I don’t know when it was made. I don’t know who made it. And I don’t care. It’s beautiful.
I do know that it came from Bangalore.
I got this back in the early 1990s for Christmas. It was actually the second instrument — the first one, apparently, didn’t make it over from India. A gentleman who worked for my father had some connections and managed to get it over. It came in a coffin with the instrument in its faux leather soft case.
The sitar is hugely decorative, and yes much of it seems to be THAT material. I’ve no real idea how to tune it, so I made into an open-D and let it ring ring ring ring ring.
It features on the first track of Bean’s debut CD, Means & Ways, and also made an appearance as part of the music of a performance of Tongues, by Sam Shepard at Boston University.
I had a case painting party a long while back which explains all that.
