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The tambura, or tanpura, as it is known in Hindustani music, is a beautiful and mysterious instrument. It is hard to find a good one with a good bridge that tunes up wholesomely. Being able to tune it up "wholesomely" is truly an art, the art of maximizing consonance and may be impossible on all tamburas at all times. At the very least, it needs to be tuned up and used regularly to get a sense of its idiosyncracies, and hence its serviceability for a concert. Randomly picking up a tambura and tuning it up for a concert is not a great idea although it could work on occasion by fluke.
And now on to the sham - I was once at a concert of the great sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar and his daughter Anoushka. It was a great concert marred by one small(or huge depending on your perspective) exercise in sham. There were four tanpura players lining up the the periphery of the stage, all beautifully clad eye candies, pretend-strumming their instruments. Pretend-strumming, that's the key. Not a whiff of sound escaped those 4 sets of strings for the entire two hours ! I didn't even see the maestro or his daughter tune up any one of them and from where I sat I could not make out if they were even strung.
To keep a single randomly picked up tanpura in tune throughout a concert is a Herculian task, keeping four of them in tune in themselves and with one another, uhhhh... keeping the four tamburas in tune with the many strings of the two sitarists and the tabla player on stage hahahahahahaha !. Needless to say, their primary and only source of shruti on stage was a little Saarang electronic tanpura, with it's own microphone. All was well, and the benighted, ecletic crowd in Pittsburgh was none the wiser as to the inner workings of sound from the stage.
People who have had the good fortune to attend a Dagar brothers concert know the care they take to tune up just two tamburas and constantly keep a focus on their state of tunedness.
Sitarists like Vilayat Khan and Shahid Parvez recognize the difficulty of keeping a sitar, with it's own chikari, tarab, etc., in tune with an external tanpura and hence don't have one. It's just sitar and tabla and everything is perfect and mutually in tune.
This to put it in context - tuning standards of Indian classical music, with its just intonations, pure consonances, sympathetic strings, etc. is an order of magnitude more complex than an army of strings in a symphony orchestra using a standard A440 to get their E-A-D-G's quicly in order (with that familiar medley of sound that gave old Ludwig an idea of how to begin his great choral symphony!) and proceeding to play equally tempered harmonies and key modulations.
More recently, I saw a high quality recording of a gifted young Carnatic vocalist, blissfully strumming the strings of an out of tune tambura, and singing along. I suspect this is less a case of sham and more a case of general unfamiliarity with real tamburas. Also maybe the overall apathy in Carnatic music towards tuning in general.
Carnatic musicians might as well stop using real tamburas. Unless one has the commitment of a Dagar brothers, it's pointless. The system does not demand it, artists don't have the time or commitment to worry about tuning or more importantly, stay worried abut tuning throughout the concert.