Saramsha

No. 008  ·  24 September 2026

A Clock of Ragas

Hindustani music gives every raga an hour. Drag the hand around the day — the ragas of that hour light up, and the one at the centre is the one you can play.

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About this piece

Why a raga has an hour

North Indian classical music holds that a raga belongs to a time of day. Bhairav is sung at first light and Malkauns near midnight, and a musician who sang them the other way round would be doing something close to a category error. The day is divided into eight watches of three hours each — prahar — beginning at sunrise, and most ragas are placed in one of them. The two junctions, dawn and dusk, have their own class: sandhi-prakāsh ragas such as Bhairav and Marwa, which lean on the flattened second, the note that sits closest to the tonic and refuses to settle.

Nobody has explained the system convincingly. The neat account — that the flat notes below Sa suit the hours when light is changing, that a raga's third tells you roughly where in the day it sits — works for a good many ragas and fails for plenty of others. What is certain is that the convention is old, that it is followed, and that singers describe ragas sung at the wrong hour as simply not working. The dial here is that convention drawn out: each arc is the window an authority might give for that raga, laid on a ring coloured with the light of the day.

A raga is not a scale. The notes are only the start of it. Each one here carries its ārohaṇa and avarohaṇa — the way up and the way down, which are often different sets: Bhimpalasi skips Re and Dha climbing and uses both descending. It carries a vādī, the note the melody keeps returning to, and a samvādī, its answer, usually a fourth or fifth away. And it carries a pakaḍ, a catch-phrase of a few notes that identifies it the way a face does. Bhupali and Deskar have the same five notes; the phrases tell them apart.

The keyboard below is drawn from the raga, not from a piano. The notes the raga allows are the wide keys; the ones it forbids are the thin slivers between them, still playable, so you can hear for yourself what a wrong note does over the drone. Flat (komal) notes are underlined and the sharp (tivra) Ma is overlined, as in Bhatkhande's notation, which is how Indian classical music has been written down since about 1910.

Everything is synthesised as you listen. Pitches are tuned in just intonation against Sa — 3:2 for Pa, 5:4 for Ga, and so on — rather than in the equal temperament of a piano, because the drone is always present and the ear wants those intervals to lock. The tanpura is four plucked strings modelled by Karplus–Strong: a burst of noise sent round a delay line slightly shorter than the period of the note, filtered a little each time round. For the ragas that drop Pa — Malkauns and Marwa — the tanpura retunes its first string to Ma, exactly as a player would.

Two ragas here, Bhairav and Darbari, have notes marked for andolan: a slow, wide shake rather than a held pitch, closer to one oscillation a second than to vibrato. It is a crude imitation of a thing that takes years to learn, and it is in the code because leaving it out would misrepresent those two ragas more than a rough version does.

Nothing is recorded or uploaded; the sound is made in your browser. Keys a to ; play the raga's notes in order. Tab to the dial and use the arrow keys to move through the day.