Ragas and Raginis: A Pictorial and Iconographic Study of Indian Musical Modes Based on Original Sources c9.18

c9.18

supposed to kill, or slaughter it. A perfect mastery of the technique is necessary to call up the picture in all its characteristic outlines, features, and limbs, its shades, and colour-schemes. An indifferent technician is apt to distort the features and limbs of the deities of the melodies. This is well illustrated in the legend of Nārada, the great mythic interpreter of Indian music. During his early practices of the science, when Kṛṣṇa wished to convince him that the former's musical practices had not yet given him the necessary technical perfection, Nārada was taken to a celestial region where he found several wounded nymphs and angels, weeping in great misery, for, their limbs had been distorted and mangled. When Nārada enquired of the reason of the pitiable plight of the nymphs,—he was informed that they were the melodies (rāgas and rāgiṇīs) whose limbs have been broken by Nārada's unskilful attempt to render their true and accurate forms, in the course of his clumsy practices. The suggestion was that if one desires to invoke the spirit of the rāgiṇīs to descend from their celestial abode and live in their physical sound-forms, the latter must be delineated with loving tenderness, scrupulous care, reverence, and devotion,—with all the accuracy of technical performance, as well as of spiritual vision. As the Kinnara (fairy) in one of the old tales of the Jātakas says: "To sing ill is a crime."