Melakartha Ragas- An Introduction

This blog is my loving effort to honour melakartha ragas in Carnatic music, not just the ones that are familiar or known like Thodi, Shankarabharanam, Kalyani et al, but also the rare and the unknown like Gayakapriya, Gavambodhi and Yagapriya. This blog is primarily for the average Carnatic music rasika, and this is a purely free effort of mine, and thus will not spend much on it to popularize. But it is my fervent hope and desire that whenever a rasika types in a rare carnatic raga, my blog should plop up and give them much needed information

Things to know before reading the blog, for a layman who is wondering what the hell must be a melakartha raga

A raga is a combination of swaras (swaras mean the basic note, noob :). A melakartha raga is a raga which has all the seven swaras in both its ascending order (arohanam) and descending order (avarohanam) in a proper order of Sa Ri Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni, and the reverse of Sa Ni Dha Pa Ma Ga Ri. 

Anything less than this, say a raga does not have all the swaras in their arohanam and avarohanam, or if they are crooked (arohanam having Sa Ga Ri Ma, say) means that the raga is not a melakartha. Melakartha ragas are also called Sampoorna ragas because they have the entire (sampoorna) set of swaras. Those ragas which do not have all the seven swaras, or their scale orders of arohanam and avarohanam being crooked are called Janya ragas. These Melakartha ragas are called Janaka Ragas.

eg of Janaka Ragas: Thodi, Shankarabharanam etc 

eg of Janya Ragas: Kamboji, Mohanam etc 

There are seven Notes in a single octave, called

1) Shadjamam: Sa (S)

2) Rishabam: Ri (R) 

3) Gandharam: Ga (G)

4) Madhyamam: Ma (M)

5) Panchamam: Pa (P)

6) Dhaivatam: Da (D)

7) Nishadam: Ni (N)

The beauty of Carnatic music is that you can sing it in any pitch and fix your swaras to the pitch. Generally Sa and Pa are taken to be the fixed notes per particular pitch. Unlike western music, where C is fixed for a particular octave, carnatic music takes all the liberties to play around with scales. For convinience we take C to be Shadjamam and the rest of the notes follow with Ri to be D, Ga to be E, Ma to be F, Pa to be G, Da to be A and Ni to be B

There are the fixed notes and the varied notes. Fixed notes are those which are sung the same irrespective of any variations. Sa and Pa are two notes which are sung the same. The other five notes are not. R, G, D, N have three variations each, and M has two variations

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