The Hands Become Rhythm.

An Instrument That Speaks Before It Plays.

The tabla is the only instrument in Indian classical music that you learn to say out loud before you are allowed to play it.

Two drums — the smaller dayan and the deeper bayan — and a vocabulary of strokes called bols: dha, dhin, na, ta, tin, ka, ge. Each bol is a syllable and a hand position at the same time. Before your fingers know a phrase, your voice knows it, and that is why tabla players can recite an entire composition without touching the drums.

This is also why tabla trains attention so sharply. Rhythm is unforgiving in a way melody is not — a stroke is either in time or it is not. Students often notice within the first week that they have begun to hear the pulse in everything around them, from footsteps to temple bells across the river.

Our course treats the instrument that way from day one. You will not be handed a book of compositions to grind through. You will be taught to speak the bols, to place each finger exactly, and to let one stroke ring clearly before you reach for the next.

Choose the Depth, Not Just the Dates.

Students arrive in Rishikesh with very different amounts of time. A traveller passing through for ten days needs something different from someone who has come specifically to study for a month. So the course is offered in four honest sizes, and we will tell you plainly which one suits your situation.

Not sure which to take? Start shorter. Many students begin with seven or ten sessions and extend while they are here — it is far easier to add sessions than to rush through a course you have already paid for.