The music of India

The best way to look at India and its timeless inheritance is to experience it. Words are insufficient to describe the ineffable quality of India. But essence of India can be felt through its music that refines the mind, soothes the spirit and penetrates the soul. For the raga alone affirms for Indian ethos those primary paradigms on which ancient India had first defined the nature of man and his place in the Universe of which he is an inseparable part.

Indian music was never written at any time in its history. It was always an oral art. Those who wrote about it in the olden days communicated its essential otherness, underlining the truth that the music of India was totally incommensurate with other branches of learning and experience. In fact, any scientific study of Indian music or any attempt to explain it in modern scientific terms becomes an explanation of the physics of sound and the theory of vibrations.

Excavations in the ten thousand year old Indus Valley Civilization in the Indus Valley in western India have turned up evidence of the flute, the drum and other types of stringed instruments. This reinforces the universal belief that Indian classical music is one of the most ancient types still surviving. It has of course evolved over the centuries but its basic elements remain unchanged. As the great Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar has said: "Music, the greatest art of my country has the unique quality of appealing directly to the hearts and minds of men, Indian music, especially, has this quality in abundance for it is rooted in nature itself".

By about 600 BC (if not earlier), Sanskrit, the oldest known member of the Indo-European group of languages had become firmly established as the sacred and literary language of India. It was at this time that the great Indian philosopher Panini wrote the world's first book on grammar and prosody. The book makes is quite clear that the allied arts of music, dance and drama had reached a very sophisticated level in India, higher than anywhere else in the word.

India's greatest writer on the arts, the sage Bharata wrote the Natya Shastra, regarded as a scared book and sometimes referred to as the fifth Veda. It was, and still is, the most important work on Indian aesthetics and covers music, dance, drama and criticism.

Apart from religious music and art music, folk music was always a part of the day to day life of the common man. There were troupes of travelling musicians, dancers, and story-tellers who, apart from performing their vital function of entertainment and instruction, kept open the lines of cultural communication between one part of the country and another. India's national epic, the Mahabharata, has frequent references to music and dance.

To listen to a selection of Indian classical and popular music and songs click here and here.