Hindustani and Carnatic: two systems, one grammar

A Carnatic vocalist and a Hindustani vocalist can sit in the same room and agree on almost all of the theory. Both work with raga: a melodic framework with an ascending and a descending path, characteristic phrases, a hierarchy among its notes. Both work with tala: a cycle of beats, not a bar of beats, which repeats and against which the melody is placed. Both inherit the same twenty-two-fold division of the octave, the same seven note-names, the same assumption that a performance is largely improvised inside a fixed frame.

Then one of them opens his mouth and the other cannot follow. The language is different, the ornament is different, the shape of a phrase is different, and the instruments on the stage are different. That gap is the thing worth explaining, and the explanation is not musical. It is a story about which courts were paying, in what language, between the thirteenth century and the eighteenth.

One treatise, before the border

The common ancestor is textual. Sarangadeva's Sangita Ratnakara, compiled in the thirteenth century, is a systematic account of melody, rhythm, instrument and performance, and both modern traditions treat it as authoritative — the south cites it directly, the north through a chain of Persian and vernacular commentaries. A thirteenth-century treatise that both sides claim is the clearest possible evidence that the split is later than the theory.

What happened after that treatise is political. From 1206 northern India was ruled from Delhi by dynasties whose court language was Persian, whose musicians came from Central Asia and Afghanistan, and whose devotional music included the Sufi qawwali. New instruments arrived with the new patrons: the rebab and the kamancheh, which are the ancestors of the sarangi; the settlers' long-necked lutes, which are somewhere behind the sitar. Persian poetic forms — the ghazal above all — became the standard vehicle for sung text.

The peninsula did not have that experience. The Vijayanagara empire, from 1336, and after its collapse the Nayaka and Maratha courts of Thanjavur, patronised music in Telugu, Kannada, Tamil and Sanskrit. The repertoire that resulted is song-shaped: a composed text with a fixed melody, elaborately ornamented, and the musician's art lies in the quality of the rendering.

What each side did with the same material

Hindustani music after the sixteenth century is organised around elaboration. A performer states a raga slowly, without a fixed composition, in the opening alap; then a composition enters; then the tempo increases and the improvisation becomes rhythmic. The audience's attention is on how far the raga can be taken, which is why a single item can occupy forty minutes and why the great recorded performances of the twentieth century are long.

Carnatic music is organised around the composition. The kriti fixes text, melody and structure, and the performer's freedom sits inside it and between items — in the neraval, where a single line of text is re-elaborated, and in the ragam-tanam-pallavi, the one movement built for extended improvisation. Because the repertoire is composed and dated, it can be taught as a corpus, listed, graded and examined — which is exactly what happened.

The pedagogies follow. Carnatic teaching begins with sarali varisai: graded exercises in ascending and descending scale patterns, sung to solfa syllables, the same way a Western student begins with scales. The system is attributed to Purandara Dasa in the sixteenth century and is still in use, essentially unchanged, in every beginner's first year. Hindustani teaching has no such ladder. It proceeds by imitation inside a gharana — a lineage with a stylistic signature, a family or a teacher's house — and the student absorbs a way of singing before he can name what it is.

The twentieth century rebuilt both

Both systems lost their courts in the same generation. The princely states were absorbed after 1947, and the court musician — salaried, resident, expected to perform on demand — ceased to exist as a role. What replaced the court was, on the northern side, All India Radio, founded in 1936 and for three decades the largest single employer of Hindustani musicians in the country; and, on the southern side, the sabha: a subscription organisation that rents a hall, sells tickets to its members, and runs a season.

The Music Academy in Madras, founded in 1928, is the model. Its annual conference grew into the December season, which now runs for several weeks across dozens of halls and something on the order of a thousand performances. That is a peculiar institution: an urban middle-class subscription concert series, organised on the calendar of a religious festival, canonising a repertoire that had been assembled in a court three hundred kilometres south.

Which returns to the pillar's question. Neither system is a survival of an ancient whole. Both are nineteenth- and twentieth-century reconstructions of a practice that was, in 1800, somebody's job at somebody's court — and the reason they look so different from each other is that they were reconstructed by different kinds of institution, in different cities, for different audiences, from the same theoretical materials.

This is entry 03 of Arts & Performance in About India. The next entry goes inside the frame both systems share: what a raga actually is, what a tala actually is, and why neither of them is what a Western listener assumes.