The Music of Hindostan c11.201

c11.201

But secondly, each group consists of an average of seven *Rāgs* (out of a total of sixty-three; out of a total of 500, an average of fifty or sixty). And a *Rāg* gets its special flavour not so much from its being just what it is, as from its not being something else, closely allied to it, which is present all the time in the musician's consciousness. Any one can hear the difference between, say, *Jhinjoti* and *Bhairav*; but the more of a musician a man is the more he can hear and enjoy the subtler distinction between, for instance, *Jhinjoti* and *Desh*, or the still subtler between *Jhinjoti* and *Tilang*. It might appear that as a given *Rāg* is taken so differently (see Nos. 27–9, 46) in different parts of the country these distinctions do not much matter; but it must be remembered that the distinctions are accurately adhered to in any one district, or by any particular school; and that it is of no use to test the songs of Bengal, for instance, by the system of Gujarāt. And some of these characteristics are so strikingly beautiful as not easily to be missed, or to be forgotten, even by a foreigner: the strong legato from F♯ to E in *Imankaliān*, for instance, or the pentatonic suggestion of *Behāg*, or the plaintive alternation of the two B’s in *Khamāj*, or the of the two E’s in *Kāfi*, or the old-world sound of the scale of *Kānaḍā*.