The Music of Hindostan c8.s1.4

c8.s1.4

With Nārada, the *Rishi* who first ‘heard’ the laws of music, are associated Tumburu, the first singer, and Bharata, the first to draw up rules for the drama, of which music formed a large part. Of Tumburu it is said that he increased the scale in which the *Sāma-veda* was chanted from five notes to six or seven. The treatise which purports to record the doctrines of Nārada, the *Nāradaśikṣā*, is probably of late date¹ and gives no clue whatever to the achievement of the Nārada of legend. The treatise which bears the name of Bharata, the *Nāṭyaśāstra*, is similarly an eponym. One or other of these three names appears probably in every book on music that has been written, and the existence of the authors is held, though in complete absence of any specific doctrine attributed to them, as a pious belief; the belief is equal to that which the Greeks professed in Olympos and Thamyris, the latter of whom some greatly daring philologist has connected with Tumburu, and the piety is something more than that which we accord to Jubal. The locus classicus for this posthumous fame is in Daṇḍin’s Mṛcchakaṭikā (sixth century A. D.), where a servant says: