The sarinda is a stringed musical instrument which is played upright and traditionally comes from India. It is a short-necked bowed lute which would have had four bowed strings and 18 sympathetic strings, the whole instrument is carved and hollowed from a single piece of dark brown hardwood. The bowl of the resonator is deeply waisted, with a parchment diaphragm over the lower opening. An internal strengthening strut is fixed between two ends of the resonator. A bridge, of simple arched form, carried the bowed strings on the top edge while the sympathetic strings passed through 18 holes drilled below. Six of the sympathetic strings then pass to individual nuts, formed of small bone posts arranged stepwise on the neck, and thence through holes in the fingerboard to transverse tuning pegs in the short neck. Decoration consists of areas of shallow knife and gouge carving and bone ornament as inlay and edging. Upper section of body, fingerboard and pegbox are edged with bone strips, incised with concentric circles and lines, which terminate in bird-head scrolls on the fingerboard extension which protrudes into the opening of the upper section, this extension also incorporates some foliate bone inlay. Other bone inlay, of quatrefoil, trefoil and foliate shapes, decorates the main fingerboard, the sides of the pegbox and the finial of the pegbox. The carved decoration extends over the back of the pegbox and a large area of the upper back of the bowl, with a border of carved ornament on the edges of the middle section; and the middle and upper sections also have a mixture of 'dart' and trefoil bone ornament applied on the edges. Some of the bone inlay, where previously damaged, has been replaced by painted parchment. Adapted from a description by Christopher Nobbs 16/12/2002 Royal College of Music