Indian Classical Music

Namaste and welcome to my website on Indian classical music.

Indian classical music is a very rich and beautiful tradition of music that goes back over 3,500 years. Over the millennia, it has evolved into two distinct schools - the Hindustani school, which is prevalent in North India, and the Carnatic school, which is prevalent in South India. The two are quite similar on a fundamental level, but have evolved to develop distinct styles over the centuries.

This website mainly focuses on the North Indian or Hindustani school of Indian classical music.

The idea for this website came to me because I know many people who enjoy Indian music and would love to understand it better, but most of the information available online assumes a certain basic familiarity with Indian classical music concepts to begin with.

So I decided to make an effort to explain the basic concepts from scratch, demonstrating through examples with notations (both Indian and Western) at each step. Even in simplified forms, Indian music is hard to notate because it uses a lot of ornamentation. Western staff notation, moreover, is not really suited for Indian classical music, because of the many differences between Indian and Western classical music in the way some of the most fundamental concepts are approached. But I think having a score, no matter how partial, is bound to be useful for beginners.

The sidebar (or menu icon if on a mobile device) is for easy navigation. I would recommend reading the pages in the order presented, as the concepts have been arranged to become increasingly clear as you go along, but feel free to go back and forth if you like.

In addition to this website, which is designed as a textbook to explain the basics of Indian classical music, I also write a blog about the historical, regional, technical, and cultural aspects of Indian classical music. Please do visit and take a look. And if there are any topics you would like to hear more about, please leave a comment under one of my blog posts.

Who is Sādhana?

Sādhana is a pseudonym I chose for myself when I set up this website. Sādhana refers to spiritual practice, discipline, or devotion in pursuit of a goal, and it is frequently used in the context of music in India. For example, "Mastering this music requires a great deal of sādhana." My real name is Usha Jayaraman.

My Musical Background

Growing up in India in the 1970s/80s, I was surrounded by Indian music. My parents both love music and my dad is a naturally good singer. Though not trained classically, he likes singing classically based songs. I grew up listening to the songs he liked.

I took Hindustani classical music (vocal) lessons for the first time around the age of 14, but only for a year. I learned only the basics during that year but became fascinated by the harmonium and continued to spend a lot of time trying to play the songs I liked on it. Eventually, I became quite good at picking out tunes by ear. Since the kind of music I liked tended to be raga-based, the concept of a raga was always intuitively familiar to me.

I started listening to real classical performances when I was around 19 and became quite obsessed. Eventually, I decided to study Indian classical music more seriously, but I already had a career and other commitments by then, so my training has been low-intensity. Still, I have trained formally under two wonderful gurus for a total of roughly nine years - Shri Sanjay Chaube (Banaras Gharana) during 2002-06, and Sushri Anuradha Kuber (Bhendi Bazar Gharana) during 2012-18.

My voice is not very strong, but my love for the music and a desire to share it with others has led me to spend a fair amount of time reading/thinking about it. In 2011, I decided to put together a resource systematically explaining and demonstrating the various basic concepts of Hindustani classical music. That is how my website came about. In the process of creating the website, I learned so much myself. Still continue to do.

Where to Find Me

Please write to me at sadhana@raag-hindustani.com if you would like to leave a comment or ask a question about the music or this website. I try to respond promptly when I can, but I hope you will forgive me for any delays. Sometimes family and work-related commitments take precedence.

In addition to this website and the affiliated blog, I have an account with Musescore, to which I have uploaded some of the contents of my website in downloadable sheet music format. My YouTube channel is a repository for the videos I use on this site to demonstrate various concepts, but it also has several playlists of my favorite performances in Indian classical music and other genres. You can also find me on Stack Exchange and Quora, where I answer specific questions about Indian classical music, and on X, if you would like to interact with me more casually.

Credits

This website is a labor of love. Before technology made it possible to share music in the form of digital information, Indian classical music was unknown to most of the world. Now that people can access any music they like from the comfort of their homes, the prospects for Indian classical music are brighter too. But there is another factor that still limits its popularity – its complexity, which makes it hard for those who are unfamiliar with it to really understand or relate to it. Through my website, I hope to make this music more accessible to everyone by demystifying it to some extent.

I want to thank all the artists whose performances I have linked to in my website as well as every other artist in the Indian classical music tradition. Your sublime music is a source of unending inspiration to so many of us!

I also thank all the original posters of videos other than my own that are embedded on this website. I have embedded these in the good faith that the original posters own all the relevant copyrights to the works in question or have the permission of the rightful copyright owners. In other words, no copyright violations are intentional on my part, but if you feel that your rights have been violated due to any of the material embedded on my site, please do let me know and I will remove the offending material.

Copyrights

With the exception of raga performance videos clearly credited to someone else, everything on this website including the text, images, notations, audios and videos are the products of my original work, to which I own the copyrights. Please feel free to quote or share, but without altering and only for noncommercial purposes. Please also make an attribution to "Raag Hindustani by Sadhana" and provide a link to the relevant page on my website. I would also appreciate if you could drop me a line telling me how and where you have used my work.

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