________________
AUGUST, 1912.]
Just
Acc. to Sir W. Jones
{
ANCIENT HINDU MUSIC
...
When 1 śruti major tone = 51 cents When 1 ruti=113 minor tone = 60 2/3 cents. When 1 śruti 1/22 octave = 54 6/11 cents
Acc. to Sanskrit writers {
491
709
A glance at the table shows that whereas in the Hindu system of 22 śrutis in the octave, the error amounts to only 7 cents or about a third of a comma, on Sir W. Jones' assumptions it is six to twelve times as great.
ma
pa 48 3
38
2.
But Sir W. Jones made the mistake of putting attached to them, whereas according to rules they wrongly represented the scheme as follows:sa ri ga ma dha
pa
Value of the Value of the Fourth in cents. Fifth in eents.
498
702
(4) So great is the anxiety of Sir William to establish the identity of the classical Hindu and the European major scale that, though in accordance with his (erroneous) scheme of the former he is forced to admit that the interval between the fifth and the sixth in that scale is a major tone whereas it is a minor tone in the other, he proceeds to ad-"thoir sixth, I imagine, is almost universally diminished by one śruti" [thus making the two scales coincide]; for he [Somanatha] only mentions two modes, in which all the seven notes are unaltered." Now even admitting that according to Somanâtha, there are only two modes in which all the seven notes are unaltered, how does it follow that in almost all the remaining modes the sixth is altered? To take an extreme view, the statement of Somanâtha can be quite correct without a single one of the remaining ragas having an altered sixth, the alterations being confined to one or more of the other notes. Sir W. Jones' imagination that the sixth of the classical Hindu scale is almost universally diminished by one śruti,' is a mere assertion, which he makes in order to uphold his preconceived notion of the identity of the two scales, but for the support of which he has produced no evidence, 35
dha
187
459
546
(5) Lastly comes the most serious error of all, which is in fact the source of all the others. Sir W. Jones would have found, if he had been a little more careful, that he had made a mistake in assigning proper places to the groups of árutis. All Sanskrit treatises clearly give the following as the scheme of the shadja-grama :
[ni] sa ri
ga
ni
663
789
80
Correct scheme of the shadja-gráma.
ni [sa] 43 after the notes the different groups of brutis ought to have been put before them. Thus he
23
Sir W. Jones' incorrect scheme of the shaḍja-grama.
4 s
has
48 3 & 2 8 i 21 This great error together with the others mentioned above, of which it was the source, found its way in the writings of all subsequent authors, among whom are Sir W. Ouseley, Mr. J. D. Paterson, W. C. Stafford, Capt. Willard, Col. French, Carl Engel, Raja S. M. Tagore, J. Grosset, A. J. Ellis:26 A. W. Ambros3" and Capt. Day, to mention only the most important. This propagation of error was quite natural, as most of the writers were ignorant of Sanskrit. But they re-iterated the words of Sir W. Jones with so much force and perseverance, and with such an appearance of independent research that a conscientious scholar like M. J. Grosset, who was the
34 SomanAtha deines only two ragas vis. mukhart and turushka-toḍt with all seven notes unaltered (R. V. iv.8), but he admits the existence of other rayas with similarly unaltered notes (B. V. iii. 32). At the same time the student of the B. V. will easily see that the unaltered notes according to Somanâths are quite different from those according to Sir W. Jones.
25 In the correct scheme of the classical Hindu scale given below, it will be seen that the interval between pa and dha is only three frutis and not four as Sir W. Jones made out. s' Geschichte der Musik.
In his translation of Helmholts's Sensations of Tone, 3rd edition, p. 521.
