Raaga Gurjari - or is it gUrjari really?

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hanquill
Posts: 49
Joined: 20 Jun 2010, 21:25

Raaga Gurjari - or is it gUrjari really?

Post by hanquill »

Raga "gurjari" of thyag and m.dikshitar-compar.
The Raaga "Gurjari"-of tyagaraja
The raaga "Gujjari"-of m.Dikshitahr:-

1.Songs tygarja and dishithar-play an imporatant part in finding out the differences and similarities:
2.Both are janyas of -Mayamalavagaula-M15.
2.1Arohana and avarohana:
Tyagarja:Gurjari
a-Sa Ra Gu Ma Pa Dha Nu Sa
av.Sa Dha Nu Dha Pa Ma Gu Ra Sa
Dikshithar:Gujjari
a.Sa Ra Gu Dha Pa Ma Pa Dha Nu Sa
av.Sa Nu Dha Pa Ma Gu Ra Sa.
3-Full Sacle :
T-gurjariArohana-Sa RaGu Ma Pa Dha Nu Sa
D-gujjari-Avarohana-Sa Nu Dha Pa Ma GuRaSa.
4.You could find-Sa Ra Gu-permitted in arohana of both ragas
5.In arohana-Ty-"Ma Pa Dha Nu Sa"
D.-"Dha Pa Ma Pa Dha Nu Sa
6.In avarohana-Ty-Sa Dha Nu Dha
D-Sa Nu Dha
7-Both are upanga ragas
8-Prayogas of both ragas:
gurjari-of Ty-
Sa Ra Gu Gu Gu Ma, Pa Ma Gu Ra Sa Nu,Pa dha Pa Ma,Gu Ma Gu ra Sa Nu,Gu Ra Sa Ra Gu Ma, Gu Ma Pa Ma Gu Ra,Sa Dha Nu Dha Pa.
Gujjari-of Dik-Sa Ra Gu Dha, Ra Sa Dha Sa,Ra Ra Gu,Dha Pa Ma Gu Ra. etc.
These are only outlines-suggestions welcome
by hanquill

SrinathK
Posts: 2477
Joined: 13 Jan 2013, 16:10

Re: Raaga Gurjari - or is it gurjari really?

Post by SrinathK »

rAga gUrjari - or is it really?

It's an unusual way to start off a rAga thread with a question intended to make the reader uncomfortable. But you will all soon see just why - a very interesting piece of raga history has just been rediscovered. :twisted:

So first, I request admin to retitle this long inactive topic, because here I am only going to talk about the modern scale that goes by the name of gUrjari, an ancient raga belonging to mela 15 (of mAyAmALavagauLa) whose history has been completely forgotten at some stage by the world of Carnatic Music. And that goes like so :

Aro : S R1 G3 M1 P D1 N3 S
Avaro : S D1 N2 P M1 G3 R1 S

Now any student of music who has at least studied dhATTu varsai (zig zag combinations) and who has some idea of the word raga would look at this and wonder what in the world makes this scale any different from mAyAmALavagauLa at all. Except for a kink in the avarohanam, there's literally nothing else to even distinguish from mAyAmALava gauLa.

If this had been sometime early last year, I would have answered that there is a difference between a linear raga using non linear phrases as part of exploring a combination in the moment (situational non-linearity) vs. this actually being an intrinsic permanent feature of the raga structure (structural non-linearity). So SDNPDMPGMRGS in MMG was a non linear possibility, but that alone didn't make a separate raga. But I had a feeling there was really more to it, although I could not find a reason why a separate raga like gUrjari needed to exist in the first place with a scale like this.

mAyAmALavagauLa is an ancient raga, going back to the world's oldest recorded music. It is known as the double harmonic scale. It has been found everywhere from Ancient Egypt to Greece to the Byzantines to Arabia to Persia to India, where it has existed under different names in different regions. It appears in Jewish and Gypsy folk music even. Overtime, this scale has diversified into a huge number of ragas. The 15th mela, the house of MMG, is a music melting pot of sorts, where many similar ragas featuring regional names seem to have come together from all over the subcontinent. gauLa comes probably from gauDa (present day Bengal) while gurjari clearly comes from gujjar / gurjar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurjar), an ancient community that lived in Gujarat-Rajasthan. All this is just to show the pervasiveness of the double harmonic scale and its derivatives across the world.

One may be tempted therefore, looking at the present day gUrjari, to conclude that it is just another variation of MMG from the western subcontinent (though as you will see later, there's much more to it). I also assumed at one point that maybe this was also the reason why gUrjari never had much of a career as a raga in the modern CM world. :lol:

After all, why is there only a sole kriti of Thyagaraja (varAlandu kommani nAyendu) in it, one that really doesn't sound like anything more than a slightly folksy version of mAyAmALavagauLa?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9N6tEe7FhQ - this version of Dr. S Ramanathan is the sole one on stage today, and everyone sings this kriti in this tune.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICMBbzOoVdA - Another one. In fact even if you look very carefully, in any 15th mela raga, you might not be able to tell the difference between SD, SND, SSD, GGR, MGR, MMR, etc in phrases unless it comes out in swaras due to the gamakas and the closely spaced pairs of swaras (SR GM PD NS). Here I really can't tell where's the gurjari in this at all.

All in all, I'd conclude that gUrjari is simply living on an old age pension from mAyAmALavagauLa. :lol:

But, the mystery of gUrjari begins when you start to explore Dikshitar. There is a kriti, gunijanAdi nuta guruguhOdayE, where some very different phrases are used. One can start seeing DG, GP, GD, PD, DS, but also NSDNPDMP, MGRS, SNDP, DNS. Now it starts becoming clear there is another gUrjari, one that is defined by phrases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRVvnvE5VlY - listen to DKJ, and if you have any doubt, just listen to the chittaswaram and even the kalpanaswaras. So is there a Dikshitar school version of gUrjari? And if so, what about Thyagaraja?

The current scale of gUrjari which I shared earlier comes from Sangraha Chudamani. Past history will tell you that the lakshanas of SC ragas are often very different from older texts and I have also pointed out in many other posts (including the last one on gunDakriyA), that many ragas and kritis in those ragas have been changed in the Post Trinity period. It might not be wrong to doubt that varAlandu kommani's tune itself might not be what we think it is.

All this sent our alarm bells ringing. And led us to uncover an extremely interesting and turbulent history that once happened in the history of ragas and their tall tales. Story time....
Last edited by SrinathK on 03 May 2021, 07:11, edited 1 time in total.

SrinathK
Posts: 2477
Joined: 13 Jan 2013, 16:10

Re: Raaga Gurjari - or is it gurjari really?

Post by SrinathK »

And so the tall tale of gUrjari was narrated...

We first went off to the Bank of Carnatic Music, the oldest institution where all that was known in Carnatic Music could be found, to check out if the story of gUrjari living off a pension from MMG was indeed true. We figured that if anyone had the best idea as to how ragas maintained their musical accounts over history, it had to be the bank. The bank was the repository of all Carnatic Music ever recorded or compiled in history, with links to thousands of musical resources, recordings and details of ragas and their records of performances. As it turned out, that story was not a joke -- it was indeed correct!! There was indeed a pension account in gUrjari's name, with MMG's Office as the sanctioning authority.

Curious, we presented ourselves as musical auditors and asked the staff at the bank what all they knew about her. We were informed that gUrjari was one of the most senior ragas in the 15th country and was extremely popular at her peak centuries ago, but, following an event of great upheaval in the music world, that was described in legend as the great war of ragas, she had been reduced to a shadow of who she was and lost virtually her entire fortune, and it was mAyAmALavagauLa who had set up a small pension fund to ensure she had enough to meet ends.

"Great war of ragas?", we asked, intrigued and curious.

"Oh yes", came the reply. "Haven't you ever heard of it? It happened over a century ago, before the era of recorded music and the rise of musicology proper. So not much has ever been known about it. But what we know is that it was a war on a truly epic scale, the likes of which hadn't been seen before nor will be seen again -- a whole generation of ragas kind of vanished and were never seen again."

This was sensational stuff. "A Mahabharata amongst ragas! Tell us anything you know about it."

"We don't know much about it. It seems to have been a huge war between old and new ragas sometime after the Trinity. Some old timers used to talk about how in the aftermath, the entire musical landscape was altered beyond recognition. It led to a whole new era of Carnatic Music and the modern era of scalar, digital ragas. All that we now know as Carnatic Music is whatever remained after the war and whatever happened after that period."

"Surely some records must exist of the music before the war"

"Here and there the files and footnotes of some old ragas still exist in the old musical vaults. There are also some Pre Trinity compositions still surviving with their original musical structure. But virtually everything not the Holy Trinity has been through too many changes and retuned to modern music. Those old ragas? Their accounts have been closed long before the present form of the bank came into existence. We have never seen or heard these ragas ever and have no idea how they transacted. We only have records from the twentieth century on, when recorded music first appeared. No one from that time is also alive now to corroborate further details."

We were disappointed, but got the topic back to gurjari. We were surprised to learn that gurjari had never come in person herself to withdraw her pension. Instead a handsome man claiming to be her PoA was the only one regularly operating her account. Were it not for a written statement by her authorizing him to act on her behalf, her account by all means would have been closed years ago.

The more senior musicologists among us, some of whom knew about gurjari in the past, asked to see her signature, citing their right to audit the records. The huge musical vault rooms, entire libraries with gopuram high ceilings, stretching for hundreds of meters in every direction, complete with a full fledged music hall and studio for listening to recordings, consisting of almost everything preserved since the era of recording music, painstakingly compiled over a century by rasikas and organizations and recording companies, was opened. It was veritably The ultimate temple of Carnatic music, where rasikas and musicians and students and strangers alike came to experience the divine music of men and Gods.

The whole library had expanded massively and had become digitized over the last 20 years, making it easy to search for past records of music. The signature on file on all her cheques and the letter of authority, and her records of performances was eerily similar to mAyAmALavagauLa's handwriting, just differing in a few strokes that were modified to be crooked.

That was when someone in the bank recalled an old story that gurjari had been last seen in person with an old Dikshitar about a hundred years ago. This was significant. At which point Dr. A decided to pull out the SSP (even the bank was surprised to see it printed in English now) and check if any kriti of Dikshitar could be used for a comparison. Of all the books out there, the SSP was a living fossil, the sole evidence of an earlier era of music and ragas, that despite being published over a century ago, was only now coming into limelight after it was painstakingly translated into English and made available on the internet.

The management of the bank of Carnatic music were actually shocked to find many older ragas with detailed phrases and compositions which they had till then known to have only existed in old dusty files before the recorded era of music. We quickly opened the chapter for mela 15, and located gurjari and went through it in detail.

A few minutes later, we all put the book down with the gurjari page open, took another look at the popular version of gurjari and the current signature, looked at the bank officials in the eye, and made the following bombshell of a statement to them :

"Manager, this isn't gurjari, but a forgery!!"

:shock: :o

You could have heard a pin drop from the other end of the library and even the main office. Literally everyone in the music bank premises was stunned silent for a moment.

The seconds needles of the clocks on the walls shattered the silence like a set of loud drums beating with metronomic precision. You could hear your heart beating a little faster. Some people broke into a sweat. Pupils dilated, eyebrows were raised, hands shook.

"A big pension forgery, this is really mAyamALavagauLa! He's been keeping her account alive, signing in her name and withdrawing back the pension."

And that meant...

"He has also taken her Thyagaraja kriti for himself while no one was looking!" exclaimed the head of the bank. As the musicologists echoed in a joint refrain -- "Scandal! Scandal!"

For a second everyone wondered if this cover-up actually meant the real gurjari was long extinct. Quickly pulling out all the available records with a full database search, the bank of Carnatic Music was surprised to discover that yes, gurjari did have a second, very rarely used account in the bank. She had in fact visited the bank to pull out a Muthuswami Dikshitar kriti for the DKP school, but everyone had failed to notice the real signature as 1) The account was a different one and 2) Modern tech wasn't available and it was virtually impossible to search the entire library manually those days.

That's when some of the rasikas visiting the bank of CM and some staff admitted this doubt had in fact been expressed by some of them. We had to ask the senior managers how they could be so obtuse not to notice when a senior lady appeared in place of the usual young man. They admitted that they all believed there was a Thyagaraja version of gurjari and that Thyagaraja and Dikshitar had followed separate schools of music based on separate texts. They also admitted that a similar situation existed for many other ragas too, and in the past musicologists had just concluded there were two schools of music.

We told them that recent discoveries unearthed by archaeologists in the 72 countries of Carnatic ragas were challenging that notion, hence the reason for our visiting the bank and insisting on an audit. In fact we then realized these findings were actually beginning to lend proof to the legend of the great war of ragas, that this might have actually been a real historical incident. Could this explain many a controversy in the world of ragas and kritis?

The SSP, we already knew, was proof of a massive unexpected change in the world of ragas. The Walajapet manuscripts were only adding to further proof. Clearly something major, or many major events had to have happened that such radical changes happened in such a short period of time, with few the wiser. There was a very important reason why the SSP was published at all, but there was no mention of what happened in the post Trinity era. Could it really have been a great war, or a series of upheavals, that disrupted the feudal era of Carnatic Music?

"This discovery is comparable to the discovery of the impact event that led to the end of the dinosaurs!" said Dr. A

At that point, one old timer informed us "You people should probably go to the 15th country of mAyAmALavagauLa, talk to him and bring him here. He is among the oldest of the old ragas, having seen thousands of years of music in many a civilization. Everyone thinks he is only good for singing varsais and a couple of kritis, but in reality, he is the ruler of the largest country in the raga world. No one has as many janya ragas as he does, not even close. If anyone knows the whole history of ragas, it has to be him, he is one of the few who hasn't changed despite centuries of changes in the world of music. I am sure the bank of Carnatic Music will also like to know just what he has been doing running gurjari's account all these years and why."

"But how did you come to know about this great war of ragas if no records were available?"

"These ragas who come here to add their latest record or retrieve some old golden era records for their audiences sometimes talk about the old days to us. They are really coy about telling us much, but when they come as a group from a concert, sometimes they sit in the lounge and talk and talk about their tales a lot, and I mean a LOT. We often hear a few snatches of conversation. Just the other day some ragas from mela 15 were here and they were talking about how in the past there were no straight roads at all in the raga countries during the Trinity period and mAyAmALavagauLa was so frustrated at the convoluted paths everywhere that he along with some scalar ragas swore he will overhaul the entire road network and relay the whole landscape with straight roads. Apparently this is where the dispute really began to escalate between the old and new ragas."

"Whoa!"

"That wasn't the only problem. They used to talk of how racial and economic tensions between the generations of ragas were ongoing for a very long time and the war was inevitable, and that many ragas who used to rule the lands lost their lives etc. etc.... however when they realized they were speaking too loudly, and we were in earshot, they'd exchange glances like "Shh.....you crazy? Be quiet. Unfortunately we couldn't get them to talk, but it would make for quite a Mahabharata if it came out. You really should interrogate mAyamALavagauLa about it."

Giving a copy of the SSP to the bank of music on request, we said our goodbyes and left (all the while imagining their facial expressions and range of emotions as they would go through every chapter in the book revealing shocker after shocker :mrgreen: :lol: ). We even joked that the bank would probably end up declaring a total audit on ragas the next time we returned and we'd be employed for years maybe before the truth came out.

We then decided to find gUrjari and head off into the country of 15th mEla, the largest of all the 72 countries, renowned in the feudal age of ragas where many a raga immigrated into mAyamALavagauLa's kingdom and each raga owned their own lands of distinct musical phrases. gUrjari was once a mighty princely landlady there, and we might not only find her, but also know about this great war of ragas.

mAyAmALavagauLa and many old ragas, the ancient scales of the world, were keeping some huge secrets of Carnatic Music under wraps for whatever reason, and we were determined to find out what they were and why they had kept quiet about it all these years.

Along the way Dr. A told me, "When we come back, I should show them what I just found in the Walajapettai transcipts and some other older texts. I didn't want to shock everyone further, but I know where to find the real gUrjari"...

To be continued....

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