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Say "Indian music" to most people in Britain and they think of Ravi Shankar and his sitar, the beat of bhangra or Bollywood pop. But there is far, far more to it than that. Its heritage goes back many centuries and its variety befits a country with an unparalleled ethnic and religious mix.

On Saturday, the Horniman Museum, in southeast London, opens a nine-month exhibition, Utsavam: Music from India. With more than 300 instruments from all parts of India, it will be the largest-ever such show. Its patron is Nitin Sawhney, our own home-grown Indian music master, and there is support from the London-based band Asian Dub Foundation, whose music has breathed fresh life into the sounds of the subcontinent.

To bring the instruments to life, there will be videos and sound recordings collected during five years of field trips undertaken in cooperation with the British Library's sound archive by the co-curators, Margaret Birley and Rolf Killius. "One of the purposes of the research project was to document disappearing music and instruments that are under threat at a time of rapid change in India," Birley says. There will also be about 20 associated concerts and musical events, with performances by the remarkable Indian-born, London-based Baluji Shrivastav and two of the brightest young talents in Britain, Soumik Datta and Gurdain Rayatt.

It is more than appropriate that this exhibition should be held at the Horniman, because the museum was founded in 1901 by Frederick Horniman, whose tea company had its roots in India. Horniman was a collector of ethnographic, anthropological and cultural artefacts, which he donated to the museum. Among his earliest gifts were instruments from India that he picked up on two trips in 1894 and in 1896. They include an early sitar, a lute from Rajasthan and some drums, all of which are on show in the exhibition.

During my own recent trip to Kerala, in southwest India, I came to realise just how significant a role music and dance still plays. With a majority Hindu population, much of the traditional music is linked to temples and village festivals. Despite rapid modernisation, even in comparatively rural Kerala (the setting for Arundhati Roy's Booker-winning novel The God of Small Things), the sounds of traditional drums and cymbals are an everyday event.

Tradition also means handing down musical skills through families. For Kuttan Marar, who lives just outside the town of Thrissur, the skill of making and playing the centa drum has survived for at least 10 generations. Though the temple players were once among the poorest, they can now earn a reasonably decent living, supplemented by film work. "I was working in Mumbai only the other week," said Marar, who plays most evenings during the Keralan festival season, which runs from November to mid-May.

Marar's drum comes from the wood of the jackfruit tree. The base is made for him, and he assembles the drum by attaching the hide bases and the ropes, which define the sound through tension. It is a skill that Marar learnt as a child, and now he teaches his own 10-year-old son.

Other youngsters who want to learn the traditions of classical Keralan music and dance can attend Kerala Kalamandalam, a highly regarded college. Its reputation is international: when I visited, there were students from America and Europe mastering, in particular, the techniques of kathakali dance, in which hand and facial movements are important.

Everything came alive at the annual festival in Adoor, a typical town in central Kerala. On the last day, the streets were crowded with brightly dressed musicians playing drums and ilathalam cymbals. Dancers followed the elephants, carrying images of the gods Vishnu and Krishna, as they walked around the town. That night, a classical concert with mrdangam drums and humorous ottamthullal dance ended the festival, making sleep a bit tough as the sounds continued to reverberate until 3am.

Kerala, which has large Muslim and Christian communities living pretty harmoniously with the Hindus, has its own particular music and sounds. In the north of the country, the traditions are very different. Bhangra thrives in Punjab, where the sounds of percussion instruments and dhol drums fill the air. Sikhism is strong there, and some of the music has a central Asian influence. Move to Aru-nachal Pradesh, in the northeast, near the border with Tibet and China, and the drums are huge framed instruments on poles. In Orissa, the Adivasi people, who practise ancestor worship, play the huge suura koma trumpet at ritualistic dances.

Examples of all these instruments, as well as those from Kerala, will fill the hall at the Horniman. Perhaps the rarest on show will be a beautifully decorated sitar dating from about 1850, which was made in Dhaka, now capital of Bangladesh, but once part of imperial India. This remarkable instrument, which has ivory pegs in the shape of crouching lions, was once owned by the East India Company.

Another notable exhibit, which was collected during fieldwork, is the tumbi, a string instrument made from a gourd and bamboo. Its sound is integral to bhangra, which crossed cultures and continents when it was featured in the movie Bend It Like Beckham. The music has become a global phenomenon via chart-topping artists such as Panjabi MC.

This is just one of the sounds that will be heard during the associated live events that run until the autumn. They start next Sunday with the Raj Academy Ensemble, whose music comes from the north of the country. The following Sunday, it is the turn of kathakali, performed by young dancers from Southall, in west London. At the end of March, there is an evening of classical carnatic music, with a range of performances from both Indian and British artists. And towards the end of the exhibition, Shrivastav, the popular sitar and tabla player, will play some Hindustani classical music.

Birley hopes that the Horniman exhibition will attract what she calls her "core visitors", many of them families in southeast London. "But we are consciously targeting the many Indians who live in and around London," she adds. Next year, the show rolls into Leicester, where the Asian population should revel in it.

Of course, nothing quite beats seeing elephants, kitted out in the most wonderful reds and blues, trundling through the back streets of a town like Adoor to the sounds of drums, cymbals, trumpets and flutes, while dancers twirl mani-cally for hours on end. Still, at the very least, Utsavam should provide a fascinating alternative.

Utsavam is at the Horniman Museum, SE23, from Sat until Nov 2;   www.horniman.ac.uk