Hindustani Classical Music as a Path to Spiritual Goals in India

The centerpiece of Hinduism, the dominant religion of India, is the transmigration of the soul-that is, the passage of the soul from one body to another after death-as determined by the force, called karma, of one's actions in life. Liberation-that is, release from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth-can be achieved by working out karmic residues.

Throughout all forms of Hinduism, sound (including its heightened form, music) plays an important role in the quest for liberation. Sound comes in two forms. That which is heard is "struck" or "manifested" sound. But it cannot exist without its ideal counterpart, "unstruck" or "unmanifested" sound.

Unmanifested sound is identical with Brahman (the creative principle of the universe and the ultimate ground of all being) and is immanent as a divine sonic presence in every human. Each individual must find a way to realize the connection between manifested sound and the sacred unmanifested sound within, thus coming into direct contact with Brahman and achieving the goal of liberation.

One means to that end is music. "The right kind of music...serves to break the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth." (Bake, 196)

Hindustani Music: Basic Elements
To attain spiritual goals, Hindus utilize not only the mystical chanting of Yoga (a religious-philosophical system) but also vocal and instrumental music ostensibly performed for artistic or entertainment purposes. Such music-in essence, all music-is regarded as a form of Yoga. Indian classical music is based on the premise that it is an aspect of, and an approach to, sonic Brahman.

Music traditions in India are broadly separated into the northern Hindustani style and the southern Karnatak (or Carnatic) style. The style familiar to most Western listeners is the Hindustani, which is the basis for the following overview.

The Hindustani system consists of three main elements: ragas, drones, and talas.

A raga is not a scale in the Western sense but rather a melodic framework-an abstract, tonally centered group of pitches, usually outlining a series of melodic motives within a scale, whose principal tone, or home base, is called the sa. Sanskrit raga means "color," hence the use of the word to identify a set of tones of a distinctive melodic character. Long or short, a raga is a kind of map followed by a musician during a performance.

Ragas have many extramusical associations. Magic powers-such as creating fire and rain, curing diseases, and melting stones-have been attributed to some ragas. Different ragas are associated with different moods, hours, seasons, zodiacal signs, planets, colors, voices of birds, periods of human life, and so on. Some ragas are believed to personify various gods.

A raga melody, whether performed vocally or instrumentally, is accompanied by a drone, a recurrent sounding, typically, of four tones (usually strummed by a string instrument): a lower tonic (the sa), another important tone of the raga (often the fourth or fifth degree above the sa), and two upper tonics. The constant presence of the drone makes it possible to hear and understand the individual relationship between the sa and each of the other tones of the raga melody.

The rhythmic element in raga music is governed by the concept of tala (Sanskrit, "hand clapping"). The term refers both to the system of rhythm as a whole and to any one of numerous specific metric cycles. A tala is a group of beats-anywhere from 3 to 128, usually 7 to 16-repeated over and over. The strongest beat is the first. Within the group are secondary stresses forming subdivisions of beats. For example, a tala of 10 beats may be subdivided as 2+3+2+3, as 7+1+2, or as some other combination. When the tala is repeated-often more than a hundred times in a single performance-so, too, are the same secondary stresses.

Hindustani Music: Performance Practices
Hindustani classical music consists of many different well-established genres, or traditional ways of developing the basic raga-tala material. Musicians utilize both preplanning and improvisation in performances.

Since ancient times vocal music, because of its association with the sonic Brahman within, has been the most important type of music in India. The singer is usually accompanied by one or more instruments.

It was only in the late twentieth century that purely instrumental music became widely popular. Melody instruments, which expose and develop the ragas, include the sitar, a long-necked lute with three to seven (usually five) plucked strings plus about a dozen thin sympathetic strings; the sarod, a short-necked lute with six main strings plus sympathetic strings; the shahnai (or sahnai), a double-reed wind instrument; and the sarangi, a bowed string instrument. The drone is usually played on the strummed tambura (or tamboura), a long-necked lute with four strings tuned to the basic tones of the raga. The tala is maintained by drums, most commonly the tabla, a pair of small hand-played drums.

Even among modern professional concert musicians, performing music is still traditionally regarded as a spiritual practice. Both vocalists and instrumentalists believe that the ultimate source of their musicianship is the sacred sound, nada (Brahman conceived as unmanifested sound), deep within themselves. Many musicians, besides entertaining others, consciously perform with the goal of achieving spiritual liberation or salvation. The musician "is on a very personal spiritual path, in which the ragas are the mantras, the sacred formulae of meditation." Careful listeners, too, may follow that path, with the musician serving as a kind of priest revealing sacred literature. (Ruckert and Widdess, 70)

The great Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar expressed this idea in theistic terms. Music, he wrote in his autobiography, is "a kind of spiritual discipline that raises one's inner being to divine peacefulness and bliss....The highest aim of our music is to reveal the essence of the universe it reflects, and the ragas are among the means by which this essence can be apprehended. Thus, through music, one can reach God." (Shankar, 17)

Hindustani Music: Symbolism
The three elements of Hindustani music-the raga, the drone, and the tala-combine to symbolize various levels in the quest for, and the attainment of, mystical union with ultimate reality.

Even the seemingly simple process of tuning instruments has its symbolic meaning. Indian musicians spend a great deal of time tuning their instruments not only before but also during a performance. Tuning symbolizes the musicians' becoming attuned with the raga, which is "regarded as a vehicle for sacred exploration and realization." (Ruckert and Widdess, 81)

The goal of union with ultimate reality is symbolized at the beginning of each repetition of the tala. At that point the melodic and rhythmic strands come together-the soloist playing or singing an important tone of the raga while the drummer accents the first beat of the tala-in a concentrated act of liberation from the stored up musical tension.

The mystical quest is also symbolized by the interaction between the raga-tala foreground and the drone background. The raga is tonal space; the tala is tonal time. Each tone of the raga can, at certain points, explode into a whirling mass of extended tonal meditations or emanations, like "galaxies of sound in progression." (Holroyde, 46)

The apparent chaos and multiplicity in the raga-tala foreground symbolize the apparent chaos and multiplicity in the world. But the ultimate reality underlying the illusory space and time of the world is a spaceless and timeless unity, Brahman.

In raga music the spaceless, timeless ground of all things is symbolized by the drone, which is melodically and rhythmically static. As Brahman (the creative energy of the universe) is the origin of all things, so the drone (the sa, or tonic) is the origin, or generating pitch, of the raga music. And as the goal of the Hindu quest is union with, or the realization of, Brahman, so the goal of the complex raga-tala foreground music is union with the underlying drone, or tonic, to which the music always returns.

Raga music is performed in a spirit of detachment, the players' duty being not to express themselves but to reveal the spiritual truths of the raga. Brahman is the immanent Unity in all things, and life is a conglomeration of moods and aspects that are merely different forms of the detached Unity. Thus, raga music, like Yoga, aims to carry the listeners' attention from the multiplicity of the sensory world to the unity of the supersensory plane.

Prolonged concentration on the details of the "galaxies of sound" leads to hypnotic introspection and objectification. Players and listeners are led away from themselves and into identification with the source of the creative energy in which they are interflowing-sonic Brahman.

Musicomystical Cosmos
Uniquely among the higher civilizations, India created-and still maintains-a music system that is probably the one most thoroughly imbued with a musicomystical conception of the cosmos and of the ultimate reality underlying it.

The basic premise is that Brahman, the supreme essence and creative principle of the universe, is pure sound. The manifest universe, including each human, is a streaming forth of awakening sound that takes the form of "dancing" (vibrating) matter. As each human body is part of the continuum of all matter, so each human soul is an emanation of the universal divine spirit.

Therefore, the individual soul, called Atman (the ultimate as discovered introspectively), is identical with the universal essence of soul, Brahman (the ultimate as discovered objectively). "Endless change without, and at the heart of the change an abiding reality-Brahman. Endless change within, and at the heart of the change an abiding reality-Atman....Brahman and Atman are one and the same." (Prabhavananda, 55)

The Hindu's ultimate goal is to break the cycle of existence (birth-death-rebirth) by reabsorbing the individual soul (Atman) into the sonic sea of divinity (Brahman) whence it came. The goal is achieved when the seeker reaches the supreme state of consciousness, realizes the truth about the identity of the soul and the Absolute, and becomes one with Brahman.

This spiritual epiphany is conceived of sometimes as a state of knowledge (not intellectual knowledge but "an immediate, direct illumination in one's own soul" of the Atman and Brahman) and sometimes as a state of liberation (freedom not only from imperfections and limitations but also from the cycle of existence). (Prabhavananda, 61-62, 245)

At the heart of this spiritual quest lies sound and its heightened form, music. By using a devotional approach to Hindustani classical music, humans can discover the divine unmanifested sound (Brahman) that vibrates within themselves and can thus become mystically reabsorbed into the music of the universe.
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