Copyright by Jeffrey Michael Grimes 2008 - The University of Texas ...

If we move back sometime in history, well before days of the British Raj, we find
that there has always been an awareness of region, or at least of center and periphery, in
the Hindustani tradition, centralized as it was until the mid 19th century. 9 In my
interview of Dhrupad singer and Benares Hindu University faculty member Dr. Ritwik
Sanyal, he pointed out the shashtric (and thus ancient) concept of desh-kaaku, the
regional flavor of a musician’s vocal style (personal comm. 10/2005). The most direct
and thorough discussion of region in Hindustani music in the corpus of
ethnomusicological literature, whether it be the ancient, medieval, or modern context, is
Richard Widdess’s article “The Geography of raga in Ancient India”(1993). 10 Here
Widdess opens with a discussion of the processes by which classical music has
assimilated musical material, in this case melodic material, since he is dealing with ragas
from folk and tribal traditions. In this context Widdess notes, “Ragas and other modes
have been named after peoples and regions ever since the earliest recorded stages in the
evolution of modal theory and practice in South Asia”(36). The bigger question,
however - why was this the case? - is precisely what Widdess seeks to answer in the
remainder of the article. The majority of Widdess’s evidence is drawn from the ancient
theorist Matanga’s Brhaddesi, a work likely produced in the late first millennium AD
which is “the first [treatise] to acknowledge the essentially localized character of practical
music”(ibid.:39). In this treatise the important distinction is made between maarg music,
9 I intend here to demonstrate that there has been a notion of center and periphery in Indian classical music
since well before the Muslim Era. I do not feel that by doing so, I am indulging in the tendency, noted by
ethnomusicologist Ashok Ranade, to try to trace certain aspects of the music back to ancient times when
the history of the subject in question is almost certainly much shorter.
10 Widdess also includes most of this material from this piece in his monograph Ragas of Early Indian
Music: Modes, Melodies, and Musical Notations from the Gupta period to c.1250 (1995).
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