outlook are the pictures representing the Rāg-mālas,[1] or melody-pictures, in which Indian music is translated into pictorial terms. A Rāga in music is the traditional melodic pattern with which the Indian musician weaves his improvisations, each Rāga symbolising in rhythmic form some emotion such as love, some elemental force such as fire, or a particular aspect of nature such as the forest at midnight, or the refreshing showers of spring associated with the playing of Krishna's flute as he dances with the cow-girls of Brindāban.
The systems of Rāgas, or principal modes, vary somewhat. According to one of them there are six, appropriate to the six seasons with which the Hindu year is divided. Each Rāga is subdivided into five Rāginīs, which, again, have each eight subdivisions, or pūtras. The Rāgas and their subdivisions give the dominant idea of the musician's theme, the season and hour of the day or night appropriate for it, and by their magic create a suitable atmosphere. The musician, by the incantations of his song or lute, can, like Orpheus, conjure with the spirits of earth and sky and flood and bring his hearers into touch with the harmonies of nature. The painter translates these melodic patterns into his own language by forming a mental image of the impression the music makes upon him—it may be the apparition of the special muse or divinity who presides over each Rāga or Rāginī, or the activity of the elemental forces which the magic of the music invokes.
Pl. LXXVIII gives two typical Rāg-mālas. In the first, Fig. A, the lady seated under a flowering tree is pouring out her soul in song to the accompaniment of her vīna, while the pet gazelle by her side, the birds
- ↑ Literally "Garlands of Rāgas."
