Page 154 - Eye of the beholder

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RAGAMALAS
“The six major melodies or ragas and thirty six minor melodies or raginis with their beautiful bodies emanated from the Abode of Brahma, the transcendental being and sings hymns in honour of Brahma himself”. Narada, Pancama Sara Samhita, 1440 C.E. O.C. Gangoly
Ancient Indian scriptures refer to the origin of music as divine phenomenon, with all the three deities of Hindu triad, Brahma, Vishnu and Siva being the primordial musicians. The conception of ragas and raginis was the basic principles of Indian music and they have no parallel in any other musical tradition. In its literary connotation, a raga would mean ‘something that colours or tinges the mind’ with some definite feeling, an influx of passion or aesthetic experience the rasa. The colouring caused by a raga is associated to certain spatiotemporal context and is bound to differ. That is a raga experience would change from dawn to dusk, from sunny afternoon to a moonlit night, from spring to autumn and so forth. On the basis of this, ragas and raginis were associated with particular moods and regions, with particular seasons and categorically, to the explicit hours of the day and night. A raga is not a song or tune; on the other hand numerous songs can be composed in certain raga mould.
The attempt to visualize what is audible gave birth to the concept of Ragamala, which literally translates as a ‘garland of ragas’. The trend of Ragamala paintings can be traced back to the 5th century text the Narada Shiksha, which explores the relationship between sound and emotion. Between 16th to the 19th century, this trend became popular in different courts of India across Rajasthan, Central India, Deccan and the Pahari region.
Ragamala paintings illustrated poetry or musical sentiments through representing specific human circumstances. Each painting thus showed a dramatic situation, though the theme that cuts across most Ragamalas and its unifying subject is nevertheless love. As a form of Indian miniature painting, it depicts a supreme amalgamation of art, poetry and classical music in medieval India. In these painting each raga is personified by a colour, mood, a verse describing a story of a hero and heroine or nayak and nayika, and also elucidates the season and the time of day and night in which a particular raga is to be sung. It also has the representation of specific Hindu deities attached with the raga, like Bhairava or Bhairavi to Shiva, Sri to Devi among others. The paintings depict not just the ragas but also their wives, raginis, their numerous sons or the ragaputra and daughters the ragaputri. The six principal ragas present in the Ragamala are Bhairava, Dipak, Sri, Malkhaus, Megha and Hindola and these are meant to be sung during the six seasons of the year – summer, monsoon, autumn, early winter, winter and spring. Each raga or ragini is based on an emotional situation reflecting a particular mood of love, either in union or separation. The paintings of raga are a visual representation of a particular state of mind, by treating the material world and nature as a mirror of any given mood.
Rasa became an inherent feature of the ragas, the specific modes of Indian music. The concept of “rasa” or aesthetic experience is one of the key concepts of Indian aesthetics and was initially associated with the sphere of theatrical reflection and the theory of painting - “Natyashastra” and “Chitrasutra” treatises respectively. Subsequently, through the efforts of a number of theorists, rasa became one of the key categories of Indian poetics. It is assumed that each raga has its own particular rasa. The word “Ragamala” in its narrow sense means