The Drumbeat That Starts Creation

In the iconography of Shiva Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance, the damaru sits in the god's upper right hand, opposite a small flame held in the upper left, and the two together are read as a single statement about the universe: creation and destruction proceeding from the same figure in the same motion. The damaru's beat in this reading is not decoration but the mechanism itself, the first sound that separates an undifferentiated field of being into the distinct elements, forms and creatures of the ordinary world, an idea some later commentators connect to Sanskrit grammatical theory, in which the drum's beats are said to have given rise to the sounds of language.

Temple images and bronze icons of the dancing Shiva, most famously the Chola bronzes of South India, consistently include the small hourglass drum, and its presence is one of the standard ways worshippers and scholars identify the Nataraja form among Shiva's many other depictions. Physically the instrument is simple, two drumheads joined at a narrow waist and struck by beaded cords that swing against the faces as the player twists the wrist rather than strikes with a hand, a technique that produces a rapid, rattling beat rather than a single resonant tone.