Hindustani classical music

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Hindustani classical music carries a tradition stretching back to at least the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, when the Sanskrit treatise Natya Shastra first laid down the principles of melodic sound. A listener who steps into a performance today encounters a raga, an intricate melodic mode, unfolding at its own pace against a rhythmic cycle called a tala. There is no harmony in this world, no chord structures borrowed from the West. Melody alone does the work.

  Three musicians who dedicated their lives to this tradition, Ustad Bismillah Khan, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, and Ravi Shankar, were each awarded the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award India gives to any citizen. That honour is one measure of how deeply the music runs through the culture of northern India. But the story of how it got there, who shaped it, who almost let it die, and how it survived into an era of recording studios and global concert tours, is far less tidy than any single prize suggests.

• 2. Ancient Foundations

  ›

  The Natya Shastra, attributed to the scholar Bharata and dated to around the 2nd-3rd century CE, treats music as something larger than entertainment. It describes sound as existing in two forms: ahata, meaning struck or audible, and anahata, the unstruck and inaudible, which it names as the principle of all manifestation itself.

  A companion text, the Dattilam, probably from the 3rd-4th century CE, focuses on what it calls Gandharva music, named for the mythological spirits regarded as musical masters. This text defines a tonal framework called grama in terms of 22 micro-tonal intervals within a single octave. Those intervals, called shrutis, account for fine distinctions in pitch that the 12-note Western scale does not register.

  The Dattilam also categorizes melodic structure into 18 groups called Jati. The names of these groups reveal their geography: Andhri and Oudichya are among them, pointing to different regional sources. Music also finds mention in Buddhist and Jain texts from the earliest periods of the common era, confirming that the tradition predates any single religious or political framework.

  Kalidasa, writing during the Gupta period, names several kinds of veena, including the parivadini and the vipanchi, alongside percussion instruments, the flute called vamshi, and the conch known as shankha. By around 1100 CE, the treatise Sangita Makarandha, attributed to Narada, is the earliest source where rules resembling those of current Hindustani classical music can be clearly identified. It names and classifies the system before the Persian influences that would reshape it.

• 3. Persian Currents and Mughal Courts

  ›

  Amir Khusrau, who lived from 1253 to 1325, stands as the most influential musician of the Delhi Sultanate period. He composed in Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and Braj Bhasha, and he is credited with introducing several ragas, including Yaman Kalyan, Zeelaf, and Sarpada. He also created six new genres of music: khyal, tarana, Naqsh, Gul, Qaul, and Qalbana. The sitar is among the instruments that developed during this era.

  The 13th-century text Sangita Ratnakara, composed by Sharangadeva, reveals the cultural traffic of the time in its very vocabulary. One raga carries the name Turushka Todi, meaning Turkish Todi, and scholars consider this text the last to be claimed equally by both the Carnatic and Hindustani traditions. It is often used to mark the formal divergence of the two.

  As the Mughal Empire drew closer contact with Hindu subjects, especially under the reign of Akbar, music flourished with renewed force. The musician Tansen introduced new ragas and particular compositions at court. A legend attached to his name holds that when he sang a nighttime raga in the morning, the entire city fell silent and clouds gathered in the sky; a separate raga, called Deepak, was said to allow him to light fires through song alone.

  At the royal house of Gwalior, Raja Mansingh Tomar, who ruled from 1486 to 1516 CE, shifted classical songs from Sanskrit into the local Hindi idiom. He wrote several volumes of compositions on both religious and secular themes and compiled the Mankutuhal, meaning Book of Curiosity, which catalogued the major musical forms of his time. The musical form known as dhrupad saw particular growth in his court, and Gwalior's gharana would carry that strength for many centuries afterward.

• 4. Fusion and the Bhakti Thread

  ›

  Medieval Hindustani music was never a sealed container. The fusion of Persian-influenced forms with Hindu devotional practice produced qawwali and khyal, two of the tradition's most lasting contributions. This blending had a particular social dimension: Muslim ustads might sing in praise of Hindu deities, and Hindu pandits might perform Islamic compositions. The tradition of religious neutrality traces directly to Sufi times.

  The Bhakti movement carried its own musical line through the same centuries. Jayadeva's Gita Govinda, from the 12th century, is perhaps the earliest musical composition in the classical tradition called Ashtapadi music. The scholar-poet Vidyapati was active around 1375 CE; Chandidas belongs to the 14th and 15th centuries; and Meerabai is dated 1555 to 1603 CE. Composers like Kabir and Nanak worked in the popular languages of the people rather than Sanskrit, folding the innovations of court musicians into a wider devotional stream.

  The raga Khamaj and its variants were classicized from folk music, while ragas such as Hijaz, also called Basant Mukhari, entered the tradition from Persian maqams. The porous boundary between folk, devotional, and classical was never simply a weakness in the system. It was the engine that kept the tradition alive across successive political upheavals.

  After the Mughal Empire dissolved, patronage continued in smaller princely courts at Awadh, Patiala, and Banaras. Some musician families received large grants of land that made them self-sufficient for several generations; the Sham Chaurasia gharana is one example. The diversity of regional courts gave rise to the distinct styles now known as gharanas, each a living school that bore the name and methods of its founding lineage.

• 5. Crisis and Reform

  ›

  Until the late 19th century, Hindustani classical music passed from teacher to student almost entirely through the guru-shishya system, a one-on-one tradition in which the student served the teacher in hopes of receiving a piece or nuance in return. The music was effectively confined to palaces and dance halls. The educated middle class avoided it; intellectuals shunned it.

  Vishnu Digambar Paluskar confronted this situation directly. He had become blind at the age of 12, yet emerged as a musician and organizer of considerable force. In 1901, he opened the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in Lahore, a school built to offer formal training in Hindustani classical music on public support and donations rather than royal patronage. It was open to all. Many students from its early batches became respected musicians and teachers across North India, and the school's existence helped shift attitudes toward musicians who had previously been treated with disdain.

  Paluskar's contemporary and occasional rival, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, took a different approach. He visited a large number of gharanas, both Hindustani and Carnatic, collecting and comparing compositions. Between 1909 and 1932, he produced a four-volume work called Hindustani Sangeeta Paddhati. It proposed a transcription of Indian music, documented the many traditions in notation, and suggested categorizing ragas into a number of thaats, or modes, based on their notes.

  The loss of royal patronage accelerated when Wajid Ali Shah was expelled to Calcutta after 1857. The Lucknavi musical tradition followed him and influenced the Bengali musical renaissance around the turn of the century. Raja Chakradhar Singh of Raigarh is noted as the last of the modern-era Maharajas to patronize Hindustani classical musicians, singers, and dancers.

• 6. Forms and Their Architecture

  ›

  Dhrupad is among the oldest surviving vocal styles, traditionally performed by male singers accompanied by the tambura and the pakhawaj drum. Its lyrics, some of which were originally written in Sanskrit, are now often performed in brajbhasha, a medieval North and East Indian language form. A dhrupad performance begins with a long, rhythmically free alap before gradually unfolding into the more rhythmic jod and jhala sections. Dhrupad risked extinction in the first half of the 20th century as its royal patrons disappeared, but the Dagar family's sustained effort helped revive it. Members of the Dagar lineage, including Nasir Moinuddin and Nasir Aminuddin Dagar, Nasir Zahiruddin and Nasir Faiyazuddin Dagar, and later Wasifuddin, Fariduddin, and Sayeeduddin Dagar, kept the form alive.

  Khyal, whose name derives from a Persian and Arabic term meaning thought or imagination, is a two- to eight-line lyric set to melody. It allows greater embellishment and ornamentation than dhrupad and became the dominant vocal form when dhrupad lost its main patrons roughly two centuries ago. Sadarang, a court musician under the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah, is credited with shaping the modern khyal more than any other single composer.

  Tappa traces its origins to the folk songs of camel riders in Punjab. Mian Ghulam Nabi Shori, a court singer for Asaf-Ud-Dowlah, the Nawab of Awadh, developed it into a classical form. Thumri, a semi-classical style, is said to have begun in Uttar Pradesh at the court of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, who ruled from 1847 to 1856. Its lyrics draw on older rural Hindi dialects including Brij Bhasha, Awadhi, and Bhojpuri, and its themes are primarily romantic.

  Taranas are medium- to fast-paced songs built from syllables drawn from the rhythmic language of the tabla, pakhawaj, or Kathak dance. They are typically performed toward the end of a concert to convey elation. The tillana of Carnatic music is based on the tarana, though in Carnatic practice the form is tied primarily to dance.

• 7. Sound Structure

  ›

  Indian classical music counts seven basic notes with five interspersed half-notes, arriving at a 12-note scale. Unlike Western practice, the base frequency of that scale is not fixed; intertonal gaps, or temperament, may also vary from one performance to the next. The Hindustani pitch system, called Sargam, maps onto Western movable-do solfege: Sa equals Do, Re equals Re, Ga equals Mi, and so on through Dha and Ni. But where solfege treats each degree as fixed in character, sargam allows Re, Ga, Ma, Dha, and Ni to appear in natural, flat, or sharp variants.

  Three registers organize the range of a performance: mandra is the lower register, madhya the middle, and taar the upper. Each register resonates with a different part of the body, the low octave in the heart, the medium in the throat, and the high in the head. Some ragas are associated specifically with intermediate ranges, such as mandra-madhya or madhya-taar.

  A full Hindustani raga performance moves through two principal stages. The first, called alap, is a rhythmically free improvisation that gives life to the raga and traces its characteristics. In instrumental music, the alap leads into the jod and jhala. The second stage, called bandish or gat, is a fixed melodic composition set in the specific raga and performed with rhythmic accompaniment from a tabla or pakhavaj. A bandish can be slow, in what is called vilambit tempo, medium in madhyalaya tempo, or fast in drut tempo.

  Ragas themselves are characterized by specific ascent and descent sequences, called aroha and avaroha, along with a principal note called the vadi and a secondary note called the samavadi, plus a set of characteristic phrases called pakad. The Natya Shastra treats the word raga as signifying color or mood, and the Dattilam's earlier equivalent concept was called Jati. Ragas may arise from religious hymns, folk tunes, or music from entirely outside the subcontinent.

• 8. Recording, Radio, and Global Reach

  ›

  The first recording of Indian music came in 1902, when Fred Gaisberg documented the performances that launched the career of Gauhar Jan, the tradition's first recording star. The gramophone arrived alongside the decline of royal courts, and together these forces remade how musicians earned a living. Public performance replaced court service. Gurukuls, or independent teaching institutions, such as the one Alauddin Khan ran at Maihar, filled some of the space left by the old patronage system.

  All India Radio, Bangladesh Betar, and Radio Pakistan later extended the music's reach to mass audiences at a moment when it might otherwise have remained marginal. Corporate support eventually followed, with institutions such as the ITC Sangeet Research Academy channeling funds into the tradition.

  Beyond South Asia, Hindustani classical music reached global audiences largely through the influence of artists including Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, and Vikash Maharaj. In recent decades, especially outside South Asia, instrumental Hindustani music has drawn larger audiences than vocal music. The source notes two factors: a somewhat different style and faster tempo in instrumental performance, and the language barrier that vocal music presents to listeners unfamiliar with Hindi, Braj Bhasha, or Sanskrit.

  One of the earliest modern music festivals dedicated to Hindustani classical music was the Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan, founded in 1875 in Jallandhar. The Dover Lane Music Conference debuted in Kolkata in 1952, and the Sawai Gandharva Bhimsen Festival began in Pune in 1953. The organization known as SPIC MACAY, whose full name is the Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music And Culture Amongst Youth, has been active since 1977.