Divine Musical Offering

The musician and the raga are like the priest and the deity. Each morning as the musician sits down to practice, the soulful lyrics and the rhythm rouses the raga’s divine force quite like the ceremonial prayer performed in a temple to ‘awaken’ the deity.

Like the priest, the musician first purifies his own mind, body and soul and seeks his guru’s blessings before he begins to sing. As the temple precincts are washed before the daily prayer ritual, the place where the riyaz is performed each day is cleansed likewise. The priest first 'calls' the deity, what is known as the 'aavahan' with mantras and invites Him to be seated in the idol. While bathing the idol, and before starting the puja, the priest decorates the idol with vermillion, ash, sand wood and silk cloth. So does the musical as he concentrates within himself and sings the initial movements of the raga in deep devotion, invoking the deity of the raga, rousing it awake.

To the chanting of mantras, the priest 'appeases' the divinity present in the idol, treating God as guest and offering one by one, water, milk, honey, perfume, flowers, incense, sweets and fruit and the light of the oil lamp. Similarly, the musician now mouths the lyric like a mantra appeasing the raga's deity by awakening its mandela or mystic svara configuration, note by note, to compose cyclical musical movements in the raga.

As the paragraphs of the raga are sung, in cycles of initiation, elaboration, and conclusion, they expand its presence and aura giving it life and a spiritual extension and each. This is called aaalaap -from aalaapnaa spaces between them, create a heightened presence of the raga's divine presence. The raga's veneration is of the Lord, in the process awakening cosmic love, both in the musician who is singing and in the listener who is present. The word 'raga' means 'LOVE'

The priest then narrates the story of the Lord, to the deity, chanting the many names of
God. The puja ritual intensifies to a climax as the mantra chanting goes on and the Lord is fanned amidst the ringing of bells and the blowing of conches. At which point the Lord begins to shower His blessings on all. in the same way, the raga, too, reaches an ecstatic peak, pitch or crescendo when the musical intensifies its story, composed from its own inner nature into paragraphs of the aalaaap unfolding its intense beauty and loving nature.

Composing in the raga is a very specialized task. The prabandha, composition or structural arrangement of all tree - raga, tala, and bandish or lyric - is in unison, and the musician composes pieces which are expanding wholes within wholes, inevitably evolving geometries of musical dialog with the self.
Each paragraph has assonance and variation by way of contrast, but it also artfully formulates constant answers or resolutions only to continue the process into the next paragraph or cycle of composition. Both processes are the externalization of the intense internal process going on.

In the temple the priest now symbolically showers the consecrated water on all those cian who has achieved laya or union with the raga. The musician who has achieved laya or union with the divine core of the raga symbolized by the heightened 'drut' or fast portion of the singing now showers the blessings of musical prasad on the audience.