What is a raga? A plain guide to Carnatic ragas

Every raga has an arohanam, its notes in ascending order, and an avarohanam, its notes descending. The two can differ: a raga may skip a note on the way up and use it on the way down, or move in a zig-zag. Beyond the notes, each raga has characteristic phrases and gamakas, the oscillations and slides that shape each note. Listeners learn to recognise a raga by those phrases, much as you recognise a voice.

Carnatic music arranges its ragas around 72 melakarta, or parent, ragas. A melakarta uses all seven swaras in strict order, going up and coming down. Sa and Pa are fixed, Ma has two positions, and Ri with Ga, and Dha with Ni, can each be combined in six ways: two times six times six gives 72.

The system was set out by Venkatamakhin in the 17th century in his Chaturdandi Prakashika, building on earlier work by Ramamatya. The 72 are grouped into 12 chakras of six, and a naming scheme called katapayadi encodes each raga’s number in the first two syllables of its name. Some well-known melakartas:

A raga derived from a melakarta is a janya raga. A janya may leave out notes, as Mohanam uses only five; move in a crooked order; or borrow a note from outside its parent. Many of the ragas heard most often in concerts, such as Mohanam, Hamsadhwani and Bilahari, are janya ragas.

Purandara Dasa made Mayamalavagowla the raga for teaching, and the tradition has kept it. Its notes are Sa, Ri1, Ga3, Ma1, Pa, Dha1 and Ni3. Its two halves have the same pattern of intervals, which makes the scale easy to hold in the ear while the voice learns to place each note.

Ragas are learnt through songs, not as lists of notes. A student who has sung a geetham, a varnam and a few kritis in a raga knows it in a way that reading its scale cannot give. At RAAGA, ragas are met through the compositions of the curriculum, in the traditional order.