Indian classical music

• 1. Introduction

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  Indian classical music carries a framework of sound that is over two thousand years old, yet it remains alive in every note played on a sitar in a Mumbai concert hall or a veena in a Chennai temple. At its heart are two concepts so fundamental that everything else in the tradition grows from them: raga and tala. The raga shapes melody; the tala measures time. Between those two poles lies one of the most intricate musical systems ever developed by human beings.

  What makes Indian classical music unlike nearly any other tradition is the weight it places on space. The space between notes is often more important than the notes themselves. Western listeners raised on harmony, counterpoint, and chords encounter a music that deliberately sets those concepts aside. This is not absence. This is a different grammar.

  Two major traditions carry this grammar forward today: Hindustani in the north, Carnatic in the south. They share more than they differ, but their histories diverged somewhere around the 14th and 15th centuries under pressures that had nothing to do with music and everything to do with politics. How a unified classical tradition split into two distinct streams, how those streams absorbed outside influences, and how a monk named Purandara Dasa helped shape a system still taught to students today: those are the questions this documentary will explore.

• 2. Ancient Foundations

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  Around 1000 BCE, the Samaveda was already treating music as scripture. Sections of the Rigveda were set to melodic themes, and the Samaveda encoded those melodies in a system of swaras, the octave notes, written above or within the text itself, or arranged into parvans, meaning knot or member. The code specified not just which notes to sing but which to sing high and which low. The lyrical portion of a song was called sahityam, and singing it was essentially vocalizing the underlying swara structure through the words.

  Before what scholars believe was around 500 BCE, the scholar Yaska included musical terms in his linguistic studies called nirukta, one of the six ancient Vedanga disciplines. This suggests that sangeeta, the distinct art of music, had already separated from the combined practice of syllabic recital, melodic chant, and dance that characterized the earliest Vedic forms.

  Two genres emerged from the ancient Hindu tradition: Gandharva, the formal, composed, ceremonial music with celestial associations, and Gana, the informal, improvised music tied to entertainment and singing. The classic Sanskrit text Natya Shastra, attributed to Bharata Muni and dated to roughly 200 BCE-200 CE, placed these forms within a comprehensive theory of performance art. That same text classified musical instruments into four groups based on how they produce sound: stringed instruments called chordophones, hollow instruments called aerophones, solid instruments called idiophones, and covered instruments called membranophones. The scholar Levis Rowell notes that small bronze cymbals, an idiophone, were the instrument of tala, and Bharata devoted nearly an entire chapter of the Natyashastra to the theoretical treatment of rhythmic time.

• 3. The Written Tradition

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  Sarngadeva's Sangita Ratnakara, completed around 1230 CE, is regarded as the definitive text by both Hindustani and Carnatic traditions. The title translates literally as Ocean of Music and Dance. Sarngadeva was patronized by King Sighana of the Yadava dynasty in Maharashtra. He identified seven tala families and then broke them into rhythmic ratios, presenting a methodology for improvisation and composition that, according to the source, continues to inspire musicians in the modern era.

  The written record surrounding Indian classical music is vast but uneven. Much of it survived; much did not. Authors from the medieval period quoted and discussed texts that are now lost entirely, so scholars know those works existed only through the references other writers left behind. The Balabodhan, written by an unknown author around 1350 CE, is itself a review of texts believed to be lost by that time.

  The surviving literature spans multiple religions and languages. Most texts were written in Sanskrit by Hindu scholars, but Buddhist and Jain scholars also contributed, and by the 16th century Muslim scholars added their own reviews. A text called Lahjat-i Sikandar Shahi, written by Umar Sama Yahya in the 16th century within the Islamic tradition, included a review of both the Natya Shastra and the Sangita Ratnakara. Encyclopedic Hindu texts called Puranas contained large chapters on music theory, including the Bhagavata Purana, the Markandeya Purana, the Vayu Purana, the Linga Purana, and the Visnudharmottara Purana. The Sangita Sudha, composed by Raghunatha of Thanjavur around 1620 CE, covered three languages, catalogued 264 ragas, and identified 50 popular ragas among them.

• 4. A Tradition Divides

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  Through the 14th century, the classical music of the subcontinent across what is now Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan was a broadly integrated system. Then the socio-political pressures of the Delhi Sultanate era drove a wedge between north and south. The two traditions were not yet considered distinct by the 16th century, but the process was already underway. According to the scholar Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy, the North Indian tradition acquired its modern form sometime after the 14th or 15th century.

  Tansen is the figure most musicians associate with the crystallization of Hindustani music. He studied and introduced innovations for roughly the first sixty years of his life under the patronage of the Hindu king Ram Chand of Gwalior. After that he performed at the Muslim court of Akbar, where Hindustani music reached a peak of development during the 16th century. Many modern gharanas, the teaching lineages of Hindustani music, trace their roots back to Tansen's style. The Muslim courts discouraged Sanskrit and pushed toward a more technically focused music, and that environment shaped Hindustani music's evolution in ways that diverged from the south.

  In Hampi, in the Vijayanagara Empire, a monk and composer named Purandara Dasa was doing for Carnatic music what Tansen was doing for Hindustani. Born in 1484 and dying in 1564, Purandara Dasa is called Pithamaha of Carnatic music, a Sanskrit term meaning great father or grandfather. A devotee of the Hindu god Krishna, he systematized classical music theory and developed exercises for learning and perfecting the art. His methodology called Suladi Sapta Tala, literally the primordial seven talas, remains in use today. The vocalist Tyagaraja, who lived from 1759 to 1847, reverentially acknowledged the influence of Purandara Dasa on the tradition he inherited.

• 5. Raga and Tala

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  The scholar Walter Kaufmann observed that a definition of raga cannot be offered in one or two sentences, though it is a remarkable and prominent feature of Indian music. Bruno Nettl and other music scholars describe raga as something between the domains of tune and scale: a unique array of melodic features organized to produce a unique aesthetic sentiment in the listener. A raga carries a given set of notes on a scale, ordered in melodies with musical motifs. The Indian tradition suggests specific sequencing for how a musician moves from note to note within each raga, because the goal is to produce a rasa, a mood or inner feeling, that is specific to that raga. For most artists, a basic perfected repertoire covers roughly forty to fifty ragas.

  The note system underlying ragas divides the octave into 12 semitones, from which seven basic notes are drawn. In Hindustani music these are Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni; in Carnatic music, Sa Ri Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni. The first, Sa, and the fifth, Pa, are considered unalterable anchors. Indian classical music uses just-intonation tuning, not the equal-temperament system used in much of modern Western classical music.

  The tala, as the ethnomusicology scholar David Nelson explains, covers the whole subject of musical meter in Indian music. Unlike Western meters with their strong and weak beat patterns, the tala's flexibility allows a beat's accent to be shaped by the musical phrase itself. Some talas are considerably longer than any classical Western meter; a framework of 29 beats, for instance, takes about 45 seconds to complete at performance tempo. The most widely used tala in the South Indian system is adi tala. In the North Indian system the most common is teental. In both major systems, the first count of any tala is called sam.

• 6. Persian and Arab Currents

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  Hindustani music absorbed Arabian and Persian influences in its development, including the creation of new ragas and the evolution of instruments such as the sitar and sarod. The precise nature of those influences is, as the source notes, unclear. The scholar Hormoz Farhat points out that the Persian word Rak, which appears in some comparisons to Indian raga, has no meaning in modern Persian and that the concept of raga is unknown in Persia.

  One of the earliest known discussions connecting Persian maqam to Indian raga comes from the late 16th century scholar Pundarika Vittala. He argued that Persian maqams current in his time had been derived from older Indian ragas. He specifically mapped over a dozen maqams: for example, he stated that the Hijaz maqam came from the Asaveri raga, and Jangula from the Bangal. In 1941, Haidar Rizvi challenged that interpretation and argued the influence ran in the opposite direction, with Middle Eastern maqams converting into Indian ragas, citing Zangulah maqam becoming Jangla raga.

  John Baily, a professor of ethnomusicology, argues the traffic of musical ideas moved in both directions. Persian records confirm that Indian musicians were part of the Qajar court in Tehran, an exchange that continued through the 20th century. In cities near the Afghanistan-Iran border, such as Herat, Indian musical instruments were being imported into the regional music culture.

• 7. A Global Reach

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  According to the scholar Yukteshwar Kumar, elements of Indian music reached China as early as the 3rd century, visible in the works of the Chinese lyricist Li Yannian.

  The more recent chapter of Indian classical music's global spread began in 1958, when Ravi Shankar arrived in the United States and began recording albums. By 1967, Shankar and other artists were performing at rock music festivals alongside Western rock, blues, and soul acts. Shankar performed at Woodstock before an audience of more than 500,000 in 1969. That wave of interest lasted into the mid-1970s.

  From the 1980s onward, and particularly from the 2000s, immigrant communities in North America preserved and transmitted classical music traditions through local festivals and music schools. Musicians of American origin including Ramakrishnan Murthy, Sandeep Narayan, Pandit Vikash Maharaj, Abby V, and Mahesh Kale pursued Indian classical music professionally. In 2020, the Canadian singer Abby V released a video demonstrating 73 different Indian classical ragas in a live rendering that spread widely online. Since 2023, the UK-based arts organization KalaSudha has presented the Kala Festival, a touring event celebrating Indian classical music across major British cities and featuring both Hindustani and Carnatic musicians.