Udaya

Hindustani music

हिन्दुस्तानी संगीत हिन्दुस्तानी सङ्गीत

Also North Indian classical music, Shastriya sangeet.

Music North India

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What it is#

Hindustani music is the classical music of north India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the difference from Carnatic is mostly one of proportion: where a Carnatic concert sets out compositions and improvises around them, a Hindustani one takes a single raga and unfolds it over an hour or more, with the composition arriving late and briefly. It absorbed Persian and Central Asian elements from the thirteenth century onward and its great lineages are as often Muslim as Hindu. The khayal is its main vocal form and the dhrupad its older and austerer one.

How it is built#

A performance opens with alap, free of rhythm, in which the raga is laid out note by note at length and the tanpura is the only accompaniment. Jod and jhala follow on instruments, pulse arriving without a tala. Then the composition, the bandish, enters with the tabla, in a tala of a set number of beats, and the improvisation builds through bol baant, taans and layakari until the fast section. A raga is assigned a time of day or a season and is traditionally not sung outside it, which is stricter than the Carnatic convention. The thaat system of ten parent scales organises the ragas.

How it is learnt#

The question a family actually has

The talim is given by a guru, traditionally with the student living in the house, and progress is measured in years rather than pieces: a student may be given one raga for months. Sargam and the voice exercises come first, then a few bandishes, then the slow building of improvisation. Ten to fifteen years before a public concert is normal and is not considered long. A tabla student learns the bols spoken before played, as in Carnatic, and the hand positions are drilled for years.

Whose lineage is whose#

Where a claim is contested, by whom

The gharana is the organising unit: a named school with a place, a founder and a characteristic approach. Gwalior is the oldest khayal gharana; Kirana is known for slow elaboration and purity of note; Jaipur Atrauli for complex ragas and rhythmic intricacy; Agra for forceful delivery; Patiala for ornament. In instrumental music the Maihar gharana of Allauddin Khan produced Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. Gharana claims are matters of pride and are sometimes disputed, and the system itself is argued over, with some musicians holding that recordings and conservatories have made it a label rather than a living distinction.

Worth knowing#

Ragas have hours

Bhairav belongs to dawn, Bhimpalasi to the early afternoon, Yaman to the early evening, Darbari to late night, and a musician asked to sing a morning raga at night will usually decline or will explain why he is making an exception. The convention is taken seriously in Hindustani music and only loosely in Carnatic. Explanations offered range from the physiological to the acoustic to the simply traditional, and no musician needs one: the association is learnt with the raga and is part of what the raga is.

The tanpura behind everything

A Hindustani performance rests on a drone of four or five strings tuned to the tonic and the fifth, played continuously and never varying, and the whole of the music is heard against it. Players speak of the tanpura as providing not a note but a field, with the overtones of the strings supplying the harmonic context the melody moves in. It is the reason a raga sung without it sounds thin to a trained ear, and the reason the first thing done in a concert hall, before anything else, is tuning it.

Where the regions differ#

  • Tamil
  • Kerala
  • Telugu
  • Kannada
  • North
  • Maharashtra
  • Bengal
  • Punjab
  • Assam
  • Sri Lanka
  • Nepal
  • Gujarat
  • Odisha
  • Mithila
  • Kashmir
  • Tulu Nadu
  • manipur
  • rajasthan
  • konkani
  • sindhi
  • jharkhand
  • himalayan
  • kodava
Where it is kept: 5 of the 23 traditions this app follows. The filled one is where it is from.
North India
The gharanas of Gwalior, Kirana, Jaipur Atrauli, Agra and Patiala, and the great winter concert seasons of Pune, Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata.
Maharashtra
Pune and Mumbai are the centre of the concert world, with the Sawai Gandharva festival the largest of its kind.
Bengal
Kolkata holds the Dover Lane conference and a long tradition in the Maihar and Senia lines.
Punjab
The Patiala gharana and the qawwali and gurmat sangeet traditions share much of their ground.
Kashmir
Sufiana mausiqi is the Kashmiri court tradition and uses a related but distinct set of maqams and instruments.

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