The sarangi (सारंगी) is the quintessential bowed instrument of South Asian art music. Its name is widely believed to mean “a hundred colours” suggesting its adaptability to a wide range of musical styles, its flexible pitch, and its ability to produce a large palette of tonal colour and rich emotional nuance.

The sarangi is revered for its uncanny capacity to imitate the timbre and inflections of the human voice as well as for the intensity of emotional expression to which it lends itself. In the words of Sir Yehudi Menuhin: “The sarangi remains not only the authentic and original Indian bowed stringed instrument but the one which… expresses the very soul of Indian feeling and thought.