India Music – The Tradition and the Vedas

The Musical tradition in India is pre-historic.  Cave drawings in Bhimbetka in Narmada valley attest to music in social events.  Apparently, there was vocal rendering of joy, sorrow and bravery even before there was formal language.  Oral literature developed along with the development of speech and language and most of the oral literature was remembered as folklores in songs.  Various folk tunes that are in use today did develop in time through common people expressing themselves on occasions of social assemblies. 

The Vedas are the most preserved part of the early oral literature in its metric form.  The Vedas are also known as the Chhandas, the material that are composed for recitation.  Various meters in the Vedas are designed to characterize the personality of the deity with the distance factored into the metric process.  Grammatically created in three tones, the Vedic meters gave rise the to the elaborate ChhandaShastra, the Handbook of Meters by Pingala, a scholar in 4^th century BCE.  Musical instruments followed with the seven notes.

This rich material will be presented in two outreach lectures by the eminent scholar Professor Radhavallabh Tripathi From Bhopal, India on April 24 and April 25.  The educational lectures will be useful for the music teachers, language and religion scholars and people who would like to know more about India and her culture.  All attendees will be provided with the custom set of slides made exclusively for India Discovery Center the lectures.

The lectures will be virtual.  There is a small registration fee of $10 for each lecture and $15 for the pair.  We plan to pay a small honorarium to the speaker to prepare the slides and present the lecture.  You can register via https://www.india.discoverycenter.org    You can write to me at misra.bijoy@gmail.com for free admission if you have a strong desire in attending, but would be unable to pay the fees.  The full lecture information is at https://www.indiadiscoverycenter.org/indian-music/

The Outreach Series Lectures of India Discovery Center were initiated in February with the first lecture offered by me under the title “Ten Thought Leaders from India”.  Here is a video of the lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17ss9DHbKpQ  The video may help people appreciate the thrust of our outreach efforts in presentation to  the world audience.

Please join.