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Music in the Thanamga Sutra
159
and syllables of Sanskrit speech 33 The concept of such attributes had evidently, arisen out of a perception of affinity or identity felt at an intuitive, psychic plane
In later ages cnumerating these extra-musical attributes of svaras became a part of the mythical lore that grew around music But this lore appears to have survived as a pious convention alone and not in spirit Yet we can, to some degree, still sense the genuine core of psychic intuition that lay at the root of this convention, because we still have a 'feel' for qualities in music which are somewhat analogous in nature We still feel that different rāgas have an inner affinity with different hours of the day and with different seasons of the year (at least we do so in the Hindustānı tradition) A morning Tāga sung in the evening offends our sensibilities, the rāga malhār invariably reminds us of rains
The later medieval phenomenon of picturing rāgas as elaborate deities--of which we find the first evidence in the 14th century,34_and as painterly images in the later rāga-mālā paintings, too, can certainly be traced to the early concept of assigning a deity and a colour to every svara
The Thanamga does not list the kind of cxtramusical svaraattributes that other ancient texts do it, however, speaks of another it identifies each svara with the call of a specific bird or animal This, too, was a generally held notion and the Thiānamga cnumeration has its counterpart in the Náradīya Śikṣā and other texts, both early and relatively modern The language in which thc descriptions are couched suggest that the relation in this case was considered to be an actual physical one the peacock is said to intone the note sadja, 36 the sheep bleat out the madhyama, the hokila actually sings in the pañcama and so forth
The implications are intriguing Did the ancients really recognise the svaras of their octave in the cries of certain birds and animals? The expressions in the texts do seem to suggest so, yet there are certain difficulties in accepting this as a fact Let us consider them
33 Yarisaya lk ya sih sū 86-92 We refer to the edition published in the Banaras Sanskrit Series, by Griffith and Thibaut, Banaras 1891 34 The earliest răga-dbyānas are found in the SangTtopanışarsároddhāra of Sudhakalasa (1350 AD) --See ch 3 verses 72 to 111 The trend may have begun a century cailier 35 Notc Kallinātha's eomments on Sangitararnākara a 1, 3, 46-47 lokato' DI şadjad svaruparijaūnāya mayarādiprāniñesadhuisanim nidarśanabhiprāyeraha. mayureti"
