IN the age of nail-sized video cameras and microchip computers, music too comes in small packets. But it’s not MP3s that interest Surendra Ganpatram Mehta. It’s musical instruments one-fourth the size of its original.In his small apartment in Vadodara, 75 year-old Mehta is preparing to leave for Orissa to collect bitter gourds of a size suitable to make miniature musical instruments. His next trip may be to Assam for thin bamboo sticks used for flutes. He has already fabricated 140 miniature musical instruments and now plans to open a museum of 1,040 musical such small instruments.‘‘I like it the Japanese way. All my instruments are short. All are precisely 1/4th the size of the original,’’ he said.His room in Fatehganj is virtually a workshop. On display among a big small collection is a palm-sized been, a tarpu—used by tribals in Dangs, a flute, and a boli that measures just an inch. Coconut covers, leather sheets, guts, bamboo shoots and lots of wood occupy the room. ‘‘It is important that they are made the same way and sound equally good,’’ says Mehta. ‘‘Sound has become a passion now,’’ he says, playing a three inch-small tanpura.Mehta’s interest in miniature models goes back to the days he was a railway foreman. While he was in Jabalpur, he made a working model of an engine called the ‘Queen of Gondwana’, that travelled to many exhibitions and won much acclaim.When Mehta retired in 1984 from Mumbai, he had set up a world record for making a model working train engine in the quickest time. ‘‘Five months, five days and a five hours,’’ he says.VADODARA’S cultural climate shifted Mehta’s interest from engines to musical instruments. And when a young neighbour asked him if if he could make a small guitar, Mehta made one in ‘‘two hours flat’’. That was the beginning of a long pursuit.He visited the Faculty of Performing Arts of M S University and took measurements of instruments. Dismantling and rearranging the sarangi was his first task. He calls it his toughest attempt.He read books on music and musical instruments, researching extensively on cultures and traditions existing in the country and how music relates to them. ‘‘It is the tribal culture that has given us all the musical instruments,’’ says Mehta.Now he’s working to meet his self-imposed deadline. Ten months to get small working models of all of India’s instruments.
