Page:The Music of India.djvu/30

 home of an ancient Tamil culture which rivalled the Sanskrit culture of the sacred cities of North India. It is, therefore, no wonder that we should find here a flourishing school of music whose traditions have persisted until this day. It is interesting to note that it was about this time that Gregory the Great was developing music in Europe for religious purposes.

The Narada Siksha, wrongly connected with the name of the great rishi, was probably composed between the tenth and twelfth century. It shows considerable development upon the Natya Sastra in its raga system and in a number of matters agrees with the Kudumiyamalai inscription where that disagrees with the next important treatise, the Sahgita-Ratnakara. Some scholars think that the Narada Siksha comes much later than the twelfth century.

The first north Indian musician whom we can definitely locate both in time and place is Jayadeva, who lived at the end of the twelfth century. He was born at Kendula near Bolpur, where lives to-day the poet laureate of Bengal and modern India. Kendula still celebrates an annual fair at which the best musical pieces are regularly performed. Jayadeva wrote and sung the Gita Govinda, a series of songs descriptive of the amours of Krishna, and so belongs to the number of India's lyrical songsters connected with the bhakti revival. Though each song has the name of the raga and tala to which it was sung these are not intelligible to-day to Indian musicians. At that time these songs were known as Prabhandhas. The Glta Govinda is a charming lyrical composition, as may be realized to some degree in an English translation of it by Sir Edwin Arnold under the name of The Indian Song of Songs. In these songs Radha pours forth her yearning, her sorrow and her joy and Krishna assures her of his love.

We come now to the greatest of ancient Indian musical authorities and one who still inspires reverence in the minds of India's musicians. He was called Sarrigadeva and lived in the former half of the thirteenth century (a.d. 1210-1247), at the court of the Yadava dynasty of Devagiri in the Deccan. At that time the Maratha empire extended to the