Mughal India, 16th century

Miyan Tansen, the court musician of Emperor Akbar, begins to sing. Each note is purposeful – this is an invocation. As he sings, the sky, previously ablaze with sunlight, becomes overcast. Clouds gather, heavy with rain, and a peal of thunder is heard. Tansen continues singing. The first drop falls, and quickly becomes a downpour. His singing goes beyond melody alone; it engages the world around it at an elemental level.

While we may never know whether Tansen could call the rains, his legacy as a musician is well established, his mark on Indian music history indelible. Our musical mythology is full of such legends: using their expertise to shift and restore atmospheric balance, to bring rain and relieve drought, as well as everyday, if fantastical, applications – worship, entertainment, healing, even hunting, luring animals to their doom with hypnotising melodies.

As a student of Dhrupad, the musical form supposedly sung by Tansen himself, I loved hearing such stories. I found the apparent connection between music and natural phenomena, repeatedly emphasised in the legends, particularly curious. No overt representations of themes such as the connection between people and the environment were obvious to me in Dhrupad, unlike many other Indigenous art forms. Beautiful natural motifs feature in traditional painting, and traditional dance mimics the gait of a deer or the ferocity of a tiger.

My connection with nature has always been through the outdoors – climbing trees, observing birds, drawing insects – and now I was studying this music which constantly made me turn inwards. I resented my Dhrupad practice for disconnecting me from the world outside, forgetting that, as a human being, nature was within me as well.

While the poetry used in Dhrupad compositions makes direct statements in its imagery (‘the call of the Koel heralds the rain!’), a musician’s focus is largely on the melody, where the structure of Dhrupad, deceptively simple, reveals a universe in each musical note. Tuning into this universe demands concentration. For a Dhrupad vocalist, a typical practice session would likely involve sitting inside a quiet room, on the floor, tuning a tanpura and singing for hours on end. No wonder, then, the musical form’s reputation for being meditative and austere.

When the environment as I knew it became increasingly unbalanced, I sought refuge in music. It was then that I had a glimpse of the knowledge hidden in what I was learning — not just the poetry and legends, but something buried in the notes themselves.

Like most Indian musical forms, Dhrupad is based around a tonic note, Sa, rather than chord progressions, and is sung within modal, melodic frameworks called ragas. My favourite poetic translation of ‘raga’ is ‘that which colours the sound’. Rather than linear scales, ragas are multidimensional. The notes in a raga are harmonically connected, embracing each other within the framework – sometimes closely, sometimes tenuously. When a raga is sung or played, musicians must consider not only the notes but their specific tonal frequencies, relationship to one another, volume, and timing.

These subtle factors can distinguish two ragas which appear to have identical melodies, and this is why Dhrupad musicians place so much focus on the tonal quality of every note. A single note can establish or ‘break’ the raga.

Considering the number of ragas in existence, that’s a lot of information to learn. Dhrupad music has been an oral tradition for much of its history; how could musicians maintain the integrity of the ragas, and teach this knowledge to their students?

Through metaphors: ascribing the sonic qualities of each raga to specific sensory experiences. By associating ragas with particular emotions, characters, and natural phenomena, musicians created a link between sound and experience. Hence, when you sing a raga, you aren’t just presenting a melody, but evoking a soundscape, creating tonal ‘imagery’ by manipulation of sound frequencies.

There are miniature paintings from mediaeval times which were created to help musicians in training visualise this imagery, and surviving paintings show a common awareness of the imagery associated with particular ragas.

The most interesting of these associations is the connection between ragas and the natural world. Ragas are associated not only with particular seasons, but also specific times of the day. How do you distinguish between the evening ragas Marwa and Puriya, which have identical melodic scales? One particular note in Marwa is sharp and stands alone, representing the brilliance of the sun at golden hour. The framework of the notes is slightly unsettling, reflecting the oncoming darkness; time to go home, from the fields, from the shops, from the forest. In Puriya, the note that was so bright in Marwa is subtler, blending in with those below it. The sun has already sunk below the horizon, and we are winding down for the evening.

These metaphors made it easier for me to distinguish the two ragas. Later, I found that not only had I memorised the ragas, but also their associated imagery, phenomena, and age-old emotional response (back when sunset meant ‘time to go home’).

This additional information initially served little purpose for me other than awe and amusement. There was the occasional memorable event, such as when some of us students all spontaneously imagined the sun rising over the sea while singing a raga, and later discovered that this was indeed the established metaphor for it – or when someone sang a monsoon raga and it started raining, and we briefly felt like Tansen.

Many musicians don’t consider time and weather anymore, and it isn’t always feasible to sing a raga only at night or in springtime. But when I felt myself growing out of sync with the natural cycles around me, I began to realise that it all went much deeper than I’d thought.

In India, the monsoon is a whole season; months of rain, joyfully anticipated as a respite from the scorching summer. One of the most prominent ragas, Megh (literally ‘cloud’), is a monsoon one. Everything about the expansive notes in Megh speaks of large, rain-filled clouds, monsoon winds and petrichor; this is how I was taught to visualise the framework of the raga.

With climate change impacting rainfall patterns, the monsoon has become more unpredictable. Almost every year it seems to be delayed. My elderly neighbours reminisce about regular, pouring rain, replenishing the forest, crops and groundwater. I nod and try to imagine.

This year, however, the absence feels tangible. I know what I am missing.

I know that there were once large rain-filled clouds because I have sung them, I have seen them, I have felt them and linked that feeling to a note, and whenever I sing that note, they come back. I will know when I’m singing the note correctly because the memory becomes stronger. I can almost feel the cool breeze on my skin and smell the freshness of the first rain.

What if I had I learnt to associate these notes with something else? Would I have imagined a night raga as a daytime one, spring as winter, or nothing at all? Possibly. Nobody really knows how these associations between notes and natural phenomena emerged. But what is interesting is that before tuners, musicians tuned their instruments entirely by ear. Instruments were made of wood and bamboo, responded to temperature and humidity, and were more amenable to certain tunings at different times of day and year. Even today, the instruments are tuned differently for different ragas.

It’s August. I climb up to the terrace to see the rain clouds. I can see the water in them, hanging in the sky like the Re note of Miyan ki Malhar, a monsoon raga created by Tansen. I have heard that the Ga note in this raga is like thunder, and have tried, rather unsuccessfully, to sing it. But now, for the first time, I hear the deep rumbling mimicking the oscillating note (or is it the other way around?), rolling in waves rather than settling on one frequency.

I shut the weather out behind the terrace door and go back indoors. My room is warm and dry, yet it feels like something fundamental is missing. Still, the notes of Miyan ki Malhar linger on, as does the vision of the cloud, and I feel the joy of the rains after a long summer.