Music

Hindustani Classical Music

My way into Hindustani classical music is recent and slow. Where most students arrive in childhood, I arrived in my twenties, drawn to the patient grammar of raag and the way a single bend on a sitar string can hold a memory. The discipline has quietly reshaped how I think about everything else — what it means to repeat, to listen, to wait.

What I love about this tradition is how rigid form opens into utter expressive freedom. A raag is a frame — a defined set of notes and characteristic movements — but inside that frame every artist finds their own voice. I'm drawn to Khayal for the breadth of that freedom, and to the sitar for its bell-like voice. I'm drawn to Dhrupad and the surbahar for their meditative weight — the slow, microtonal alaap that turns every note into a place to dwell. I trace my Khayal to the Etawah Gharana and my Dhrupad to the Dagar Vani.

What follows are recordings from that practice — some polished, some unfinished, all honest.

Afternoon Kafi thaat

Raag Bhimpalasi

A raag of the afternoon, and of longing. It rises through only five notes — leaving out Re and Dha on the way up — and returns through all seven, so the descent always arrives fuller than the climb. The komal Ga and komal Ni give it its ache: not grief, but the particular stillness of the third prahar, when the day has spent its urgency and not yet turned toward evening.

2 recordings