India has two types of music, Southern and Northern Indian Music. Southern Music is also known as ‘Carnatic Music’, named after a southern state (region) of India. This blog is about Northern Indian music, however. It is also known as ‘Hindustani Music’ or sometimes just ‘Indian music’. Northern Indian music is played almost all over India and it has earned a lot of popularity all over the world. The main reason for its international popularity over southern music is its compatibility with other types of music (especially Western). These days most of the Indian music you hear is the Northern Indian music. Pt. Ravi Shankar (sitar), Zakir Hussain (Tabla) and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (singer) all belong to Northern Indian music school or Hindustani Music. Pakistan’s music is also the Hindustani music. Some of the greatest players and vocalists of ‘Northern Indian music’ come from Pakistan.
It is said that the Southern and the Northern Indian music use to be same at one time. Both styles changed by the mixture of cultures from Middle East, Mediterranean, Middle Asia and Europe. The ‘Mughals’ influenced the Northern Music the most. During the golden Mughal era (15-16 centuries) it came out as its own. It still kept the complexity of its ancient version, but the outlook changed enough so it got recognized as a different type of music. Most of its changes were due to the new comers’ interpretation of ancient rules. They adapted it such a way so it became very versatile. It was named ‘Hindustani music’ by Muslim musicologist who called India, Hindustan.
The basics of Northern Indian music are very ancient. The ‘Raag’ and ‘Taal’ theory predates to Vedic Era (5000-2000 BC). Also, ironically in theory, the Northern Indian music closely resembles the ancient Indian Music than the Carnatic music. Since the modern Carnitic music adopted 72 Thaat system, some of the scales are not compatible with ancient diatonic scales. Having said that, the Northern music also has some very famous Rāgas imported from Persia and South that do not adhere to the ancient rules.
In ancient India, music was considered a medium of connecting with gods and, singers, musicians and dancers were revered as sages. Even today most ancient musicologists’ names are written with a ‘Sage’ salutation. Parts of old scriptures are still available and over time the musicologists have tried to put Indian music’s authenticity back into it.
Over the centuries, the Indian music had no ‘standard’ notation system. In fact most of the Indian music was not written at all. It was taught from ‘guru to shish’ (teacher to student) and all the compositions of ‘Raags’ and ‘Taals’ were remembered by heart.
In modern times, Pt. Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860-1936) dedicated his life to arrange and re-arrange northern Indian music theory and compositions. He invented the most popular Indian music notation system (one also used on this site) to date. He tirelessly met with musicians and musicologists to archive the old compositions in his newly invented notation system to keep them safe for future generations. He put most of his collective work into a six book series (Karmic Pustak Malika) which up to today, remains the biggest source of classical Raag (Rāga) compositions and structures ever collected by anybody in Northern Indian music.
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