A BRIEF
HISTORY OF MRDANGAM MAKERS

‘Before the artist enters the picture, it is the maker who brings various textures, colours, sounds and shapes together by twisting, turning, stretching, breaking, crushing, washing, coating, cutting and binding it all together with his body. The maker is the Cupid. He understands
the dead, the alive, the lifeless and the artificial, and finds a way to marry them. He looks and he knows, and feels in his fingers the beat of the mrdangam. And, when he strikes it for the first time, the mrdangam is born.’