Reading the notation on this site

The twelve swaras

Seven named degrees: Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni. Five of them have two forms. Re, Ga, Dha and Ni can be komal — flattened. Ma can be tivra — sharpened. Sa and Pa never move, which is why they are the two notes a tanpura holds.

Twelve positions in all, the same twelve a piano octave has. The resemblance ends there: the intervals here are tuned in just ratios against Sa rather than spread evenly, so a komal Ga is not quite a piano's minor third, and a tivra Ma is distinctly not the piano's F sharp.

This site writes lowercase for komal and a hash for tivra: Sa re Ga Ma Pa dha Ni is Bhairav, and Ma# is the sharpened fourth. It is not Bhatkhande's own shorthand — his uses underlines and marks that do not survive plain text — but it reads unambiguously on a phone, which his does not.

Aroha and avaroha

The ascent and the descent. Many raags are not symmetrical: a swara used going up may be skipped coming down, or the line may bend rather than climb straight.

Brindavani Sarang takes komal ni coming down and natural Ni going up — the same degree, two forms, decided by direction. A raag that behaves like that cannot be written as one scale, which is why both lines are printed.

Pakad

The catch-phrase. A few swaras in a particular order that identify the raag immediately, the way a handful of words identifies a speaker.

It is the most practically useful line on the page. Learn the pakad before the full ascent and descent: it is what tells you, two seconds into a recording, which raag you are listening to.

Vadi and samvadi

The vadi is the swara the raag rests on most — the note the melody keeps returning to and dwelling on. The samvadi is its second, usually a fourth or fifth away.

They are not decoration. Where the vadi falls is one of the older arguments for a raag's hour: Bhatkhande's rule of thumb put raags with a vadi in the lower half of the octave in one part of the cycle and those with a vadi in the upper half in the other. Like all rules of thumb in this music it has exceptions, and like all of them it is still worth knowing.

What is absent

The most under-taught thing in raag is what a raag refuses. Lalit has no Pa. Bhupali has no Ma and no Ni. Malkauns has neither Re nor Pa.

You will reach for a note that is not there. That absence is not an omission, it is the raag — and the hand that keeps reaching for it is the hand that has not learned the raag yet.

On the instrument page here, a swara the raag does not use is not merely wrong: it does not sound at all. That is deliberate, and it is the quickest way to learn an absence.