Drums initially beaten in traditional Indian rhythm (5)
I believe the answer is:
tabla
'drums' is the definition.
(I've seen this before)
'initially beaten in traditional indian rhythm' is the wordplay.
'initially' says to take the initial letters.
'in' means one lot of letters goes inside another.
'traditional indian rhythm' becomes 'tala' (I can't explain this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
The initial letter of 'beaten' is 'b'.
'b' placed into 'tala' is 'TABLA'.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for tabla that I've seen before include "Pair of drums used in Indian music" , "Belch" , "has stretched skin" , "Indian drum pair" , "set of drums" .)