India’s frame drum tradition runs along two tracks. In the south, the kanjira rose from a folk and devotional bhajan instrument into one of Carnatic classical music’s defining voices — a transformation credited to a single 1880s innovator, Manpoondia Pillai, who reduced it to one pair of jingles and brought it onto the concert stage. Elsewhere across the subcontinent, related frame drums — the duff and daffli among them — carry the same Persian-influenced lineage as Iran’s daff into devotional and folk settings from Punjab to the south. See the Kanjira page below for the full story.