Pranayama of ragas brought to life

Jan 13, 2010, 12.00am IST
Subroto Roy.

There are two kinds of Indian oral-aural art traditions: the concrete and the fluid. Although both their form and content are tangible, their purpose has been mystical .


The concrete, like the statues of the 64 yoginis in Jabalpur and Bhubaneswar, are long-lasting and evidence of specific art traditions which went into firming up a culture. They represent cultural and scientific heritage. They often say much more than we can interpret and are repositories of untapped information about the knowledge of their times.

There is no need to do a pran pratishtha or infuse life into these art objects, as we do for Ganesh or Durga clay idols, because they are meant to communicate static information which, when apprehended by us, leads to a semeiosis, a term formulated by American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Pierce, which means any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. Traditionally these works of art are not immersed in flowing water unless they are damaged, unlike clay idols.

Clay idols are short-lived and created for a different purpose to awaken spiritual powers. Their veneration is to promote peace and prosperity. Once their prescribed function is complete, they must return to Prithvi from where they came. This is why they are called parthiv or lifeless, unless prana is infused into them.

Fluid arts cannot be seen; they can be heard through invocation, like a musical raga. It is in one way like a clay sculpture, given structure by taal, and energy by the singer's own panchaprana or five vital energies and the sounds of svaras. This process is akin to pran pratishtha of clay idols; mere singing of aroha and avaroha cannot bring them to life.

Ragas are acoustic. They remain inaudible unless we recall them from memory and listen to the body of svaras. Musicians talk of raga roop or swaroop, the form with its content or raga as a being. If ragas were not living and life-giving, how could they make plants grow faster and better, as J C Bose showed in early 1900?

Matang Muni defined svara as sva+rajari = self-illuminating. Nada, the essence of svara, is also known as Nada-Brahmn and is taken as the cause of the universe. Both point at life potential, waiting to be tapped.

Hatha Yoga includes pranayama which is the regulation of the panchaprana. Is it a coincidence that rules do not normally allow ragas with less than five svaras? Do the five mandatory svaras of a raga form its panchaprana? Vocal music is essentially pranayama and regulation of the panchaprana into the form of raga. When the raga becomes fully alive, it spreads its own light and modifies space and time to provide a rejuvenating experience to the listeners.


The substance of a raga communicates its character and the performer and listeners rejoice in it. It is more like a live play than a film that has been shot earlier. It is listening to what a raga has to say about itself. It is collective experience of rasa emanating from a concrete but a fluid being just brought to life.

The next stage, the moment of visarjan (dissolution), has to arrive. Once its acoustic body ceases to be, the raga itself dissolves into vayu or wind, the most powerful of the panchamahabhoota.

The writer is a scholar of Indian music .