Ragas and Raginis: A Pictorial and Iconographic Study of Indian Musical Modes Based on Original Sources c10.217

c10.217

The large body of rāga-mālā texts in Hindī, a fraction of which we have been able to consider here, came into existence in answer to a demand to popularise the currency of the melodies in accurate presentation of their distinctive emotive values, for, they have been used in intimate application to the pictorial illustrations, the pictures justifying the texts as much as the texts justified the pictures, both contributing to an accurate knowledge of the different emotional significances of the different, though sometimes, related melodies. As compared with the brief and miniature forms of the Sanskrit prototypes, the Hindī descriptive texts are not confined to essential iconographic lineaments of the images suggested in the Sanskrit prayer formulas (*dhyāna-ślokas*), but in their popular Hindī versions, these original musical images are each amplified and elaborated in an emotional situation, in an appropriate dramatic form which makes it easier to apprehend their inherent emotive concepts. This may be typically illustrated by comparing the Sanskrit dhyāna and the corresponding Hindī version of the Lalita rāginī (plate XXXVI) in the meagre Sanskrit texts, there is hardly room for anything but a suggestion that the lady, carrying a wreath as a memento of her dalliance over-night heaves heavy sighs (“*viniśvasantī sahasā prabhāte*”), when with the sun-rise her beloved walks out of the love-chamber to attend to the duties of the day. In the Hindī version,—the germ of this idea is elaborated into a dramatic device—in which the forlorn lover left alone in her couch when the sun is up, is plunged in grief ("Ugata Bhānu cale navakānta tāvai tiya dekhi viyogame bhīnhī"). Unable to detain her lover by any plausible excuse She tries to pick up a lover's quarrel, unreasonably taunting him with the false charge that he is going to another lover, whom he loves. And the poet, in order to elucidate the state of the feeling of the lovers parted at day-break, (the appropriate hour for singing the melody), introduces this clever dialogue with remarkable dramatic effect. All this elaboration is implied but not actually suggested in the Sanskrit text, and naturally grows out of the seeds imbedded in the essence of the emotional idea connotated by the melody of Lalita rāginī. Other examples of such happy dramatization of the essential emotive concept, in charmingly picturesque situations of profound feelings of diverse flavours and shades, are strewn over the numerous Hindī texts quoted on the Plates (in Volume II) which the reader may find out for himself.