Ragas and Raginis: A Pictorial and Iconographic Study of Indian Musical Modes Based on Original Sources c6.344

c6.344

A pretentious treatise compiled during the early part of the 19th century, and printed in 1842 we owe to a musical expert Kṛṣṇānanda Vyāsa, a Gauḍa Brahmin from a village in Udaipur. It is an encyclopædia in Sanskrit of songs collected from different parts of India and published under the title Saṅgīta-rāga-kalpadruma.¹ It also deals with dancing and drumming and rhythm. It is hardly an original contribution to music and merely summarises the works of previous text-writers. In the section on rāgas the author follows the *Sangīta-darpaṇa* basing his classification on the School of Hanumān. He describes the 36 melodies and quotes the prayer-formulas as cited in the *Sangīta-darpaṇa*. As an anthology of old songs, both in Hindi and Persian, which are collected under different melodies, the work is of great value, the materials having been collected during a period of 32 years, from a wide field of researches.