Chenda

The chenda is Kerala’s cylindrical drum, hung from the shoulder and played standing with two curved sticks or with a stick and the bare hand. It is the loudest instrument in Indian music and is made to be heard outdoors over a crowd of thousands, which is what it is for: it belongs to the temple festival and the procession rather than to the concert hall. A chenda melam is not an accompaniment to anything. It is the event, played by between fifteen and two hundred drummers at once, and a Thrissur Pooram crowd stands for four hours listening to nothing else.

The drum is a hollow jackfruit cylinder with cowhide at both ends, and the two heads are different: the edam thala is struck for the bass and the valam thala, tightened hard, gives the crack that carries. Panchari melam, the best known pattern, is built on a six beat cycle and runs through five stages, each at double the tempo of the one before and each with half the beats, so the cycle shortens while the hands speed up. It begins at a pace so slow that the pulse is hard to hold and ends in a sprint. The elathalam cymbals keep the frame, kombu horns and kuzhal pipes answer the drums, and the whole is conducted by the lead drummer with no score and no signal but what he plays.

A boy begins at about ten, traditionally after a ceremony at the temple, and spends the first year or more striking a stone or a block rather than a drum, until the wrists can take it. The chenda is played standing with the drum’s weight on the shoulder for hours, so the training is as physical as it is musical. Three to four years brings a place at the back of a melam; the front row and the lead come after fifteen or twenty. Teachers say the slow opening stage is the hardest thing in the repertoire and the last thing a player is trusted with.

The marar and poduval communities held the temple drumming as a hereditary service, and the great names of the twentieth century, Peruvanam Kuttan Marar among them, come from those families. The art has opened beyond them and is now taught at Kerala Kalamandalam and in schools across the state, including to women, which the temple tradition did not. The hereditary families and the schools coexist without much friction, but the question of who may play inside a temple is settled by the temple rather than by the training, and it is not settled the same way everywhere.

Kerala

The temple festival instrument of the whole state, with Thrissur Pooram as the occasion every player measures themselves against and Peruvanam as the oldest.

Tamil Nadu

Heard in the Tamil districts bordering Kerala and at Ayyappa temples; the tavil holds the equivalent place in Tamil temple music.

Tulu Nadu

Related drumming accompanies the bhuta kola of Tulu Nadu, though the instrument and the patterns are its own.

Deities

• Siva
• Krishna
• Bhairava

Festivals

• Thrissur Pooram
• Vishu
• Thiruvonam · Onam

Temples

• Vadakkunnathan Temple, Thrissur
• Guruvayur Sri Krishna Temple

Related arts

• Panchavadyam
• Kathakali
• Koodiyattam