Indian classical music: an introduction

If you have arrived here after hearing something you could not name — a long unaccompanied opening on a sitar, a voice circling one note for minutes at a time, a drum pattern that keeps landing back on the same point — this page is a map. It will not make you an expert. It should make the next concert legible.

One caution before anything else. "Indian classical music" does not mean all the music of India. India has enormous folk, devotional and film traditions, and several regional art musics that stand outside the classical systems entirely. The Metropolitan Museum's survey of the subcontinent's instruments puts it plainly: the classical field is usually divided into two major traditions, Hindustani music in the north and Karnatak (Carnatic) music in the south, while many regions also hold musical traditions independent of both.

This archive's own coverage is strongest on Hindustani music. We say so on our About page, and you will see it in the balance of our musician profiles. Where this guide describes Carnatic practice, it is describing something we document less well, not something we cover equally.

Two traditions, one framework

North and south share a basic architecture. Melody is organised by raga; time is organised by tala; and within both, the musician improvises. The Met attributes much of the divergence between the two systems to the far heavier Persian influence in the north from the late twelfth century onward, which did not reach the south to the same degree. Instrument names carry that history: sitar comes from the Persian setar, and the santoor became popular in Kashmir through the same channels of contact.

Raga is not a scale

This is the single most common misunderstanding, and the writer Jameela Siddiqi meets it head on for Darbar: a raga "is not a musical scale, a mode or even a tune, but it definitely encompasses all three elements". The word descends from the Sanskrit rang, colour — that which colours the mind with a particular feeling.

What a raga actually specifies is more detailed than a scale. It fixes which notes ascend and which descend (aroha and avaroh). It weights notes unequally, with a vadi, the "king note", and a samvadi, the "queen note". And it carries a chalan, a set of characteristic melodic movements, which is what lets two ragas built from the same handful of notes remain entirely different ragas.

Ragas are traditionally assigned to a time of day or night, the prahar. Treat this as tradition rather than law: Darbar's own explainer qualifies the association, and modern concert scheduling frequently overrides it.

Tala is a cycle, not a bar

Tala organises time in cycles rather than in the linear bars of Western notation. Common north Indian cycles run to sixteen beats (tintal), twelve (ektal), ten (jhaptal), seven (rupak) and fourteen (dhamar, jhoomra, deepchandi).

Two ideas make a cycle audible. Sam is the point of return, and it is counter-intuitive for newcomers because it is the first beat of the next cycle, not the last beat of the current one. Khali, meaning empty, marks a low point in the cycle, shown by a wave of the hand rather than a clap. The spoken drum syllables are called bol in the north and solkattu in Carnatic music.

If you want to hear this properly once, our guide to listening to a tabla solo takes a full recital apart in order.

The shape of a concert

A Hindustani instrumental recital typically opens with alap: unmetered, no percussion, the musician laying out the raga. It moves through jor, where a pulse emerges, into jhalla, marked by fast rhythmic strumming. Underneath it all sits the drone of the tanpura; alongside, usually, the tabla.

The exception is dhrupad, the oldest surviving Hindustani vocal form, which predates khayal and thumri. It moves slowly and without quick flourishes, and takes the barrel-shaped pakhawaj rather than the tabla — sometimes no percussion at all, as in rudra veena and surbahar presentations.

Two things a newcomer often assumes are ancient are not. The gayaki-ang, instrumental playing that imitates the voice, is closely associated with Ustad Vilayat Khan. And the jugalbandi, the duet, is described by Darbar as a relatively recent phenomenon that some purists still regard as beyond the pale.

How the soloist and accompanist actually negotiate this in real time is a subject of its own; we treat it in how accompaniment becomes a conversation.

Lineage, and how much to believe

Hindustani musicians are usually identified by gharana — from the Urdu for house — meaning a lineage with a consistent, recognisably distinct approach to presentation, sustained across generations of teacher and student. Some are named for people, some for places: Gwalior, Kirana, Jaipur-Atrauli, the Dagar vani in dhrupad, Maihar around Ustad Allauddin Khan. A gharana, as Jahnavi Harrison puts it, cannot be created on a whim.

But the origin stories deserve care. The historian and tabla player Aneesh Pradhan argues that performers "often mistake legend for history" about their own lineages, and that Hindustani music "has always been in a state of flux" rather than sitting in fixed, ancient compartments. When a maestro dates his gharana to a fifteenth-century court, that is an oral claim, not a document. We record such claims on our gharana pages with their attribution attached, and we say when the evidence is thin.

Our longer piece on teachers, students and musical lineages follows the guru-shishya relationship itself.

A short history, honestly told

Music theory in the subcontinent has a long textual tradition — the Natyashastra, and Sarangadeva's thirteenth-century Sangita Ratnakara, which the Sangeet Natak Akademi has called the most important text of sangitashastra. What that theory has to do with what is played today is a live scholarly question, not a settled inheritance.

Popular accounts credit the thirteenth-century poet Amir Khusrau with inventing the sitar and the tabla. A survey published in Sangeet Natak, the Akademi's own journal, concludes that these claims "have been exaggerated and remain largely unproven", noting that the sitar appears in no treatise, painting or sculpture before the eighteenth century, and that Khusrau's contemporaries remembered him as a poet, not a musician. We flag the attribution; we do not settle it.

The twentieth century reshaped the music more than any invention did. Princely patronage withdrew, and musicians who had been supported by courts had to find audiences and institutions instead. V. D. Paluskar (1872–1931) and V. N. Bhatkhande (1860–1936) are credited with building schools and notation systems that opened Hindustani training to students outside hereditary families — the ancestors of institutions like Gandharva Mahavidyalaya and Bhatkhande Sanskriti Vishwavidyalaya. Paluskar is also accused of sanitising erotic song texts; Pradhan considers that charge unfair and argues the recorded evidence contradicts it. Both views are in circulation.

Residential guru-shishya training has thinned since. ITC Sangeet Research Academy, founded in 1977 explicitly because the music was suffering the withdrawal of royal support, was built as a modern gurukul and remains an exception. We tell that story in the corporate gurukul.

Where to start listening

Five entry points, each documented rather than merely famous.

- Pandit Ravi Shankar on sitar. The Met credits him with a pivotal role in spreading appreciation of Hindustani music worldwide, and with popularising the jugalbandi alongside Ustad Alla Rakha. - Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, khayal voice, Kirana gharana — described by The Hindu as the last link of Kirana's golden years. - Ustad Zakir Hussain on tabla, who in The Guardian's obituary transformed the range and appeal of the instrument. - Dhrupad from the Dagar lineage, for the oldest surviving Hindustani vocal form. - M. S. Subbulakshmi, for Carnatic voice — the Ramon Magsaysay Award citation calls her the leading exponent of the Karnatak tradition. We do not yet hold a profile for her, which is a fair measure of where our coverage stops.

If you would rather be walked through a single evening than a whole field, start with your first evening with Indian classical music. Then follow the links: every musician here connects to teachers, students, instruments and traditions, and the archive is built to be wandered rather than read straight through.