Introduction to the Series

This is a series of essays on Hindustani classical music, conceived to unfold across the ages and to illumine the nuances, the lineages, and the enduring legacy that adorn our musical heritage. Bharat, or Hindustan, is a land in which music is woven into the very fabric of our existence. It is not an ornament upon our culture but a vein within it, coursing through temple and court, shrine and salon, threshold and open field. To trace the story of this music is, in no small measure, to trace the story of a civilization learning to speak to the eternal.

Here, sound was never merely heard; it was apprehended as something sacred. From the primordial intuition of nada Brahma, the conviction that the cosmos itself is founded upon vibration, to the disciplined architecture of raga and tala, our forebears understood music as a discipline of the spirit no less than an art of the senses. The raga is at once a mood, a season, an hour of the day, and a doorway; and through its many lilting forms it has long spread a quiet divinity, drawing the listener beyond the self toward something vast and unnameable.

Across the essays that follow, this story will be told in eight movements, each attending to a distinct age and its inheritance: the sacred foundations from which the tradition springs, the great confluences and syntheses that shaped it, the courts and lineages that refined it, and the custodians, celebrated and forgotten alike, who carried it faithfully across the generations. What emerges is not the possession of any single community or creed, but a shared inheritance in which musical identity has repeatedly transcended the boundaries that elsewhere divide, and in which the human voice, raised in longing, has sought after the infinite.

Let us begin, then, at the beginning, where music and the sacred were one.

1. Vedic Foundations and the Sacred Geography of Hindustani Classical Music

Introduction: The Origins of Hindustani Classical Music

Hindustani classical music is customarily narrated as a chronicle of courts and gharanas, of illustrious ustads and their princely patrons. Beneath that chronicle, however, lies an older and profounder substratum: the liturgy of the Vedas and the sacred landscape of the subcontinent itself. The tradition was not conceived within an abstract realm of theory; it was chanted into existence at the sacrificial altar, elaborated in temple and treatise, and nurtured in particular river cities, pilgrimage groves, dargah towns and fortress capitals, each possessing its own acoustic ecology of temple bell, azaan, flowing water and courtly assembly. This essay traces that twofold inheritance. It begins with the Vedic origins of Indian melodic thought and the ancient theoretical edifice erected upon them; it then maps the sacred geography from which particular ragas, forms and gharanas arose; and it concludes with the foundational Sanskrit treatises and the early medieval developments that furnished the melodic system, the compositional forms and the devotional performing culture upon which every subsequent synthesis would rest.

I. The Vedic Origins of Indian Classical Music

Music in the Vedas: Samagana and the Birth of the Seven Notes

The earliest stratum of Indian musical practice is liturgical. Rigvedic recitation employed three pitch accents: the udatta (raised), the anudatta (lowered) and the svarita (a falling glide). This system of controlled intonation is still transmitted orally by Vedic reciters and is regarded by musicologists as the germ of Indian melodic thinking. The Samaveda transformed Rigvedic verses into fully melodic chant, known as samagana. Sama chanting expanded the tonal palette first to three and eventually to seven notes, named in descending order as krushta, prathama, dvitiya, tritiya, chaturtha, mandra and atisvarya; this descending orientation was later inverted by theorists into the familiar ascending saptaka. It is an established fact that the seven-note framework, the practice of solmization and the ideal of music as a sacred discipline all possess Samavedic roots, whereas the claim that specific modern ragas descend directly from particular saman melodies belongs to legend rather than to evidence.

The Gandharva Veda, reckoned an upaveda, or auxiliary Veda, attached to the Samaveda, bestowed its name upon gandharva: the sacred, rule-governed art music of antiquity, which early theorists distinguished from gana, the music of entertainment. In its classical definition, music (sangita) embraced vocal music (gita), instrumental music (vadya) and dance (nritya) as a single composite art.

The Natyashastra: Shruti, Grama, Jati and the Ancestry of the Raga

Bharata’s Natyashastra, compiled roughly between 200 BCE and 200 CE and treated by scholarly consensus as a layered, multi-author text, supplies the first systematic theory. Its musical chapters define the twenty-two shrutis, the microtonal units within the octave; the two parent scales or gramas, namely the shadja-grama and the madhyama-grama; the murchhanas, which are modal rotations of the gramas; and the eighteen jatis, melodic classes governed by rules of initial, final and predominant notes. The jati is the direct ancestor of the raga concept. The Natyashastra also codifies tala, the rhythmic cycle, and rasa theory, the doctrine that art exists to evoke codified aesthetic emotions; this doctrine remains the aesthetic foundation of Hindustani performance to the present day.

Temple Worship and Royal Patronage in Ancient Indian Music

The performing contexts of ancient and early medieval music were the temple, the sacrificial ritual and the royal court. Temple inscriptions across the subcontinent record endowments for hereditary singers and instrumentalists, while the devadasi and allied traditions of temple service institutionalized the daily musical offering, or seva, as an act of worship. Music was thus understood as nada-upasana, worship through sound: a devotional conception that Hindustani music never relinquished, even after its centre of gravity migrated to the Persianate court. Royal patronage ran parallel from the earliest times. The Gupta courts, the Vakatakas and later regional kingdoms maintained musicians, and monarchs themselves cultivated the art as an attribute of sovereignty; Samudragupta, indeed, is depicted on his coins playing the veena. This dual ecology of temple and court, devotional legitimacy on the one side and the economics of patronage on the other, constitutes the single most durable structural feature of the tradition’s entire history.

II. The Sacred Geography of Hindustani Classical Music

Before the treatises and the lineages, there is the land. Hindustani music did not develop in an abstract space of theory; particular ragas, forms and gharanas emerged from particular sacred and political landscapes, whether river cities, pilgrimage groves, dargah towns or fortress capitals, each with its own acoustic ecology of temple bell, azaan, river and court. What follows maps that geography, and the places introduced here recur throughout the tradition’s history.

The Riverine Sanctuaries: Varanasi (Kashi) and Kurukshetra

Kashi (Varanasi), the city of Shiva, is in the tradition’s own mythology the city of nada itself, where the god is Nataraja and the beat of the damaru inaugurates the world; it has been a continuous musical habitat for perhaps three millennia. From its ghats and temples arose the purab ang: the Banaras vocal tradition of bol-banao thumri, of tappa, and of the river-seasonal songs, the chaiti of the spring harvest and the kajri of the monsoon, genres literally keyed to the Ganga’s year. From the same city came the Banaras tabla gharana of Ram Sahai; the kathak of the Maharaj families, embracing both the city’s own Banaras gharana and the celebrated Lucknow lineage long domiciled upon its ghats; the shehnai, elevated from a signalling instrument at the temple gate to a concert art by Bismillah Khan at the Balaji temple; and the sant tradition of Kabir, the weaver of Kashi, whose padas travelled into every singing lineage of the North. No city binds temple, river and raga more tightly.

Kurukshetra, the battlefield of the Gita and the sacred basin of the Saraswati, frames a less celebrated musical homeland. The town of Kirana, or Kairana, from which the Kirana gharana takes its name, lies upon the Yamuna in the present-day Shamli district, within the wider Saraswati country of the ancient northwest; and its founding family, kinsmen and heirs of the great binkar Bande Ali Khan, carried from it the gayaki of the sustained and worshipped single note: swara as tirtha. The gharana that rendered the note itself sacred thus arose, fittingly, within the orbit of India’s oldest sacred geography.

The Braj Country: Mathura, Vrindavan and Nathdwara

Mathura, the birthplace of Krishna, anchors the Braj region whose dialect, Brajbhasha, became the song language of the entire classical tradition, court and temple alike. Dhrupad, dhamar, khayal and thumri all speak Braj, because the devotional poetry of the Krishna country constituted the art’s shared world of texts. Mathura’s pakhawaj players and dhrupad-singing families served the temples for centuries, and its poets nourished the haveli repertoire.

Vrindavan contains the grove of Nidhivan, where Swami Haridas sang for Krishna alone; it is the tradition’s devotional pole. From it flow the Haridasi, Radhavallabh and Gaudiya singing lineages, the congregational dhrupad of samaj-gayan, and, through Tansen, the reputed disciple of Haridas, the decisive transmission from temple to court that shaped Mughal music itself.

Nathdwara is Braj transplanted. When Shrinathji departed Govardhan for Mewar in 1672, the haveli liturgy travelled with the deity, and Nathdwara became the living museum of raga as worship, with its eight daily darshans and their ragas prescribed by time, season and mood. Sacred geography here proved portable: the shrine moved, and the acoustic order of Braj moved with it.

The Citadels of Dhrupad and Qawwali: Gwalior, Ajmer, Delhi and Fatehpur Sikri

Gwalior has been styled ‘the Gangotri of Hindustani music’. The fortress court of Man Singh Tomar consolidated dhrupad; the nearby village of Behat is the traditional birthplace of Tansen; and in the city Tansen lies buried beside his Sufi master, Muhammad Ghaus, the tomb of a Hindu-born musician standing within a dargah compound, where the annual Tansen Samaroh still gathers the nation’s musicians to sing at the grave. Three centuries later the same city produced the first khayal gharana. One landscape thus spans both the art’s medieval consolidation and its modern point of departure.

Ajmer, the dargah of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti and fountainhead of the Chishti order in India, became the liturgical capital of qawwali. The shrine’s sama, its Basant rites and its hereditary qawwals form the devotional counterpart to Delhi’s Nizamuddin, and the Chishti sanction of music that radiated from Ajmer is precisely what opened the Persianate world to the raga.

Delhi is the imperial acoustic. At the dargah of Nizamuddin, the songs of Khusrau have been sung nightly for seven centuries and the Qawwal Bachche lineage was formed; at the Mughal court, Sadarang composed khayal into existence, and tradition credits the hands of Sidhar Khan with the invention of the tabla; from the city’s kothas and shrines came the Delhi vocal and tabla gharanas. Delhi is where the temple stream, the dargah and the darbar audibly converge, and its repeated sackings, that of 1739 above all, are what scattered the art across the map of the gharanas.

Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar’s short-lived sandstone capital, built around the dargah of Sheikh Salim Chishti, is the synthesis frozen in architecture. Here the thirty-six musicians of the Ain-i-Akbari performed, and tradition places at the Anup Talao pavilion Tansen’s legendary performance of raga Deepak. A Chishti shrine at the centre of an imperial city, whose court music was led by a Brahmin-born dhrupadiya, embodies the whole argument of this study in a single complex.

The Later Capitals of Hindustani Music: Lucknow, Rampur and Lahore

Lucknow, the capital of Awadh, received the largest share of Delhi’s dispersed musicians and transmuted refinement into a civilization. The court of Wajid Ali Shah perfected thumri and kathak; the Lucknow tabla gharana grew out of dance accompaniment; and the tawaif salons became conservatories of the lighter classical arts. In the modern era, Bhatkhande planted his Marris College of 1926 in the same city, rendering Lucknow at once the last court capital and the first institutional one.

Rampur, the Rohilla court, became the conservatory of the nineteenth century: the refuge of the Senia lineage, whose Wazir Khan, teacher of Allauddin Khan, stands as the grandfather figure of modern instrumental music; the home of the Rampur-Sahaswan vocal gharana; and the keeper, in the Raza Library, of one of the great manuscript archives of Indian musicology. It was a small state with an outsized share of the tradition’s transmission.

Lahore, the metropolis of the Punjab, closes the circle. It is the city of the dargah of Data Ganj Bakhsh, the subcontinent’s oldest great Sufi shrine and a heartland of qawwali; of the Punjab tabla gharana’s modern forging under Miyan Qadir Bakhsh; and of Paluskar’s first Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, founded there in 1901, which means that the modern institutional movement began in Lahore, not in Bombay. After 1947 it became the capital of Pakistani classical music, home to the All Pakistan Music Conference, to the exiled rababi families, and to the Sham Chaurasia and Patiala houses in their new abode. Sacred geography, like the gharanas, was partitioned; and, like them, it kept singing on both sides.

The Southern Crucible of Khayal: Goa, Dharwad and Gadag

One further landscape must be added to the map, for no geography of Hindustani music can explain the twentieth century without it: the western Konkan-Karnataka belt, comprising Goa on the coast and the Dharwad and Gadag districts on the plateau above, which produced, from a few hundred square kilometres, an astonishing share of modern khayal’s legends. This is the tradition’s southern crucible, where three currents met: the temple, the border between the two classical systems, and the railway to Mumbai.

The temple towns of Goa, among them Mangeshi, Shantadurga and Mardol, maintained hereditary communities of temple-dedicated women performers, the kalavantins, together with the wider Gomantak performing communities, whose daughters were raised in music as a birthright of temple service. When the pressures of the Portuguese era and the pull of Bombay’s new concert economy drew these families out of Goa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their daughters conquered the highest classicism in the land: Anjanibai Malpekar of the Bhendibazaar gharana; Kesarbai Kerkar of Keri and Mogubai Kurdikar of Kurdi, the two greatest disciples of Alladiya Khan; and, in the succeeding generation, Mogubai’s daughter Kishori Amonkar. From the Mangeshi temple family came Dinanath Mangeshkar, and through him Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle, the very voices of Indian film. The devadasi-descended women’s tradition here nourished not the ‘light’ genres but the summit of khayal, a temple lineage of the west coast standing at the head of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana’s golden age.

On the plateau above, the Dharwad district became modern India’s most improbable factory of vocalists, ‘the singing district’, where the Carnatic south and the Hindustani north converge. Here the Haridasa devotional inheritance of Purandara Dasa, the father of Carnatic pedagogy and a saint of Karnataka, together with the Lingayat vachana tradition, had made congregational singing the very texture of daily life; and here, at Kundgol, Abdul Karim Khan’s greatest disciple, Sawai Gandharva, settled to teach. From that one teacher’s house came Gangubai Hangal of Dharwad-Hubli and Bhimsen Joshi; and around them the district raised Mallikarjun Mansur of Mansur village, jewel of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana, Basavraj Rajguru, and, in the neighbouring Belgaum district, Kumar Gandharva: five of twentieth-century khayal’s supreme names from one small corner of Karnataka. The Kirana gayaki of the worshipped swara, born in the old Saraswati country of the northwest, found its mass homeland here, a thousand miles to the south, among Kannada- and Marathi-speaking devotional publics: sacred geography’s proof that the tradition’s map is drawn by devotion and discipleship, not by language or region.

Adjoining Dharwad, the Gadag district contributes the tradition’s great institution of sacred charity: the Veereshwar Punyashram, founded by Panchakshara Gawai and led thereafter by his foremost disciple, Puttaraj Gawai (1914 to 2010), the blind saint-musician who trained thousands of students, many of them blind or destitute, in Hindustani and Carnatic music alike, entirely free of charge, within a Lingayat math. The gurukula ideal, the temple stream and the crossing of the two classical systems are embodied in this one ashram. Bhimsen Joshi’s own roots lie in this district, and the annual congregations at Gadag stand beside the Sawai Gandharva festival of Pune, founded by Bhimsen in his guru’s memory, as the living ritual calendar of the southern crucible.

An anecdote, that of the Ganga as guru, distils the whole. Asked in his youth where he had learned his music, Bismillah Khan is said to have pointed not only to his gurus, chief among them his uncle Ali Bux ‘Vilayatu’, shehnai player of the Balaji temple, but to the Ganga itself. For him, the dawn of Kashi was a single acoustic environment: temple bells, the azaan from the riverside mosques, the flowing water and shehnai practice upon the ghats, indistinguishable strands of one sound. In this documented recollection, the tradition names its true conservatory: not a court, not a school, but a sacred landscape heard whole at first light.

III. The Foundational Sanskrit Treatises on Indian Music

Four Sanskrit treatises anchor the theoretical lineage. The first is Bharata’s Natyashastra, of roughly 200 BCE to 200 CE, which, as noted above, established the shrutis, the gramas, the murchhanas, the jatis, tala and rasa. The second is the Dattilam of Dattila, roughly contemporary with, or slightly later than, the Natyashastra: a compact treatise on gandharva music that systematizes jati theory and confirms the continuity of the ancient framework.

The third, and the pivotal text, is the Brihaddeshi of Matanga, of approximately the eighth to ninth century CE. Matanga provides the first surviving definition and named treatment of raga, a melodic entity ‘that colours the mind of the listener’, and, crucially, legitimizes desi, the regional and living music, alongside the frozen margi tradition. The raga concept, the very heart of Hindustani music, is therefore documented from roughly the eighth century, well before any Central Asian contact.

The fourth is the Sangita Ratnakara of Sharngadeva, composed in the thirteenth century at the court of the Yadavas of Devagiri: the great summa of the unified Indian tradition, written on the eve of the Sultanate expansion into the Deccan. Its seven chapters codify svara, raga (with 264 ragas described), the prabandha forms, tala, instruments and dance. Both Hindustani and Carnatic theorists regard it as their common ancestor, and it is conventionally called the last major treatise of the undivided tradition.

IV. Early Medieval Music before the Sultanate: Prabandha and the Roots of Dhrupad

Between Matanga and Sharngadeva, the performing repertoire was dominated by prabandha, a family of sophisticated, sectionally structured compositions, with named limbs such as udgraha, melapaka, dhruva and abhoga, set in defined ragas and talas. The dhruva section, the fixed refrain, gave its name to the dhruvapada, literally ‘the fixed word or verse’, from which dhrupad derives both etymologically and formally. Scholarly consensus holds that dhrupad is the direct descendant of prabandha song, vernacularized into Brajbhasha and devotionalized within the temple culture of the Gangetic plain and the Gwalior region.

The devotional bhakti movements supplied both texts and performing occasions: Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda of the twelfth century, with its ashtapadis prescribed for named ragas; the haveli sangit of the Vallabhite Krishna temples; and the pada literature of the saint-composers, which dhrupad singers carried into the courts. Raga classification in this period proceeded upon the raga-ragini system, in which ragas were personified, gendered and grouped into families of six ragas with five or six raginis each: a poetic and iconographic scheme, later painted in the ragamala miniatures, rather than a logic of scales. All of this was in place before 1192: the melodic system, the compositional forms and the devotional performing culture that the synthesis of the Sultanate era would inherit.

Conclusion: Why the History of Hindustani Classical Music Begins with the Land

The history of Hindustani classical music, viewed from its wellsprings, is therefore neither a courtly invention nor a foreign graft, but the flowering of a liturgical and geographical inheritance of extraordinary antiquity. From the pitch accents of Rigvedic recitation and the melodic chant of the Samaveda descended the seven notes, the solmization and the conviction that sound is worship; from Bharata, Dattila, Matanga and Sharngadeva descended the theoretical architecture of shruti, grama, jati, raga and tala; and from the sacred landscape itself, from Kashi and Kurukshetra, from Braj and Gwalior, from the dargahs of Ajmer and Delhi to the temple towns of Goa and the singing districts of Karnataka, descended the living forms, lineages and gharanas of the art. The dual ecology of temple and court, and the portability of sacred geography wherever devotion and discipleship travelled, remain the deepest structural truths of the tradition; and when Bismillah Khan named the Ganga at dawn as his conservatory, he spoke for a music whose first and final teacher has always been the sacred land heard whole.

Mufaddal Idris Khumri