A thousand symphonies: Some heard, most not

Itis like a raga pantheon: Many gods, and yet the same God And so many ragas, andyet the same Raga The first thing the ancients taught theirdisciples in music was: Ek sadhe sab sadhe,sab saadhe sab jaaye in other words, if you practiced One Raga toperfection, you had practiced all, but if you tried to perfect all, you had lostall Down the ages students of music began to take the adage a bittoo seriously Instead of thinking that the practice of one raga gave themaccess to all ragas, they.actually thought that not too many ragas needed to bepracticed, ever. Narad Muni, who would often visit the mythical,celestial land of the ragas to find out how they were doing, had much to say Ashe reported, each raga was as healthy and luminous as the amount of times, andthe devotion and perfection with which it was being sung in the material worldIn fact he had found many ragas maimed, many ill, and a lot more suffering theyhad been sung and played so incorrectly by musicians in the big bad materialworld But the one thing that Narad Muni did not ever.report on was the numberof ragas. In myth, they were personified as people who were in states of deepsleep, never having been woken up at all! Since ragas came to be,less than half of the pantheon has been awakened either by being sung or playedFrom a total of 999 ragas that the ancient texts estimate in the cosmic order,only musicians in the world of Hindustani music have explored a quarterMusicians will look at the gallery, and sing a handful of ragas allthrough their lives, concentrating again and again, on a familiar.few, afraid toinitiate unusual melodies and the not-so-well-known ragas, because it is hardwork, that takes a while to establish them in the minds and hearts of listeners.Don’t some medical doctors prescribe only from a certain stock of familiarmedicines, even for complicated diseases? Ancient texts say that thehuman body which is the virat, or the cosmos itself-- is known to contain withinit as many cures as the diseases that will ever afflict its soul, andconsequently its body Similarly, each of the 999 ragas has the potential of aparticular kind of healing, not found in any other raga In theIndore gharana, master guru Ustad AmirKhan Saheb was known.to take forward his raga repertoire from the number of15-20, sung by his predecessor generation, to 60-70 approximately, in his ownlifetime. After him, his disciple Pandit Amarnath added another 200 ragas,enriching further the schools repertoire with newbandishes or lyrics in those ragasBoth masters were also very bold in terms of introducing these lesser-heardmelodies to a not-so-initiated public But with each raga they were, after all,only evoking its blessings, for everybody and for themselves PanditAmarnath often used to tell us this story One morning, when the Kirana gharanamaster, Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan Saheb, was.singing the raga Lalit at thedargah of Ajmer Sharif, the presidingpir saheb was moved to tears.