What this is

The idea

The day divides into eight prahars — four between sunrise and sunset, four between sunset and sunrise — and raags belong to them. Bhairav at first light, Yaman at dusk, Darbari Kanada in the dead middle of the night, Lalit in the last watch before dawn.

Most charts print those as clock hours. They are not clock hours: they are measured from the sun, so they are unequal and they move through the year. This site computes them from your coordinates and the sun's real position, tells you the window you are in, plays a recording that belongs to it, and says why.

Everything is worked out in your browser. There is no account, nothing to sign up to, and nothing to pay for.

What else is here

Riyaz is an instrument limited to the swaras of the current raag — played with your hand through the camera on a laptop, as strings or keys on a phone, with a roll that records a phrase and loops it, and the standard alankar figures worked out in the raag of the hour.

Kharaj is one note in the low octave, held against a drone until the breath runs out, with the microphone measuring how long you held it and how far it wandered. Sit is two tones a few hertz apart, one in each ear.

Each raag also has a page of its own: its hour, its notation, how it differs from the raags it is confused with, the film songs built on it, and a Ragamala painting where an open-access one exists.

Where the musicology comes from

Raag placements, notation and thaat assignments are drawn from standard references: N.A. Jairazbhoy, The Rāgs of North Indian Music (1971); V.N. Bhatkhande, Kramik Pustak Malika; ITC Sangeet Research Academy raag notes.

Every raag page states how well attested its hour is, and says so plainly when sources disagree or when the placement is weaker than usual. Film song attributions are widely published and rarely unanimous — composers borrow a scale without committing to a raag's grammar — and the pages say that too.

Recordings are YouTube embeds of performances published by their own artists and institutions. Nothing is hosted here.

The paintings

Ragamala sets are a centuries-old tradition of depicting individual raags as scenes, often carrying their hour. Where an open-access folio exists in a museum collection it is shown with its full credit line, accession number and a link to the museum's own record.

Those sets predate several raags here and do not cover the modern repertoire, so each painting says honestly whether it depicts this raag or a near relative. Where no folio exists, a commissioned illustration stands in and is labelled as an illustration, never as a folio.

Corrections

The musicology is checked but not beyond argument, and the recordings are one person's picks. There is a box on the station for telling me what is wrong — a line of your own, or a link to a recording that belongs there instead. Both optional, nothing else collected.

Every note is read. Corrections to a raag's hour, its notation, or an attribution are the most useful thing anyone can send.

Who made it

Built by Paritosh Darekar. It is a personal project, maintained in the open, and it is added to as the raag set grows.