The Music of Hindostan c15.28

c15.28

The body of hymns is divided into two sections, which may be centuries apart—the early, according to the latest authority,¹ the *Uttarārcika*, and the late, the *Pūrvārcika*. The early hymns are divided into (1) the ‘investigated’ (*Ūha*), and (2) those which are ‘to be investigated’ (*Ūhya*) or which are ‘secret’ (*Rahasya*). The later hymns are in three divisions, addressed to Fire (*Agni*), the Rain-god (*Indra*), and Soma *Pavamāna*.² These are arranged internally according to their metres, and according to the ‘jubilations’ (*stobha*) and the doxologies (the parts of the hymn which are genuine *Sāman*). Only seventy-five verses, out of many hundreds, are not borrowed from the *Ṛgveda* or other source; such borrowings are known technically as *yoni* (womb). A distinction is also made between those verses of the *Ṛgveda* which have one melody (*eka-sāmi*) or many (*bahusāmi*), showing that *Sāman* is, properly speaking, music, not music and words, nor words for music. In fact the conception is the reverse of ours. We speak of setting words, that is, putting music to them; but the *Sāman* is a melody for which words were found (chiefly in the *Ṛgveda*). This is the case too with modern poets; Rabindranath Tagore says that when the general idea of the poem comes into his mind, he first thinks of the melody (generally his own) and then writes words to it. We are reminded of Burns’s two manful attempts to find words for that ‘crinkum-crankum tune, Robin Adair’, with its ‘cursed, cramp, out of the way measure’, and of his better success with Duncan Gray, ‘in Scots verse’.