From Adam's Peak to Elephanta

by Edward Carpenter

Another absurd custom of the young Babus here (I am speaking of the mass of the people) is that of putting on a Manchester cotton shirt, pure and simple, when they wish to appear in full dress! As they do not wear trousers, the effect (combined with the patent-leather shoes) is very naïve and touching.

On the whole Calcutta does not impress me very favorably. There is the official society, and the trading and commercial ditto, and the educational and legal sections, and a considerable racing population, including a great number of jockeys and horse-trainers who come over with their girls from Australia for the season; there-is a fine zoological garden and a botanic garden, and the Asiatic Museum, and various public buildings, and two or three colleges, including a college for native women; but all these interests seem to serve chiefly in the direction of disorganizing the mass of the people and the primitive sanctions of their life. Taking it at its worst the general population is dirty, lazy and rapacious. As in our slums, a kind of listlessness and despair marks the people in the poorest quarters—who, instead of congregating as with us round a beershop, may be seen perching about on doorsteps and even on the tops of walls, sitting on their heels with knees drawn up to the chin, and a draggled garment about them—looking painfully like vultures, and generally chewing betel, that common resource against hunger. One notes however, even here, a few fine faces, and a good many very pathetic ones, of old people.

Chundi Churn plays a little on the sítar—the original of our guitar I suppose—an instrument with a long neck and small belly made of a pumpkin shell, and four or five wires (originally three wires, from si, three, and tar, string). The frets are movable, so that keeping the same key-note you can play in major, minor, or other modes. I am beginning to understand the Indian music better now, after having heard a little in different places; but have not very much systematic knowledge about it. It appears that they divide the octave into twenty-two exactly equal parts, called sruti—each part having its own special name. An interval of four srutis may then be said to constitute a major tone, three srutis a minor tone, and two a semitone—though this is not quite exact; and out of these three intervals, major tone, minor tone, and semitone, a seven-step scale is constituted very nearly similar to ours, and having the semitones in the same places. The key-note of this scale is called Sa or Ansa, and corresponds to our Do, and though not exactly a key-note in the modern sense of the word, it is the most accentuated note and “rules the others.” By adopting any of the other six notes as key-note scales are got very nearly corresponding to the seven Gregorian scales of the old church music; and one very commonly in use, if I am not mistaken, corresponds to the Phrygian mode—i.e. that which we produce on the piano by using E as tonic and playing all the white keys.

These seven scales constituted the first system of Hindu music; but they had a second system in which the notes, though preserving their names, could be, any of them, raised or dropped by a sruti; and a third system in which one or two notes being omitted, five or six-step scales were produced.

Out of the hundreds (or thousands) of possible scales thus producible, the Oriental mind, unable to find the scientific root of the whole business, made a fantastic selection. There were six sons of Brahma and Saráswati called Rágas—the genii of the passions. Six principal scales were named after these genii and called Rags, and then each of these had five feminine sub-scales or Raginas attached to it; and so forth. Then the numbers five, six and seven became typical of divisions of the year, days of the week, the number of planets, etc., and very soon a most fanciful system was elaborated—the remains only of which have lingered to the present day. The old notation appears to have died out; but a vast number of time-honored melodies, or rather phrases, in the different modes and scales, have been preserved by tradition—and are now called rags and raginas, though these names were formerly applicable to the scales only. These rags and raginas are not what we should call tunes, but are brief or extended phrases, which have been classified as suitable for various occasions, emotions, festivals, times of day, seasons of the year, and the like; and these the musician uses and combines, within limits, to his taste; and in the hands of a skilful person they are very effective, but become abominably insipid and conventional if treated in a mechanical way.

Besides the regular notes belonging to any given scale, the Hindus use the quarter tones, or srutis, a good deal in the little turns and twanks of which they are so fond; and sometimes by slurring they pass through every intermediate gradation of tone. The slur, which is congenial to the mystic vague melody of the East, and so foreign to the distinct articulation of Western music, is often used in singing; and on the sítar a slight slurring rise of tone is produced by drawing the string sideways along the fret—a device which recalls the clavichord of which Sebastian Bach was so fond, in which instrument the hammer which struck the string was also the bridge which defined its length, so that an increased pressure by the finger on the key after the first striking of the note raised the bridge a little, tightened the string, and so produced a plaintive rise of tone.

WOMAN PLAYING SÍTAR.

All this gives the idea of a complicated system of music; and it will be seen that in the range of mere melody the Hindu music has really a greater capacity of subtle expression than ours. But in harmony it is deficient—the ground idea of their harmony being the use of a drone bass—which bass, though it may change not unfrequently, always seems to preserve the drone character. And of course the deficiency in harmony reacts on and limits the play of melody.

The general character of the music, like that of much of the Indian life, reminds one of our own mediæval times. The monkish plain-song and the early minstrel music of Europe were probably very similar to this. There was the same tendency to work from a droning bass rather than from a key-note in our sense of the word, the same tendency to subordinate the music to the words, causing vague and not always balanced flights of intricate melody, the same love of ornamental kinks, and the same want of absolute definition in the matter of time.