The concept of the Raga, without doubt, is the key to understanding Indian classical music. The core of Indian classical music, it is often said, lies in the exploration, elaboration and the unfolding of a raga in all its beauty. Hence, the great practitioners of the art have called raga “the soul of Indian music, “a way of seeing the world through sound,” and as a unique, exquisite form, “which the bandish and the tala only help reveal.”
A rāga may be understood as the primary melodic framework through which the musician creates music. Each artist imaginatively and playfully unfolds this melodic world, with all its subtleties and nuances. It gradually comes into being afresh with every performance, slowly drawing listeners into its world, where they dwell for a few fleeting, immersive moments. Once the performance ends, what remains is only memory—or perhaps a recording. Each performance is therefore irreducibly unique. In this sense, the object of the performative arts, especially live music, differs fundamentally from objects such as a literary work, painting, or sculpture, which remain continuously present before us as stable objects in real time. Central to understanding the manner in which Indian music unfolds in performance is the concept of the rāga.
Pdt. Ravishankar, the well-known sitar exponent described the raga as “a scientific, precise, subtle and aesthetic melodic form with its own peculiar ascending and descending movement.” Every learner of Indian classical music, as we know, begins by learning the Arohana (the ascending notes in a scale) and Avarohana (the descending notes) of a specific raga before embarking on learning how to create an intangible, aural, sound-scape using those specific notes. We can call these fixed notes the basic units of a raga. However, though we can describe a raga as a cluster of specific notes in a particular ascending and descending order, a raga, as any practitioner knows, is always much more than just a specific arrangement of notes. It is a living, aesthetic experience that brings into being a bhava, an emotion, an atmosphere or an experience. Hence, the term raga-rasa-anubhava is used to capture the experience of our savouring of the specific raga.
The raga then, let us note again, is always more than a fixed grammar of notes. This is precisely why the same raga is rendered differently by different artists (even by the same artist for no two performances are alike) and it is in this difference thatlies the beauty of each rendition. This was illuminatingly brought out in a recent function I attended – the 70th birthday of Parameshwar Hegde, a well-known, much-loved exponent of Hindustani music. A speaker paying tribute to Parameshwar Hegde’s dedication to music, recalled listening one day to his fine rendition of Bhilaskani thodi. A raga that has been sung by Bhim Sen Joshi, Mallika Arjun Mansoor, and Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, the speaker remarked that despite having heard all of them, Parmeshwar Hegde’s rendering of Bhilaskani thodi stood out as unique and moved him immensely. This raises the question: If the Raga is not just a fixed object with its fixed sets of notes, and its contours and the bhava it evokes change with each rendering, how then do we understand what constitutes a Raga? How do we determine what keeps a bhilakani thodi the same if the rendition by each of the masters is different and the multiple ways of unfolding a raga is already built into every raga? If no one rendering of a raga can be fixed as the raga, how do we understand its form?
Mukund Lath, one of the finest thinkers on Indian Classical Music, is most illuminating about this question. Both, the way he frames the question and the manner he sets about exploring it are remarkable in approach. Unlike the conventional understanding of identity where one explores the identity of an object as that which remains the same despite all the changes to the object, with changes or differences being seen as accidental, he notes that “there are identities where…difference is not contingent but necessary to identity.” In such cases, he observes, identity “is formed and maintained through the process of change.” (2018: 6; emphasis in the original). Thus, the question Lath astutely raises is: How is the identity of such a dynamic object to be understood? His case in point is the Raga as a form. In the next post, we will explore this further.
Bibliography
Lath, Mukund. 2018. “Identity Through Necessary Change: Thinking about ‘Raga-bhava,’ Concepts and Characters.” Journal of World Philosophies 3, 2: 6–23.