ab intra

In the previous post, I had given you a brief intro about swaras and ragas. In this post, we’ll see more about Melakarta ragas.

Melakarta ragas are Sampoorna ragas i.e. they have all the seven swaras in their aarohana and aavarohana. A Melakarta raga has the following properties.

• It should have the swaras Sa and Pa
• The swaras Ri and Ga should be present in such a way that
  • Ga is always preceded by Ri
  • The index value of Ga should always be greater than or equal to the index value of Ri i.e. A combination of {Ri2, Ga1}, or {Ri3, Ga2}, etc is not acceptable
• Previous rule applies for Dha and Ni
• The swara Ma is either Ma1 or Ma2

Applying the rules, the possible combinations of {Ri,Ga} would be

• { Ri1 , Ga1 }
• { Ri1 , Ga2 }
• { Ri1 , Ga3 }
• { Ri2 , Ga2 }
• { Ri2 , Ga3 }
• { Ri3 , Ga3 }

Similarly the possible combinations of {Dha,Ni} would be

• { Dha1 , Ni1 }
• { Dha1 , Ni2 }
• { Dha1 , Ni3 }
• { Dha2 , Ni2 }
• { Dha2 , Ni3 }
• { Dha3 , Ni3 }

This way, we have 1 Sa, 1 Pa, 6 {Ri,Ga}, 2 Ma, 6 {Dha, Ni}

1 X 1 X 6 X 2 X 6 = 72

There are 72 Melakarta ragas!

Each Melakarta raga has a fixed number mapped to it known as the Mela number. You can find the list of Melakarta ragas with its corresponding Mela numbers here.

In the next post, I’ll talk about how individual swaras are determined for each Melakartha raga.

Music and Math is a three part series of posts that gives a basic view of ragas in carnatic music and how modulo arithmetic is applied to derive the swaras in a raga. The basics given here cover only the relevant information needed to understand these posts.

To start with, this post gives a quick intro to the terms swara and raga.

Swara
Swaras are the basic atoms of music or what people call it as a note. There are seven swaras in Carnatic music. They are Sa, Ri Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha and Ni. Some properties of swaras are

• The swaras Sa and Pa are fixed and do not have any variants
• There are different variants for Ri, Ga, Ma, Dha and Ni
• The notes Ri, Ga, Dha and Ni have 3 variants each i.e. Ri1, Ri2, Ri3, Ga1, Ga2, Ga3, etc.
• The note Ma has 2 variants which are Ma1 and Ma2
• The following notes are equal
  • Ri2 = Ga1, Ri3 = Ga2, Dha2 = Ni1, Dha3 = Ni2. [These notes sound same when sung or played in an instrument.]

Raga
A Raga is made up of five or more swaras.

• Each raga has an ascending sequence of notes known as Aarohana and a descending sequence of notes known as Aavarohana
• A raga may contain variable number of swaras in Aarohana and Aavarohana. This way, there are thousands of possible combinations of swaras to form a raga
• Melakarta ragas are those ragas that have all the seven swaras in their ascending and descending sequence. The swaras that appear in the Aarohana are same as those in the Aavarohana.
• Melakarta ragas are the basic ‘parent’ ragas from which all other ragas are derived.

The next part of this post will talk about how Melakarta ragas are named and numbered.