat is first soaked in water un­til it is very soft.  It is said that Iguana skin gives the best sound.  It is then bound to the lip of the resonator and glued in place.  After the glue has set and the membrane dried, any excess is cut away.  This membrane on the dotora is known as “chauni”.

Sound holes are now burned into the skin.  If one attempts to cut these holes instead of burning, there is a tendency for them to tear.  These sound holes are known as “chad”.

At this point, the body may be painted ac­cor­ding to ones preference.

Face Plate – If one is making a southern style of dotora, then there is a good likelihood that you will be wanting to put a metal faceplate on.  This faceplate is often used be­cause the southern style of dotora uses metal strings, and the constant fingering of metallic strings ag­ainst a wooden fingerboard tends to ruin the fingerboard.  The highest quality dotoras tend to use a nickel or chrome plated brass.  Ordinary sheet metal may be used for lower quality in­stru­ments.

A surprising addition to the instrument makers craft is the use of laminates (i.e.,. Decolam, Formica, Arborite, Alpikord, etc). In the last few years this has em­er­ged as a workable and eco­nomical al­ter­na­tive to the metal fingerboard.  This tends to be found only on ext­remely inexpensive southern styled dotoras.

The method of attaching the faceplate depends upon what material is be­ing used.  Metallic faceplates tend to be at­ta­ched with screws.  This allows the plates to be removed to facilitate the reskinning of the dotora which must be performed periodically.  The inexpensive “decolam” versions have the plate fixed with contact adhesive.

The main body is now finished.

Tuning Pegs

The tuning pegs are a very impor­tant part of the dotora.  These are known as the “kan”.  As one moves around India and Bangladesh, one may find many variations on how the tuning pegs are made.  One often finds tuning pegs made of hard wood that have been tur­ned; these are si­mi­lar to those found on the sitar or sarod (see “Making the Sitar – kunti”).  One oc­casion­ally may see mechanical tuners si­mi­lar to those found on guitars, mandolins and modern dilrubas.  These fancier tuning sys­tems are typical of the higher priced dotoras found in many of the larger music stores of the cities.  How­ever, we will stick to the more rural roots and des­cribe a way of making tuning pegs from bamboo.

A few words are in order con­cerning bamboo.  As a whole, it has been said that bamboo has a strength-per-weight ratio which is greater than steel.  How­ever, one must be sensitive to the char­acter­is­tics of bamboo.  Parts of it are very strong, but weak areas can compromise the overall strength very sig­ni­fi­cantly.  For our pur­poses, it is suf­fi­cient to re­mem­ber that the skin of the bamboo is the strongest part of the bamboo; but the skin is also very thin.  This should be kept in mind when one is carving and fash­ioning the pegs.  It is preferable not to carve too much of the skin away be­cause this will compromise the overall strength of the peg.  How­ever carving away the inner, woodier side, will not compromise the strength as much.

To make the tuning peg, one starts with the proper bamboo.  For insta­nce, the lo­cal variety “makla” is widely chosen and found to be suitable for this pur­pose.  One starts with a cylinder of bamboo roughly four inches in length (illustration “A” in the figure below).  With a chisel one cuts out a longitudinal sec­tion that is about 1 inch in width (illustration “B” and “C” in the figure below).  One then takes this sec­tion and carves it into the form shown in figure “D”.  This produces a peg that has two sec­tions.  There is the handle and there is the shaft.  The handle should be roughly 2.5 inches and the shaft should be roughly 1.5 inches.  This is of course merely a rough guide to the proportions; the precise dimensions are determined by the size and dimensions of the muga (i.e., the peg box).

Although it is only barely noticeable, the shaft should not be cylindrical.  There should be a slight taper to it.  This will allow for a better con­trol on the tension as it is fitted into the peg box (muga).

Bridge

The dotora must have a bridge.  There are nu­mer­ous variations in both material as well as form for the bridge.  The more expensive ones available in the music stores some­times use bridges made of camel bone.  How­ever a more rustic version would be made of wood.  A wooden one may have the form as shown in the pic­ture below

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Dotora bridge (without notches)

One should notice two things about the bridge at this point.  One is that it does not have any grooves for the strings.  Making the groves should be the last job and performed only when one is stringing the instrument and is able to judge a proper ac­tion.  Another point to con­sider is that at this point the feet should be longer than re­quired.  As we start to string the dotora, then at that point we can chop the feet down and adjust the ac­tion to a comfortable level.

String Attachment at Base

There must be some provision for attaching the strings to the base of the instrument.  There are al­most as many ways to do this as there are instrument makers.  Many of the fancier and expensive southern versions have basses made of brass or bone with projections on them allowing for the strings to be tied to.  Some of the simplest forms are nothing more than tying the strings di­rec­tly to the protrusion on the base of the instrument.  Sometimes a nail or screw is inserted into the base; upon this the strings can be tied.  In the ac­com­pany­ing photographs we see a simple form of akkra.  This is nothing more than a small rod which is tied to a nail in the protrusion at the base.  Upon this rod the strings are at­ta­ched.

Finishing Touches

At this point there are a num­ber of finishing touches that must be attended to.  Let us look at them in greater de­tail:

One topic that needs to be addressed is the tuning pegs (kan).  Ideally at this point, the tuning pegs will be slightly too large for the holes.  (If this is not the case, you had better go back and make some more pegs.)  Now is the time that you work on both pegs and holes to make a good fit.  It is inter­est­ing to note that when you finish, you will find that a par­ti­cu­lar peg only fits well with a par­ti­cu­lar hole; so do not forget which peg goes into which hole.  This is not peculiar to the dotora but is a quality which is shared by sitars, sarods and other in­di­ge­nous in­stru­ments of South Asia.

Next, we roughly string the instrument and put the bridge on.  There are seve­ral jobs that need to be done.

One of the jobs is to cut the notches into the bridge.  This must be done by seeing how the strings on the bridge line up ag­ainst the fingerboard.  This may be thought of as a lateral adjustment of the string posi­tions.

There is also a vertical adjustment of the string posi­tion.  This is how high the strings are from the fingerboard.  This is also re­fer­red to as the “action” of the instrument.  The ge­ne­ral rule is to have the strings as low and as close to the fingerboard as pos­sible.  How­ever the con­cept of “possible” may not be intuitive.  The strings should not be so low as to rattle ag­ainst the fingerboard.  Fur­ther­more over time, the skin will stretch and the bridge will go down, so allowances must be made for the settling in of the skin and bridge.  Although we are trying to get the ac­tion such that the strings are close to the fingerboard, they must be high enough to accommodate these other con­si­dera­tions.

The adjustment of the ac­tion is done by shortening the feet of the bridge.  We previously men­tioned that the feet should intentionally be made longer than neces­sary.  It is at this point that we gradually cut the feet down un­til we ob­tain the right ac­tion.

Plectra

The dotar is played with a plectrum known as a “kati”.  It is gen­erally made of horn, bone, coconut shell, or wood.

Stringing and Tuning

The stringing and tuning of the dotora, like many other in­stru­ments of South Asia, is not standardised.  In South Asia the stringing and tuning is con­si­dered a part of the ar­tis­tic pro­cess.  There­fore choices of gauge and material for the strings is often just a ref­lec­tion of an individual artist’s taste.  The tuning is so variable that it is very normal for the tuning to be dif­fer­ent for each song.  With these con­si­dera­tions in mind, we will ap­proach the sub­ject of stringing and tuning.  It is pointless to pontificate on specific tunings, but more appropriate to dis­cuss the phi­lo­sophy and ap­proaches to the tuning.

Philosophy of the Tuning – There are seve­ral things to con­sider when developing con­cepts and ap­proaches to tuning the dotora.  The first thing to re­mem­ber is that the instrument will be tuned to an open tuning.  That is to say that the strings, tension, and pitch will ref­lect but a sin­gle key.  Most of the con­si­dera­tions of the stringing and tuning be­come clear when we keep one simple fact in mind; the dotora is there to accompany the voice.  There­fore, the most fun­da­men­tal issue, speci­fically what key to tune to, is determined en­tirely, ac­cor­ding to what key the singer is going to sing in.  Unlike Western music or the Western influenced film music, the singer gen­erally does not change the key from song to song, but retains a par­ti­cu­lar key for all of their performances.  Once this key is es­tab­lished, then every­thing else about the tuning falls into place.

Dotoras may have a varying num­ber of strings but the most impor­tant will be the first two strings.  The outer most string is known as the jin and the next one in is known as the sur.  Of these two strings the sur is tuned to the tonic (i.e., Sa, a.k.a. Shadaj, or Khadaj) and the jin will be tuned a fourth up from this tonic (i.e., Ma or Madhyam or “moddhom”).  Most of ones play­ing will be upon these two strings.  Any other strings and their tuning is gen­erally only a ref­lec­tion of the individual artist’s taste.

We will show two com­mon tunings for a four-string dotora.  The first is shown below:

Ma, Sa, Sa, Pa tuning

This last tuning deserves some dis­cus­sion.  We see that both the se­cond string and the third string are tuned to the tonic (Sa).  This ef­fec­tively gives you two strings which are the sur.  The fourth string is a fourth below the sur (i.e., a fifth, but in the lower octave).  This corresponds to Pa (Pancham).  This string is called the “Bom”. (For more information on scale struc­tures go to: Saptak-The Scale.

There is an­other tuning that you should con­sider.  This is shown below:

Ma, Sa, Pa, Sa tuning

There are a couple of inter­est­ing points to con­sider about this tuning.  The first is that it extends the po­ten­tial play­ing range half an octave lower than the first tuning.  Although al­most all of the play­ing is done only on the first two strings, there are occasions where you wish to explore the lower octave.  In these rare cases, the extended range of this tuning can be advantageous.  But, this extended range is comes by sacrificing some of the richness of the sound of the tonic that one finds with two sur strings.

Materials and Gauges of Strings – The first thing to re­mem­ber about the choice of materials and the gauges of the strings is that they must ref­lect the overall phi­lo­sophy of tuning.  If you wish to tune to a par­ti­cu­lar note, it is impor­tant that the strings will ac­tually do it.  This may seem self evident, but as a practical mat­ter this is the point that trips most peo­ple up.

As a ge­ne­ral rule we can say that the southern versions of the dotora tend to use metal strings while the nor­thern dotoras tend to use strings of silk, cot­ton, gut, or artificial fibres.  This is just a ge­ne­ralisation, be­cause it is normal even to find dif­fer­ent materials mixed together on the same instrument.

We only need to keep a few things in mind when choosing strings:

• Heaver gauges (thicker strings) produce lower pitches, while light gauges produce higher pitches.
• Metallic strings produce lower pitches while gut, cot­ton, and silk produce lower pitches.
• Brass and bronze produce lower pitches while steel produces higher pitches.

With these simple points, you can start experimenting to find the right strings for your instrument.

Playing the Dotora

An in depth dis­cus­sion of the play­ing of the dotora is be­yond the scope of this humble web page.  How­ever there are a few things that we can men­tion.

The dotora has two modes of play­ing.  The first mode treats the the dotora as though it were a rhyt­hmic instrument.  For this, there is an alternation bet­ween the sur string (Sa or the se­cond string) and the jin string (Ma or first string).  This is done in an open man­ner, with­out the use of the fingerboard.  This produces the cha­rac­teristic sound that is so typical of baul sangeet, (the music of the Bauls).  The se­cond mode is where the dotora is played in a melodic fash­ion.  This is al­most al­ways upon the first two stings, and involves very intricate fingerings upon the finger board.  In this mode, all the notes of the scale may be pro­du­ced.  Typically the dotora is played in such a way that it alternates bet­ween these two surprisingly distinct modes.

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Works Cited

Grierson, Sir Abraham
1903 Linguistic Survey of India. Office of the Superintendent of Govt. of India

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