Page:The Music of India.djvu/34

 Snadragachandrodaya, Ragamala, Raganianjarl, and Nartanamrnaya : these have recently been discovered in the State Library of Bikanir. It appears that the music of Upper India was getting into confusion, and Pundarika seems to have been asked by the Raja Burhankhan to bring things into order. Pundarika was a southern pandit, as he himself states, calhng himself 'Karnatika', or belonging to the south ; and so he had come to know both the northern and southern systems. He adopts the suddha scale of the south and describes many northern rcigas. In describing his rdgas he seems to make use of only fourteen srutis in the octave, and uses only twelve frets for his vlna.

Rama Amatya, a southern musician, gives us the first detailed exposition of the southern system in the Svaraniela Kalanidhi, written about the year A.D. 1550. This work contains the first collection of Indian ragas which are adequately described. All of them belong to the Carnatic system and have shadja as their tonic. It seems that, in the south at least, ragas have now been worked out from a common tonic, indicating that instrumental music had greatly developed.

Following this comes the Ragavibodha, one of the most important works on Indian music, written in A.D. 1609 by Somanatha, a Telugu Brahman of the East coast, probably of Rajamandry. He was evidently a practical musician as well as a scholar and_poet. The book is written in masterly couplets in the Arya metre. It starts with the theory of musical sounds and goes on to describe the different vtnas in existence and how to use them. The names and positions of the twenty-two srutis are given. Somanatha belongs to the southern school and classifies the ragas into primary and derivative (Janaka and Janya) as is done in modern south Indian music. He also gives a number of melodies developed from the ragas. A translation of this work was appearing in the Indian Music Journal when it met with an untimely death.

Another important work of the southern school which was written about the same time is the Chaturdandi Prakasika^ whose author was Pandit Venkatamakhi, son