Dambura: The Soul of Hazara Music
Pick up a dambura and you are holding something that has traveled centuries of history in its body. The instrument is modest by the standards of classical music - two strings, a long neck, a pear-shaped hollow carved from a single block of mulberry or apricot wood. It fits easily across the lap. There are no frets to guide the fingers. And yet from this stripped-down form, Hazara musicians have drawn music that carries grief and celebration, nationalist fire and pastoral calm, the sound of a people who have survived repeated attempts to erase them. The dambura is not just an instrument. For the Hazara people of central Afghanistan, it is the primary vehicle through which culture, memory, and identity have been passed across generations.
What the Dambura Is and How It Sounds
The dambura - also written "dambora" - is a fretless, long-necked lute with two strings, typically made of gut in older instruments and nylon in modern ones. The body and neck are most often carved from a single block of mulberry or apricot wood, giving the instrument a warm, slightly dry resonance. The strings run over a short bridge and are anchored to a pin at the base of the body. At the top of the neck, flat T-shaped pegs allow the player to tune the instrument by hand.
Playing technique varies by tradition but shares a common character: the player strums or plucks with vigor, often using the full hand rather than a pick, sometimes striking the body itself to add percussive emphasis. The upper string generally holds the drone - a continuous, vibrating foundation - while the lower string carries the melody. This separation of drone and melody is central to the music's sound. It gives dambura playing its characteristic texture: warm and sustained in the background, fluid and responsive up front. In faster passages, particularly dance songs, the strumming intensifies and the rhythmic slap of the hand against the wooden body becomes part of the beat.
A Central Asian Lineage
The dambura belongs to a family of long-necked, two-stringed lutes that stretch across Central Asia from Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan, each carrying a slightly different name and form. The Kazakh dombra, the Uzbek dutor, the Uyghur dutar, the Tajik dutor - these are all cousins, descended from a common ancestor traced back through the Silk Road to the Khorasanian tunbur, an ancient plucked lute whose name and form migrated with trade and migration across the region over centuries.
The word "dutar" itself comes from the Dari words do (two) and tar (string) - a name that simply describes what it is. The Hazara dambura is distinguished from the Uzbek or Uyghur dutar primarily by its fretlessness, its construction from a single block of wood rather than staves and the specific strumming and percussive techniques that Hazara players developed in the central highlands of Afghanistan, in the region known as Hazarajat. Where the Uzbek dutar is more suited to melodic ornamentation within court or classical music traditions, the Hazara dambura evolved in a folk context: storytelling, communal celebration, work songs, and eventually protest.
It is worth distinguishing the dambura from the Afghan rubab, the plucked lute more commonly associated with Pashtun and classical Afghan music. The rubab is a more complex instrument - multi-stringed, with sympathetic resonator strings that give it a rich, layered timbre suited to elaborate ornamentation. The dambura is leaner, more direct, and historically more democratic. You did not need years of court training to play it. It moved with the people.
Genres: From Folk Songs to Revolutionary Hymns
The core of traditional Hazara dambura music consists of folk genres that have been performed in Hazarajat for centuries. The doheti - two-line verses, often improvised, that have been passed down orally - are among the oldest forms. These short verses carry love poems, agricultural observations, laments, and humor. Singers and instrumentalists would build extended performances by stringing together doheti verses, with the dambura providing rhythmic and melodic grounding beneath the words. The oral tradition of doheti composition is still active; it is a form that rewards quick wit and poetic precision.
Alongside the doheti tradition sit longer narrative forms - songs that recount historical events, tell stories of migration and loss, or celebrate specific places and people. Lyrical themes across Hazara folk music range from the pastoral (harvest songs, descriptions of the landscape of Hazarajat) to the intensely personal (longing, exile, grief) to the communal (wedding songs, lullabies passed mother to child).
But the genre that transformed Hazara music's cultural and political reach is the surud-e-inqilabi - the revolutionary hymn. In the 1980s, as Afghanistan was convulsed by Soviet occupation and internal resistance movements, a new kind of song emerged among Hazara musicians. These ahangha-e inqilabi (revolutionary songs) were explicitly political: calls to consciousness, to resistance, to solidarity. They drew on the dambura's established role as a community instrument and turned it toward a sharper purpose. The form was vernacular and accessible - sung in Hazaragi, the Dari dialect of the Hazara people - and it circulated on cassette tapes throughout Hazarajat and among Hazara communities abroad in Pakistan and Iran. People who had never attended a concert knew these songs by heart.
The Men Who Made the Music
The figure most credited with founding the surud-e-inqilabi tradition is Sarwar Sarkhosh. Born in 1942 in what is now Daykundi Province, Sarkhosh was by training a dambura player and folk singer in the established Hazara tradition. What he did in the early 1980s was take that form and load it with direct political content. His songs called on Hazara youth to resist oppression and occupation - not only the Soviet presence in Afghanistan but the longer history of persecution and marginalization that the Hazara people had endured. His message was one of awakening: that the suffering was not inevitable, that a generation had the capacity to change it.
Sarwar Sarkhosh was killed in 1983, shot in the Uruzgan region by a local political faction. He was 41 years old. His death transformed him into a symbol that his music continues to carry. Listen to the recordings that survive - Dawood and Sarwar Sarkhosh: Mix Inqilabi Songs on YouTube - and you can hear why the music landed as it did. There is urgency in it without bombast, feeling without sentimentality.
His younger brother Dawood Sarkhosh, born in 1971, grew up watching and then learning from him. By seventeen, Dawood had learned dambura from Sarwar. When his brother was killed and his family eventually fled to Peshawar and then Quetta, Pakistan, Dawood carried the music with him into exile. In Quetta he studied harmonium under the Pakistani composer Arbab Ali Khan, adding technical depth to what he had inherited. He did not perform for commercial reasons. He performed, as he described it, out of nostalgia and to give voice to what Hazara refugees were living through - the dislocation, the grief, the will to survive. Hazara communities abroad attended his concerts in the thousands. His song "Ay Jawanana Hazara" - available on YouTube - became an anthem recognized across the Hazara world. You can also find a full live performance at SoundCloud.
Where the Sarkhosh brothers represent the political and nationalist tradition, Safdar Tawakoli stands as the great custodian of the older folk forms. Born in 1942 in Yakawlang, Bamyan Province - the heartland of Hazara culture - Tawakoli dedicated his life to mastering and preserving the traditional dambura repertoire. Over five decades of performance, he became the most important living repository of Hazaragi folk music. In 2017, when the first dambura music festival was held in Bamyan - an event that drew thousands of participants across two days - the festival honored Tawakoli's fifty years as a performer. The event itself was remarkable: local religious authorities tried to block it, calling it un-Islamic. Social media protests spread rapidly, and the people of Bamyan chose to hold the festival regardless. A dambura concert, in Bamyan, became an act of communal assertion. YouTube: Yakawlang, Bamyan, the birthplace of Hazaragi music, with Safdar Tawakoli.
The Dambura as Instrument of Resistance
The political dimension of dambura music did not begin with the surud-e-inqilabi. Hazara music has historically been described - including by Hazara musicians themselves - as a medium for expressing "sufferings, protests, and resistance" to oppression. The dambura was always a vehicle for more than entertainment. But the 1980s formalized this role and gave it a new intensity.
The cassette tape made this possible at scale. Before digital distribution, cassettes carrying the voices of Sarwar and then Dawood Sarkhosh circulated through Hazarajat and through Hazara communities in Quetta and Peshawar. Music crossed borders at the speed of a tape passed hand to hand. In refugee camps and urban apartments thousands of kilometers from Hazarajat, people heard their language, their instrument, and their situation named out loud. The effect was not only emotional. It was organizing. Songs that named oppression and called for awakening performed a political function even when no meetings were convened and no pamphlets were printed.
The oral-poetic tradition of the doheti also fed resistance. Two-line verses could be composed quickly, memorized easily, and passed without paper. In a community under pressure, this portability matters. The dambura's role as accompaniment to oral poetry - including political poetry - meant it was woven into the very fabric of how Hazara communities processed and transmitted their experience.
Under the Taliban's Silence
The Taliban's first period of rule, from 1996 to 2001, brought a near-total ban on music in Afghanistan. Instruments were confiscated and publicly destroyed - sometimes burned, sometimes "hanged" alongside cassette tapes as a theatrical display of prohibition. Musicians who had recorded or performed publicly faced real danger. Many fled: to Pakistan, to Iran, to wherever they could go. The 1990s Hazara musical tradition largely moved to Quetta and Peshawar, where it survived in exile communities and continued to be recorded and performed away from Taliban control. The dambura did not disappear, but it went underground or went abroad.
The Taliban's return to power in August 2021 renewed the suppression. Hundreds of musicians fled Afghanistan in the months that followed. Those who remained faced raids: documented cases include musicians whose homes were searched, their instruments smashed, and themselves jailed and beaten. For Hazara musicians specifically, the danger was compounded. The Taliban have historically regarded the Hazara people - Shia Muslims, with distinct cultural and linguistic traditions - as a particular target of hostility. As one Hazara musician noted to international press: "They despise me because I'm Hazara, a Shia minority known for our art, music, and dance - everything the Taliban considers haram." The dambura, so central to Hazara cultural identity, was doubly threatening in Taliban eyes.
Inside Afghanistan today, public dambura performance is effectively impossible.
The Dambura in New Countries
Outside Afghanistan, Hazara musicians in new countries are keeping the tradition alive with considerable energy. Australia has become one of the most significant centers of Hazara cultural life abroad, with a substantial community that has built institutions, organized cultural events, and maintained music practice across generations. Hazara Culture Day events in Australia and elsewhere regularly feature dambura performance as a centerpiece - not as museum piece but as living tradition.
Digital platforms have also created new modes of transmission. YouTube channels dedicated to Hazaragi music - including performances by younger artists playing in the dambura tradition - allow the music to reach second-generation Hazara youth who may have grown up in Australia, Germany, or Canada with limited exposure to the instrument in daily life. The music finds them through a screen instead of a gathering, but it finds them.
One of the most prominent Hazara musicians working internationally today is Elaha Soroor - born in Iran to Afghan refugee parents, she first gained wide recognition as a contestant on the Afghan Star TV competition in 2009. After leaving Afghanistan in 2010 following violent backlash for performing publicly as a woman, she settled in London and joined the ensemble Kefaya. In May 2024, she performed at Vienna's Odeon Theater for the Roots Revival concert series, an event documented on a live album released in July 2024. The album - Hazara Music, available at Roots Revival's Bandcamp and the full concert on YouTube - interprets Hazara musical traditions with both dambura and contemporary ensemble, demonstrating how the tradition is being carried forward by musicians who know its roots and are not afraid to move it. Soroor was named to the BBC's 100 Women list in 2024.
The Instrument and the Word
It is impossible to talk about dambura music without talking about poetry, because in the Hazara tradition they have never been fully separate things. The dambura is, at its most basic function, the accompaniment to the spoken and sung word. Doheti verses were not intended to be read silently on a page - they were meant to be sung to the drone of the strings, carried on breath and sound into a room or a gathering. Epic narratives, love poems, historical accounts, political calls to action: all of these used the dambura as their foundation.
This relationship between the instrument and oral literature means that the dambura has served as an archive. Because poetry and story in Hazara culture were traditionally passed through performance rather than manuscript, the instrument was present at every act of transmission. A singer who knew the old songs knew the old stories. The dambura player at a wedding or a gathering was not background music - they were a carrier of the community's accumulated memory.
This is part of what makes the Taliban ban on music so specifically damaging for Hazara culture. The ban is not only a prohibition on entertainment. It is a prohibition on a primary mode of cultural transmission. When the instrument is silenced, the archive it carries goes quiet with it.
That it has survived - through cassette tapes in Quetta, through cassette tapes in Peshawar, through YouTube channels in Melbourne and Berlin, through the hands of Safdar Tawakoli in Bamyan before the second Taliban period, through the voice of Elaha Soroor in Vienna - is a testament to what the people who love it have been willing to do to keep it alive. Two strings, a carved wooden body, and seventy-odd years of playing through everything that has been thrown at it. The dambura endures.