Ragas and Raginis: A Pictorial and Iconographic Study of Indian Musical Modes Based on Original Sources c11.2

c11.2

Materials are not adequate for a demonstration of the processes by which familiar scenes and experiences in life were adopted and developed and utilized into patterns and designs for visualizing the Indian melodies. But one, or two suggestions may be made how characteristic scenes and themes may have been worked out and idealized into a pattern for a rāgiṇī picture. The three examples of Kānaḍā rāgiṇī cited on Plate L, seem to indicate the three stages in which, a hunting melody, originally used by attendant Shikāris (hunters) helping a Prince in his elephant-hunts, later developed into the rich but plaintive strain of the melody now recognized under the name of Kānaḍā. Possibly, when the prince killed an elephant, the attendants stood up to salute the hunter and broke into congratulatory cheers, in some crude minstrel-songs (cāraṇagītis), in which the plaintive groans of the dying animal mingled its deeply moving notes of sorrow, which perhaps still linger in its refined, finished, and developed structure, now known to us. In the final ‘picture’ that it evolved, it obliterated all traces of its origin, and in this developed picture (Plate L-A) it is interpreted as a song of inspiration to Kṛṣṇa (Kānar= Kānorā) as He starts to ride out from His palace to kill the demon gajāsura.¹ The sources of the pictorial motifs have been forgotten, defaced, or obliterated in most cases. But we shall endeavour to indicate the origins of the motif woven into the theme of the Toḍī rāgiṇī. Possibly, the melody came originally from the peasants' field. Very probably, it was a melody sung by the wife, or daughter of the peasant who watched the paddy fields, (as they still do today, from sunrise to sunset; perched on a bamboo frame), chiding away the deer, and other animals which strayed into the fields, in groups, to eat up the standing crop, before it was ready to be shorn. Perhaps, the farmer's daughter, weaned away the encroaching depredator, by the music of her primitive lute, which attracted the deer, and kept them away from mischief. Some such picture, is called up by many stray passages in ancient poetical literature. We seem to have vivid pen-pictures of deer dropping the food they were chewing in the crop-fields in their depredatory raids, under the enchanting strains of music. Thus in Śrī-Harṣ's “Nāgānandam,” in the dialogue of Ātreya and Jīmūtavāhana