Sangitasiromani: A Medieval Handbook of Indian Music.

• Author: Rowell, Lewis

This is a big, beautiful, and expensive book with a wealth of detailed information on ancient and medieval Indian musical science as understood in the early fifteenth century A.D. The Sangitasiromani (Crest-jewel of Music) was commissioned by Sultan Malika Sulata Sahi, whose capital was at Kada (50 km west of Allahabad). A team of scholars was assembled and instructed to compose an intelligible synthesis of the musical learning recorded in the treatises that the Sultan had collected for them. This library included both the Natyasastra and Sangitaratnakara, as well as a large number of other treatises written from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries; interestingly, it also seems to have included the cryptic Gitalamkara, although the short section on grama fails to render any more intelligible that text's enigmatic exposition of the ga-grama. The committee completed its labors in the year 1428.

This volume consists of an extensive English introduction (74 pages), followed by the Sanskrit text (in transliteration) and an English translation on facing pages, and concludes with annotations to the translation, bibliography, and an extensive index. This is not a critical edition, and te Nijenhuis' Sanskrit text is largely based on a manuscript (no. 16785) preserved at the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute at Jodhpur. The text runs to a grand total of 2371 couplets (slokas), divided in an unpredictable manner among the major topics: the opening preamble and synopsis (65 slokas), sruti (intonation, 74), svara (scale degree, 60), grama (scale, 19), murcchana (scalar rotations, 38), tana (hexatonic and pentatonic variants, 161), sadharana (altered notes, 20), varna and alankara (ornaments, 99), jati (mode classes, 195), giti (style and text-setting, 13), raga classification (62), raga characteristics (342), tala...