Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

(b) Instruments in iconography.

Paralleling the distinction of older and newer layers of content in the treatises is a very significant change in the type of string instrument depicted in sculpture. Iconographic remains from the 2nd century bce to the 8th century ce, the era when Buddhism was still dominant in South Asia, abound in bow harps and short-necked ovoid lutes. From the 7th century ce to the 13th and after, these two string instruments disappear from sculpture and are replaced by stick zithers with one or more strings and often with bowl-shaped resonators or supports. These instruments are direct ancestors of the modern bīn of Hindustani music.

In the Nātyaśāstra (chap.29) the two principal types of vīnā are called vipañcī and citrā. They correspond to the bow harp and the ovoid lute, respectively, of iconography. The names of these instruments continue to appear in later treatises, including the Sangīta-ratnākara (they are a part of inherited śāstra), but to them are added descriptions of several varieties of the later stick zither vīnā. Furthermore, one passage in the Nātyaśāstra (chap.29, 95–100 in the Ghosh edition) describes playing techniques for the vīnā. Although the variety of vīnā is not specified, some of the techniques clearly refer to an instrument with open strings, plucked with the left hand as well as the right, such as a harp. Again, the Sangīta-ratnākara reports this by then purely historical material, but it also describes in some detail a very different playing technique for the one-string eka-tantrī vīnā, a variety of stick zither. Furthermore, the technique is declared applicable to all instruments of the class. It is based on a separation of the functions of left and right hands. The right hand has nine modes of plucking, whereas the left hand, while holding a stick against the string, can produce either a shake or a slide; 13 special two-hand techniques are also described.

Whenever a priori pitch relationships have been important in South Asian music theory, the instrument of reference has always been the current form of vīnā. A radical change in string instrument types and their techniques, therefore, should be correlated in some way with an equally radical change in the underlying concept of pitch relationships. On open-string instruments (such as the bow harp) the basic pitch collection has to be tuned in advance. Any pitch is potentially as important as any other, and in different musical contexts different pitches will assume the central role. A stopped-string instrument differs in that all the stopped pitches can easily be conceived as a function of the pitch of the open string, and ultimately as subordinate to it. That a conceptual change moving towards the notion of a single system tonic had occurred is explicitly confirmed early in the medieval period, but it may have been well under way during the last centuries of the ancient period.

(c) References in general literature.

There are many references to music and musical instruments in Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit (e.g. the Vāsudevahindī) literature (see Jain, 1977). On the whole they confirm the technical terminology and names and descriptions of instruments available from the treatises and iconography, but they also provide some further context and several entertaining anecdotes. Śrīvāstav (1967) located and discussed musical references in Sanskrit literature from the Vedas to the end of the 6th century, including references in Kālidāsa and other classical playwrights. For a wider sweep, of both literary and other early Indian sources, see Premalatha (1983). Many secondary studies and commentaries on classical works and authors have examined musical references among other cultural areas, but much remains to be discovered and systematically discussed. An important source for the music of southern India in the early centuries ce is the extensive section on music theory in the Tamil narrative work Cilappatikāram. It is even possible that some of the origins of later Sanskrit theory may be identifiable in this work and in the tradition it represents.

India, Subcontinent of, §II, 2: History of classical music, To the mid-16th century.

(ii) The medieval period.

(a) Treatises.

There are few musical treatises available between the Sangīta-ratnākara and the new theory that appeared in the later 16th century. Of those considered here the most influential are the two commentaries on the Sangīta-ratnākara. There are also two historically important works by Jain authors, a large-scale compendium of music theory of 1428 and a single enormous treatise from Rajasthan. The commentaries on the Sangīta-ratnākara are Simhabhūpāla’s Sudhākara (c1330) and Kallinātha’s Kalānidhi (c1450), both written in peninsular India. The earlier one quotes extensively from the first of the two Jain treatises, Pārśvadeva’s Sangīta-samaya-sāra, which makes the latter nearly contemporaneous with the Sangīta-ratnākara, or possibly earlier. The later Jain treatise is the Sangītopanisat-sāroddhāra by Sudhākalaśa. It is from Gujarat and was completed in 1350. The Sangīta-śiromani (1428) was compiled at the behest of Sultan Malik Shah of Kada (near present-day Allahabad) by a circle of scholars who used, and to some extent commented on, a large number of earlier Sanskrit works. The treatise from Rajasthan, which quotes from the Sangīta-śiromani, is the Sangīta-rāja, written under the direction of King Kumbhakarna of Mewar and dated 1453.

The Jain treatises may well represent a tradition of śāstra independent of the Sangīta-ratnākara. The Sangīta-samaya-sāra covers material similar to the Sangīta-ratnākara, but with many differences of detail. The great importance of the Sangītopanisat-sāroddhāra is as a link between ancient and modern phenomena. Firstly, in its chapter on tāla (time cycle), both the arrangement (by length of time cycle) and the association of a particular configurative drum pattern with each particular tāla point towards modern Hindustani usage. Secondly, the rāga chapter provides the oldest known set of verse iconographies for melody types. Six rāgas, each with five sub-types called bhāsā, are depicted as quasi-Tantric images, in several cases many-armed, holding various emblems, each with an associated animal (vāhana). Nawab (1956) contains a set of paintings, a rāga-mālā, representing these melody type icons.

These are the only known rāga icons of this Tantric type, the various later traditions all having a basis in secular poetics. The historical significance of this material is heightened by the fact that most of the individual iconographies of the system in the Sangītopanisat-sāroddhāra appear again in the Sangīta-rāja, but not as part of a symmetrical classification system. The Sangīta-rāja is on the whole simply an enormous collection of lore. It follows the categories of the Sangīta-ratnākara in principle and often paraphrases its descriptions. The iconographic rāga verses are simply attached where appropriate, usually with the observation ‘according to some’. These are the most striking materials in the portions of the Sangīta-rāja so far published, but the very size of the work implies the inclusion of a number of miscellaneous details not available elsewhere.

Of the commentaries on the Sangīta-ratnākara, Kallinātha’s Kalānidhi in particular is a tantalizing link between ancient and modern music. Kallinātha expanded considerably on the material in the Sangīta-ratnākara, in several places identifying 15th-century equivalents of its rāgas by names still in use, and he clarified the important section on improvisation. In one passage he confirmed and illustrated a fundamental contradiction (virodha) between ancient doctrines and practices he himself knew in 15th-century Vijayanagar (Sangīta-ratnākara ii, 114ff; see also Brhaspati, 1969, pp.20ff). Part of this passage speaks of ‘the same formation being in all the rāgas’ due to the ‘immobility of the 5th’, and of the scales of rāgas in the old system as ‘done in the [modern] practice as though [all] beginnings were at the middle sadja ’, sadja being the degree that evidently had already become the single permanent system tonic that is now familiar. In another place, Kallinātha seems to have referred quite explicitly to a common tonic, saying ‘Thus in regional [rāgas] those beginning with nisāda [degree 7] are fixed on the place of middle sadja [degree 1], and so then in all [rāgas] there is a common primary [degree]’ (Sangīta-ratnākara iii, 298–9). He had introduced the matter as an explanation for Śārngadeva’s mention of ‘[coming] from a common primacy’, and thus implied that the system tonic was already prevalent in the early 13th century, at the end of the ancient period.

Simhabhūpāla’s Sudhākara is less helpful as a guide to the transition which had been and was still taking place, but like Kallinātha he supplied much useful material from earlier sources.