Kanai Lal & Sons

The founder of this workshop started out making furniture.

Kanailal Bhowmick was born in the Kumilla district of Bengal and began his working life as a furniture maker, before coming to Calcutta and joining an instrument workshop. What happened next is why the name carries weight: he went on to work with Hiren Roy and with Radha Krishna Sharma, two of the most respected Calcutta makers of the century. He learned the craft inside both traditions before building anything under his own name, and founded Kanai Lal & Sons in Howrah, just across the river from Calcutta.

The workshop is run today by his son Subhas Bhowmick, who learned the craft from his father, assisted by his brothers Mintu and Ashutosh. Their instruments earned appreciation from Pt Jnan Ghosh, Pt Radhika Mohan Moitra, Pt Narayan Rao Joshi and Pt Gokul Nag, and the workshop's reputation has grown steadily since the turn of the millennium.

What players consistently say about Kanai Lal instruments is consistency: jawari work done to the same standard instrument after instrument, which is far harder than doing it well once. Their student models are serious instruments rather than stripped-down ones, and their concert instruments are where the reputation lives.

We carry their sitars, tanpuras, tanpuris, dilrubas, sarods and santoors, which makes this one of the broadest string workshops in our catalogue.

One point of confusion worth clearing up, because it comes up often and the names are nearly identical. Kanai Lal & Sons, the workshop we buy from, is not the same as the older Kanai Lal & Bro, which built celebrated sitars, surbahars and rudra veenas and closed in the 1990s. Those instruments are collectors' pieces now and nobody has new ones. If you see a Kanai Lal & Bro offered as current stock anywhere, ask questions.

By instrument: Kanai Lal Sitar, Kanai Lal Tanpura. See also Sitar Brands and Tanpura Brands.