Eitan Plays the Santoor

Niyantha Shekar
People in India
Published in
3 min readJun 18, 2015

After a three hour trek to the tiny village of Tosh in the Parvati Valley, my friends and I stopped for lunch at the Moon Light Restaurant where we struck up a conversation with Eitan as we waited for our Special Thalis. Born to Iranian parents, Eitan had grown up in Israel. He was a musician who carried his santoor on his travels. “I’ve been playing since the age of six,” he said. “Music’s a part of my being.”

“Who did you learn the santoor from?”

“My father, but I’m better than him now,” he said with a laugh. “He is an amazing vocalist, though. The best in Israel. He never had any formal training, but he sings from the heart.”

The sun had set in Tosh. Light, if any, came from open restaurants but that offered little help as we walked down slopes slippery with cow dung. When we eventually made it to Eitan’s guesthouse, we saw him standing outside his room.

“We’ve come to hear you play the santoor,” I said.

“Sure, come on in.”

“Hope we’re not interrupting.”

“Of course you are,” he replied with a smile.

The santoor is not a small instrument, and I wondered how Eitan carried it up the hills. He had even done some serious trekking in Nepal with it in tow prior to visiting India.

“Do you tune by ear?” I asked as he tapped on a few strings.

“I can, but it’s much easier with a tuner. The santoor has 272 strings. Sometimes it can take me forty-five minutes. But the mountains have been good to it. I haven’t had to tune much here.”

We sat outside his guesthouse in torchlight glow with cups of chai.

“What was Nepal like for you?” I asked.

“I did the Seven Lakes trek there. It took us about three and half days to get to the top, and when we got there it was just us. Total isolation. On our way down, we first came across a goat. Then a boy pushing his baby brother in a cradle. And then a grandmother planting potatoes. They had very little, but they were happy. I started to cry… I was seeing life at its purest.”

Eitan sat across from us, his santoor beside him. The room was narrow and had a long table that extended from one end to the other. Fluorescent lighting. Thick carpets in red and blue lined with pillows. We had just finished a dinner of roti and dal.

“Have you heard of the ‘nai’?” he asked us.

We shook our heads.

“Nai means flute. It’s a Persian instrument. Have you heard of the shehnai?”

I nodded, my mind immediately going to A.R. Rahman’s shehnai instrumental of ‘Yeh Jo Des Hai Tera’.

“Shehnai means ‘the flute of the kings’,” he continued. “The flute, if you can play it well, can mimic the human voice. Take the Indian aalap, for example. It’s so beautiful. The human voice is the purest form of music and the flute is the most beautiful instrument after the voice.”

I was curious about the origin of the santoor. He said that it was an instrument that came from the east. “The piano is derived from the santoor, in fact,” he said. The santoor’s metal strings did remind me of what lay underneath a piano’s wooden case. “You have many instruments that started in the east and then went to the west. The violin is based on the sarod.” He then listed a few more eastern influences on western instruments, and then said, “What we need is a balance between the west and the east.” He wasn’t talking about music anymore.

“People in the east are more about the heart, and in the west they’re more about the mind. You see people go to the west and become greedier than the ones there. Some westerners come to the east and become hippies. They hug trees and kiss the ground. So you have the two extremes, but slowly they’ll begin to balance each other and that’ll be the ideal.”

“So, I’ll play one last song for you guys.”

“Would you mind if I recorded it?”

This piece was originally published in my People in Parvati Valley photo-essay series. Read the entire series here.

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