The That System of Seventeenth Century North Indian Ragas: a Preliminary Report on the Treatises of Kamilkhani
It would seem to be paradigmatic in the study of Indian classical music to say that one major difference between Karnatic music and its North Indian counterpart lies in their conception of the ragas and how they are classified. Beginning with Ramamatya's radical break with the past in the Swaramelakalanidhi (1550) the South Indian ragas were no longer to be organised according to the old method of parent ragas and jatis, but conceived according to their basic scalar material (te Nijenhuis 1977:20) Ramamatya's proposition of nineteen basic scales, or melas,2 led eventually to the development and enthusiastic adoption of a highly logical and practically based system of seventy two melakarta that account for all possible tonal permutations of the ragas. The North Indian ragas, however, were conceptualised until the twentieth century as a rather looser conglomeration of individual entities organised