harmonium

Harmonium was coined from Greek harmonia (agreement, concord, from the fitting together of parts). The instrument was patented in 1842 by Alexandre Debain in Paris. It is a small keyboard organ that produces sound by pumping air through metal reeds with foot-operated bellows. The tone is reedy, warm, and continuous — the player controls volume by pumping harder or softer.

Christian missionaries brought harmoniums to India in the mid-19th century as portable organs for hymn-singing. The instrument was cheaper and more portable than a pipe organ, and it survived tropical humidity better than most European instruments. Indian musicians adopted it for their own purposes. The harmonium was ideally suited to Indian music: it could sustain notes (like the tanpura drone), it was portable (unlike the sarangi), and its keyboard was adaptable to Indian scales with minor modifications.

By the early 20th century, the harmonium had become essential to North Indian classical music, Sikh kirtan, and Bollywood film music. Hindustani vocalists used it as their primary accompanying instrument. The instrument that Paris invented and missionaries exported had been so thoroughly adopted that the All India Radio banned it from broadcasts in 1940, arguing that its fixed Western tuning was incompatible with Indian microtonal music. The ban lasted until 1971.

The word harmonium entered Hindi as hārmoniyam and is used across South Asia without any sense of its French origin. The instrument in Indian music bears little resemblance to its Parisian ancestor — Indian harmoniums are played sitting on the floor, pumped with one hand while playing with the other, and often tuned to non-Western scales. The French harmonium and the Indian harmonium share a name and a mechanism. Everything else has changed.