Ragas and Raginis: A Pictorial and Iconographic Study of Indian Musical Modes Based on Original Sources c11.11

c11.11

“Wherever Kunāla went, the citizens of Pāṭaliputra followed like deer attracted by music.” “They pricked up their ears to hear his words, like deer anxious to listen to music.” These poetic conventions have also their practical application in the methods employed to capture gazelles which is described by Alberuni: “I myself have witnessed that in hunting gazelles they had caught them with the hand. One Hindu even went so far as to assert that he, without catching gazelles, would drive it before him and lead it straight into the kitchen. This however, rests, as I believe I have found out, simply on the device of slowly and constantly accustoming the animals to one and the same melody. Our people, too, practise the same when hunting the ibex, which is more wild than even the gazelle. When they see the animals resting, they begin to walk-round them in a circle, singing one and the same melody so long until the animals are accustomed to it. Then they make the circle more and more narrow, till at last they come near enough to shoot at the animals which lie there in the perfect rest.”¹