Beating the Odds: Bhosari Youth Keeps Family Percussion Craft Alive Across Pune

Sahil sets out from Bhosari at first light, a bundle of rope-tuned drums and a hand-painted melodic steel tongue drum stacked on a mat, and works his way through Pune’s chowks, temple forecourts, and evening markets, where the clang of traffic competes with his gentle demonstrations; for five to six years he has repeated this circuit, inheriting routes, bargaining patter, repair tricks, and maker contacts from his forefathers, and in the process turning a precarious street pitch into a roving stage that sells both sound and story. On busy festival days he threads through crowds to tap out rhythms that pull children and devotees into a semicircle; on lean afternoons he retunes laces, oils skins, and burnishes shells so the drums hold pitch despite dust and heat. The work begins at home in a slum cluster of Bhosari—an address that often shadows families with stigma—and continues across a city that still answers to percussion at processions, school gatherings, and small studios, even as Bluetooth speakers crowd pavements and redevelopment squeezes hawker corners. Sahil’s stall is part shop, part classroom: he shows a student how to seat a drum between the knees, teaches a pujari the slow heartbeat for an aarti, and persuades a wedding band apprentice to test the rebound before buying; every exchange is a small transfer of know-how that keeps analog music tangible. Margins are thin—bus fares, skin replacements, and sudden showers can wipe out a day’s take—but the craft offers dignity, a ledger of repeat customers, and the pride of hearing an instrument sold in the morning return as the pulse of an evening procession. In a trade where sound is proof, Sahil sells by ear: a crisp open tone to signal quality wood, a muted thump to expose a loose lace, a shimmering scale from the tongue drum to draw someone who only meant to pass by; it is marketing without signage, inventory without a storefront, and service without a counter. He talks of future plans—expanding to weekend workshops, bundling starter kits with basic lessons, persuading schools to add folk percussion to assemblies—because continuity requires more than nostalgia; it needs new hands to tie knots, new wrists to find tempo, and new listeners to choose an unamplified beat over the easy volume of machines. As Pune accelerates, Sahil’s day remains measured in rhythms: the slow footfall of morning commuters, the syncopation of noon heat, the crescendo of twilight buyers; and when he packs at night, the city’s noise softens for a moment under the clean, human certainty of a drum struck well, a trade practiced honestly, and a legacy not yet ready to fall silent.