Five Notes, Two Traditions, and a Quiet Mind
“Dey! Shut off that radio!”
My father was furious. “That music playing on the sarangi sounds horrendous! Sarangi is what they play when some VIP dies. It isn't auspicious music in our home!”
It was October 1984. Indira Gandhi had just been assassinated by her own bodyguards, and the radio was carrying the news—and, in between the announcements, Hindustani music.
I was a boy growing up in Madurai. I had learnt the veena as a child and continued learning it for almost ten years. Carnatic music was the natural musical environment around me. Hindustani music, in those days, was almost an alien sound in our part of Tamil Nadu. But for some inexplicable reason, I was drawn to it. Radio was my only window to that world; there was no television, YouTube or streaming service to take me there. As I grew older, I began attending both Carnatic and Hindustani concerts. Much later, after moving to Singapore, I learnt the sitar for nearly ten years. Over the course of my life, I have attended more than 1,500 concerts across the two traditions. Somewhere along the way, Carnatic and Hindustani ceased to be two competing traditions for me. They became my two musical eyes.
Perhaps that is why, years later, while listening to Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia play Raag Bairagi, something about it immediately felt familiar. I had heard that musical mood before. I checked the notes and there it was: Ragam Revathi. The basic ascending and descending framework in both traditions is the same: S r m P n S' – S' n P m r S. Five notes, with Gandharam and Dhaivatam left out, creating an unusually spare musical canvas.
But saying that Revathi and Bairagi have the same notes can be misleading. They may share the same letters, but they speak different musical languages. The way the notes are approached, connected, ornamented and emphasised is quite different in Carnatic and Hindustani music. If English and French use essentially the same alphabet, that does not mean the two languages sound alike. Pronunciation, the way words are constructed, how phrases are formed, how sentences flow and ultimately how an entire thought is communicated can be completely different. Revathi and Bairagi are much like that. The raw material is similar; the musical language built from it is not.
And yet, something rather remarkable survives all those differences: the mood.
In Carnatic music, Revathi is generally heard toward the latter part of a concert, often after the main musical edifice has been built. It seems to arrive almost like a gentle hand on the shoulder, asking the mind to settle down. Bairagi, on the other hand, is conventionally placed under Bhairav Thaat in Hindustani music and is associated with the morning. It can be a substantial centrepiece, explored at length through alap and khayal. So the two ragas may live very different musical lives, but both seem to lead the listener toward a remarkably similar emotional space: quietude, contemplation and an inward turning.
Why should five notes have this effect?
I have often wondered about that. Listen to Revathi toward the end of a long Carnatic concert, when the mind has been through elaborate ragas, tanam, swaras, rhythm and all the excitement of musical exploration. Something seems to happen. The mind loosens its grip. The emotional turbulence settles. The music does not excite you into another state; it seems to empty you into one. I have experienced this often enough over the years to wonder whether other listeners feel it too.
And that was when another word began to intrigue me: Bairagi.
It sounded remarkably close to Vairagya—dispassion, detachment, the quiet withdrawal of the mind from its attachment to the things around it. I would not claim that this establishes why the raga was originally given its name. But the coincidence was irresistible. Here was a raga whose name evoked Vairagya, and whose musical personality seemed to lead the listener toward precisely that state.
That, in turn, brought to mind a beautiful story from the Srimad Bhagavata Purana.
Bhakti, Jnana and Vairagya—Devotion, Knowledge and Dispassion—are personified as a woman and her two sons. As Bhakti travels across the land, her sons become old, weak and almost lifeless. When she reaches Brindavan, Bhakti becomes young and vibrant again, while Jnana and Vairagya remain frail and unconscious. Narada tries to revive them by reciting the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. They stir, but only briefly. The sages then tell him that in Kali Yuga, knowledge and dispassion cannot remain merely abstract ideas; they need to be carried by Bhakti. Narada recites the Bhagavata, where knowledge and renunciation are woven into stories of devotion, and Jnana and Vairagya awaken again.
I have always loved this story. But now I began to wonder: could there be a musical parallel here?
We often think of Vairagya as a philosophical idea. But music has a strange ability to make an idea into an experience. We may not be able to explain why a particular raga quietens us, but we can certainly feel it happening. Perhaps that is part of the magic of Revathi and Bairagi. Their economy of notes seems to leave less for the mind to chase and more space for it simply to be.
And then came another little mystery.
Anyone who has listened carefully to Vedic chanting will know that it is not a monotonous recitation. The voice rises and falls according to a precise system of pitch accents. In the commonly encountered recitation traditions of the Krishna Yajurveda, four principal pitch levels are particularly relevant: Udātta, the middle or baseline tone; Anudātta, the lower tone; Svarita, the higher or falling tone; and Dīrgha Svarita, an extended high tone. There are other nuances and variations within the Vedic traditions, and Sama Veda, in particular, has a considerably richer melodic treatment. But these four are enough to illustrate the connection I noticed.
Now look again at Bairagi—or Revathi.
Five notes. And intriguingly, four of those notes appear to have a structural correspondence with the four principal pitch levels used in this form of Vedic recitation. The Madhyamam occupies a somewhat different role within the raga, acting as an important melodic bridge. Ancient Indian traditions also speak of relationships between Vedic recitation and musical swaras, suggesting that the worlds of sacred recitation and musical pitch were never entirely unrelated.
Is this coincidence? Is there a historical connection? Is the emotional effect of Revathi and Bairagi somehow related to an ancient architecture of sound that also found expression in Vedic chanting?
I don't know.
And perhaps that is what makes it so fascinating.
I am not claiming that the four notes prove a direct lineage between Vedic chanting and Bairagi or Revathi. Nor am I suggesting that we now have a scientific explanation for why these ragas calm the mind. What I do know is what I have experienced, again and again, over decades of listening to both traditions and attending more than 1,500 concerts: these sounds have a remarkable ability to quiet something within me. That is a personal observation, not a scientific conclusion. But perhaps that is precisely why it is worth sharing. Music ultimately lives in the experience of the listener, and I wonder how many others have felt something similar.
Perhaps there is also a larger lesson here. Carnatic and Hindustani music may handle the same five notes in entirely different ways, just as two languages can use the same alphabet and yet create completely different worlds of expression. Yet beneath those differences, the emotional destination can sometimes be remarkably similar. Revathi and Bairagi seem to me to be one such meeting point between the two traditions that have been my two musical eyes.
And perhaps this is where music, Veda and the old Indian idea of Vairagya begin to touch one another. We tend to think of music, mantra, Veda and spirituality as separate worlds. Perhaps they are not. Perhaps beneath their different forms lies an older intuition: that sound can do more than please the ear. It can quiet the mind, turn it inward, awaken devotion and make us receptive to something beyond ourselves.
So the next time you hear Revathi, listen not only to the notes but to the silence between them. The next time you hear Bairagi, listen for that inward pull, that faint suggestion of Vairagya. And when you hear the Vedas being chanted, listen not merely to the words, but to the ancient rise and fall of the voice.
Perhaps what we experience as “calm” in these sounds is not merely an aesthetic accident. Perhaps there is something very old here—something that Indian music and spiritual practice have been carrying, quietly and continuously, across the centuries.
And perhaps, all these years after my father shouted, “Shut off that radio!”, I am still listening.
