Gandharva Veda: The Ancient Science Behind Indian Classical Music

Somewhere around four-thirty on a January morning in Varanasi, before the first call to prayer and before the chai stalls begin clattering open along the ghats, a sound rises from a music room above the river. A lone shehnai — the double-reeded oboe of North Indian classical music — is working through the opening phrases of Raga Bhairava. The notes arrive slowly, one at a time, each sustained long enough to settle in the pre-dawn air: a flat re, the natural dha dropping to komal dha, the characteristic oscillation around the shadja that gives Bhairava its gravity. No tabla accompanies the melody. No tanpura drone is audible from outside the room. Just a single instrument, mapping a scale onto the silence of a city that hasn’t woken up yet.

Ask the musician why Bhairava and not some other raga, and the answer is matter-of-fact: this is when you play it. Bhairava belongs to the early morning. It is a sandhi prakash raga — a raga of the transitional light between night and day — and performing it at noon or midnight would be not just unconventional but, in the traditional understanding, wrong. Not morally wrong. Structurally wrong, the way planting rice in December would be wrong. The notes would be the same, the intervals identical, the technique unaltered. But something in the relationship between sound and hour would be absent.

That conviction — that music is not merely sound arranged for human pleasure but a phenomenon governed by the same natural laws that regulate dawn and dusk, tides and seasons — is the central premise of Gandharva Veda.

An Upaveda of sound

In the architecture of Vedic literature, the four principal Vedas (Rig, Yajur, Sama, Atharva) are supplemented by subsidiary bodies of knowledge called Upavedas. Ayurveda, the science of health, is an Upaveda of the Atharva Veda. Dhanur Veda, the science of martial arts, is associated with the Yajur Veda. Gandharva Veda — the science of music, melody, and rhythm — is traditionally classified as an Upaveda of the Sama Veda, which is itself a Veda of chant. The Sama Veda’s verses are not merely recited but sung, using melodic patterns called samagana, and scholars have long regarded these chanting conventions as the earliest ancestor of the raga system.

The word “Gandharva” refers to celestial musicians in Vedic cosmology, beings who inhabit the space between the earthly and divine realms. To call a body of musical knowledge “Gandharva Veda” is to assert something ambitious: that music, properly understood and properly performed, participates in the organizing intelligence of nature itself. This is not a metaphor in the Vedic framework. It is meant literally. The vibrations produced by a raga are held to be the same vibrational patterns that structure the corresponding period of the natural cycle. The musician does not imitate nature. The musician gives voice to it.

Whether one accepts this claim as physics or regards it as philosophy, its practical consequences are specific and testable in experience. The Gandharva Veda tradition prescribes which ragas are to be performed at which times, which melodic movements evoke which emotional states, and how rhythm, pitch, and tonal quality interact to produce defined effects on the listener’s awareness. It is, in other words, not just a theory of beauty but a technology of consciousness.

The prahar system: music on the clock

The most immediately striking feature of the Gandharva Veda framework is its insistence that ragas belong to specific times. The Indian classical day is divided into eight prahars (watches), each roughly three hours long. A full cycle runs from sunrise to sunrise:

The first prahar begins at sunrise (approximately 6 a.m.) and covers the early morning. The second prahar runs from roughly 9 a.m. to noon. The third and fourth prahars span the afternoon. The fifth prahar, beginning around 6 p.m., marks the transition from day to night — the evening sandhi, a mirror of the dawn. The sixth, seventh, and eighth prahars divide the night into late evening, deep night, and the hours before dawn.

Each prahar has its own family of ragas. The assignments are not arbitrary or merely customary. According to the traditional musicological literature, they follow observable patterns related to the intervals employed:

Raga Bhairava, with its komal (flat) rishabh and komal dhaivat set against natural (shuddha) gandhar and nishad, is a dawn raga. Its mood is contemplative, austere, faintly devotional. Played in a dim room at five in the morning, the flat second degree (komal re) creates a tension against the tonic that mirrors the quality of light before sunrise — something present but not yet fully arrived.

Raga Yaman (known as Kalyani in the Carnatic tradition) uses all shuddha (natural) notes except for a tivra (sharp) madhyam, the raised fourth degree. It is an evening raga, assigned to the first prahar of the night. Its character is often described as romantic, expansive, and luminous — appropriate for the hour when lamps are lit and the heat of the day gives way to a cooler clarity. Yaman is frequently the first raga taught to students, in part because its intervals are accessible, but seasoned musicians can draw extraordinary depth from its deceptively simple structure.

Raga Malkauns (Hindolam in Carnatic music) is a pentatonic raga of the deep night, typically performed during the third prahar after sunset, around midnight. It omits the rishabh and pancham entirely, moving through a scale built on komal gandhar, komal dhaivat, and komal nishad. The result is a mood variously described as profound, introspective, and weighty. Malkauns performances at midnight concerts in India are among the most intense experiences available in any musical tradition — the sparse scale and slow unfolding create a concentration of feeling that many listeners find almost unbearable in the best possible sense.

The question that divides musicologists is whether these raga-time associations reflect something intrinsic to the intervals themselves or whether they are cultural conventions that have hardened over centuries into perceived necessity. The traditional Gandharva Veda position is unequivocal: the connection is intrinsic. The intervals of a morning raga correspond to the vibrational quality of morning. Performing them at the correct time amplifies their effect; performing them at the wrong time diminishes or distorts it.

Rasa: the emotional grammar

If the raga-time system governs when music is played, the theory of rasa governs what that music does to the person hearing it.

Rasa literally means “juice” or “essence,” and in the aesthetic theory laid out by Bharata Muni in the Natyashastra (composed somewhere between the 2nd century BCE and the 2nd century CE — scholars disagree on the date), it refers to the emotional flavor that a work of art evokes in a prepared audience member, known as the sahridaya or “one with heart.”

Bharata enumerated eight rasas; a ninth was added by the philosopher Abhinavagupta in his 10th-century commentary. The full list:

Shringara (love, beauty), Hasya (laughter, comedy), Karuna (compassion, sorrow), Raudra (fury, anger), Veera (heroism, courage), Bhayanaka (fear, terror), Bibhatsa (disgust, aversion), Adbhuta (wonder, amazement), and Shanta (peace, tranquility) — the ninth, and by many accounts the most difficult to evoke because it requires not the presence of a specific emotion but the absence of agitation.

In the Gandharva Veda tradition, each raga carries one or more dominant rasas. Bhairava carries shanta with undertones of karuna. Malkauns is traditionally associated with veera and shanta. Raga Darbari Kanada, the majestic, slow-moving raga attributed to the court of Akbar, is steeped in a gravity that hovers between karuna and adbhuta. The relationship between raga and rasa is not incidental — it is structural. The intervals, the ornamental patterns (gamakas), the characteristic phrases (pakad), and the permitted melodic movements all conspire to produce the designated emotional effect.

This is where the Gandharva Veda framework departs most sharply from the Western notion that musical emotion is subjective. In rasa theory, the emotion is in the music, not merely in the listener. A well-performed Raga Yaman will evoke shringara whether the listener has heard Indian classical music before or not. The listener’s preparation and attentiveness affect the depth of the experience, but not its fundamental character.

The texts

Gandharva Veda, unlike the principal Vedas, does not survive as a single, intact manuscript. Its knowledge is distributed across several major texts and a much larger body of oral tradition passed from teacher to student within the guru-shishya parampara.

The earliest systematic treatment of music, dance, and drama in the Indian tradition is Bharata Muni’s Natyashastra, a sprawling treatise of thirty-six chapters that covers everything from stage construction to hand gestures to the classification of melodic modes (jatis), which are considered precursors to ragas. The Natyashastra’s treatment of rasa theory remains foundational — no subsequent Indian aesthetician has managed to supersede it, only to refine it.

Matanga Muni’s Brihaddeshi (circa 8th-9th century CE) is historically significant as the earliest text to use the word “raga” in something close to its modern musical sense. Before Matanga, the melodic modes of Indian music were classified as jatis and grama-ragas. The Brihaddeshi marks the transition to the raga system that both Hindustani and Carnatic musicians use today.

The most comprehensive medieval treatise is Sharngadeva’s Sangita Ratnakara (13th century CE), sometimes called the “Ocean of Music.” Written in the Yadava court of Devagiri (present-day Daulatabad, Maharashtra), the Sangita Ratnakara codifies 264 ragas and provides detailed treatment of svara (pitch), tala (rhythm), and the classification of instruments into four categories: tata (stringed), sushira (wind), avanaddha (percussion with membranes), and ghana (solid percussion). Both Hindustani and Carnatic traditions claim the Sangita Ratnakara as a foundational authority, making it one of the last pre-schism texts of undivided Indian classical music.

These texts, combined with the practical knowledge carried by performing lineages (gharanas in the North, paramparas in the South), constitute the living body of Gandharva Veda. It is a tradition that lives simultaneously in books and in bodies — in the theoretical classifications of musicologists and in the muscle memory of a shehnai player’s embouchure at dawn.

Maharishi’s revival

For much of the 20th century, the term “Gandharva Veda” appeared mainly in academic Sanskrit studies. Practicing musicians in India typically did not use the phrase to describe what they did; they spoke of shastriya sangeet (classical music) or simply sangeet. The ragas, the rasa theory, and the time conventions were all part of their working knowledge, but the overarching Vedic framework that connected these elements to a unified science of natural law had receded into the background.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi changed that. Beginning in the 1980s, Maharishi — already internationally known as the founder of the Transcendental Meditation program — undertook what he described as a revival of Gandharva Veda as a complete Vedic discipline. His premise was straightforward: the ancient texts described music not as entertainment but as a means of creating coherence in individual and collective consciousness. If the right ragas were performed at the right times, the effect would be measurable — in the listener’s physiology, in the atmosphere of the performance space, and potentially in the wider environment.

To put this into practice, Maharishi commissioned some of India’s most accomplished classical musicians to record extended raga performances specifically timed to the prahar system. The recordings were produced not as concert albums but as functional music — intended to be played in homes, meditation halls, and public spaces at the hours prescribed by tradition.

The musicians who participated in this program were not fringe figures. Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, widely regarded as the greatest living bansuri player, recorded multiple volumes for the series. Ustad Anant Lal, a master of the shehnai who had performed at state functions and concert halls across India, contributed recordings of morning and evening ragas. Pandit Debu Chaudhuri, the sitar virtuoso who held the post of head of the Department of Music at Delhi University for decades, recorded definitive performances within the Gandharva Veda framework. Each brought not only technical mastery but the authority of lineage — these were musicians steeped in the guru-shishya tradition, performing within a discipline they had inherited from their own teachers.

The resulting catalog, released through Maharishi University of Management Press and affiliated labels, is extensive and uneven in its production values but remarkably consistent in its musical quality. Stripped of the concert-hall context — no applause, no stage patter, no competitive energy between performer and audience — these recordings have a quality of privacy that distinguishes them from the same musicians’ commercial releases. They sound like music played for its own sake, or more precisely, played for the sake of the hour.

The question of proof

Maharishi’s revival brought Gandharva Veda to international attention, but it also raised a question that the tradition’s proponents have been answering in different ways ever since: does any of this actually work?

The claim that music affects human physiology is not controversial. Decades of research in music therapy have established that tempo, rhythm, and harmonic structure influence heart rate, blood pressure, cortisol levels, and neurological activity. Hospitals use music in pain management. Therapists use it in the treatment of anxiety and PTSD. The American Music Therapy Association recognizes it as an evidence-based health profession.

What is more controversial is the specific Gandharva Veda claim that particular ragas produce particular effects at particular times, and that these effects are not merely psychological but physiological and environmental. A handful of studies, primarily conducted at institutions associated with the Maharishi Vedic tradition, have reported measurable changes in brain wave coherence and autonomic function during raga listening sessions. A 2015 study published in the International Journal of Music and Performing Arts examined EEG responses to morning and evening ragas played at their prescribed times versus at mismatched times, and reported statistically significant differences in alpha wave coherence — though the sample size was small and the study has not yet been independently replicated at scale.

Outside the Maharishi-affiliated research community, mainstream musicology tends to treat the raga-time connection as culturally conditioned rather than biologically determined. The argument goes roughly like this: listeners raised in the Indian classical tradition learn to associate certain intervals with certain times, and this learned association — not any inherent property of the intervals — produces the sense of appropriateness that musicians report. A listener in Lagos or Leipzig with no exposure to Indian music would, under this view, feel no particular sense of “morning” upon hearing Raga Bhairava.

The traditional musicians themselves tend to be untroubled by this debate. For them, the raga-time connection is experiential rather than theoretical. They have played Bhairava at dawn and felt its rightness in their bodies. They have played Yaman as evening settled and experienced the raga opening up in a way it does not at other hours. Whether this constitutes evidence in the scientific sense is, for most of them, someone else’s question.

Why it persists

What keeps Gandharva Veda from being an academic curiosity is that people keep finding it useful. Meditators who play morning ragas during their pre-dawn practice report a quality of stillness that they distinguish from silence. Yoga studios and Ayurvedic clinics use time-specific raga recordings as ambient sound, not because their clients are scholars of Vedic musicology but because the music seems to do something that other ambient music does not. Music therapy researchers, even those skeptical of the Vedic framework, have noted that the raga system offers an unusually precise vocabulary for describing music’s emotional and physiological effects — more precise, in some respects, than any classification system available in Western music theory.

And the musicians continue to play. In Varanasi, in Chennai, in Mumbai practice rooms and Brooklyn living rooms, the morning ragas still go up before sunrise. The shehnai players and sitarists and bansuri players work through Bhairava and Todi and Ahir Bhairav in the half-dark, not because a text written a thousand years ago told them to, but because when they play these ragas at these hours, the music acquires a quality it does not otherwise possess. A weight. A rightness. A sense of fitting precisely into the slot that the morning has left open for it.

Whether that quality originates in Vedic natural law or in centuries of accumulated human practice may, in the end, be a distinction without a difference. The music does not wait for the argument to be settled. It simply goes on, note by note, prahar by prahar, filling the hours with the sounds that belong to them.