My purpose in this article is to bring out the basic features of Hindustani music—the music of North India. Karnatik music, or the music of the South, is different. Fortunately, however, some basic concepts are common to both the styles. More important of these are: alāpa, rāga, tāla. So, a treatment of Hindustani music is not to be regarded as throwing no light on the Karnatik style. The bases of my attempt are provided essentially by my own experiences as a listener. But I have also drawn upon established musicology; and, what is equally important, upon the aesthetic insight revealed by our master musicians in intimate conversation.

Markandeya told King Vajra in the Vishnudhar-mōttara Purāna that he must learn the art of dance before he learned the art of icon making, and the art of music before he learned the art of the dance; he added that rhythm (tāla) was basic to them all. This story is significant from the point of view of the Indian Arts, since it points towards the inter-relationship of the arts not on the level of the aesthetic experience alone, but also that of technique.

A national theatre is a representative, specific, and unique image of a community's ethos, and is created through the living idiom, the distinctive tone, and the particular form that a community evolves in its process of living. Whatever is dead, irrelevant or alien cannot be an attribute of a living national theatre. A vigorous theatre is always rooted in patterns of public behaviour. The moment an experience is severed from these patterns of public conduct, at that moment we knock out the dramatic tensions, and the generative action which define the quality of a theatre. The theatre, as an art, emerges out of vital social contexts and miraculously images a community's awareness, its identity, its potentials, and its particularity. If a theatre does not draw its nourishment from the detailed facts of life it remains a toneless and anaemic exercise.

That the Indian approach to literature has always been different from the Western one would be a trite observation. To add that the Indian tradition distinguished literature, or more specifically poetry, from art, because the aims of the two were different would be correct but not sufficiently explanatory. To arrive at a fair appreciation of the predicament of the contemporary Indian writer who is heir to two incompatible literary traditions, it is most useful to compare the traditional or classical author-audience relationship in India with the one obtaining now and set the two in the perspective of historical development.

Professor Northrop, in his introduction to Professor Heisenbergs volume in the World Perspectives series entitled Physics and Philosophy, makes the following significant observation:

It is frequently assumed by native leaders of non-Western societies and also often by their Western advisors, that the problem of introducing modern scientific instruments and ways into Asia, the Middle East and Africa is merely that of giving native people their political independence and then providing them with the funds and the practical instruments. This facile assumption overlooks several things. First, the instruments of modern science derive from its theory and require a comprehension of that theory for their correct manufacture or effective use. Second, this theory in turn rests on philosophical as well as physical assumptions… one cannot bring in the instruments of modern physics without sooner or later introducing its philosophical mentality, and this mentality, as it captures the scientifically trained youth, upsets the old familial and tribal moral loyalties. If unnecessary emotional conflict and social demoralization are not to result, it is important that the youth… must see their experience as the coming together of two different philosophical mentalities, that of their traditional culture and that of the new physics.

The unity and continuity of Indian civilization is both a commonplace and a problem. It is usually taken for granted as a truth too evident to require proof. Yet when scholars begin to inquire into the exact nature of this unity and continuity and into the ways in which it is attained, they quickly encounter many unanswered questions. In a recent paper on “The Content of Cultural Continuity in India,” the American indologist Professor W. Norman Brown concludes that, while there has been a highly developed civilization on the Indian subcontinent since the third millennium в. с. with many elements of cultural continuity, it remains a problem to say what has given this Indian civilization its distinctive character and vitality. He himself does not believe that this question will be answered by making a catalogue of the hundreds of cultural traits (such as the use of the swastika, the sacredness of the pipal tree and of the cow, the joint family and the caste system, ascetism, the doctrines of karma and rebirth and of ahinsā) which persist across large spans of Indian civilization. Even if the historical and ethnic origins of these traits could be traced, this knowledge would not be sufficient, he thinks, to discover the vitalizing principle of Indian civilization. That principle, he suggests, lies in the field of values and attitudes and not in the material productions of arts, literature, and the sciences, or in particular skills, customs, institutions, or forms of thought. He analyzes, as one example of such a basic value, the notion of duty and the stress on correct action.

India's ancient contacts with Europe receded from the sixth century A.D. The crotchety Byzantine monk Cosmas Indicopleustes (the man who sailed to India), a merchant engaged in the Far Eastern trade whose business took him as far as Ceylon and who in later life retired into a monastery of Sinai where he wrote the Topographia Christiana, a Christian account of the geography of the world (c. 640 A.D.), was the last to report on Indian conditions. Only a few Christian missionaries visited India during the Middle Ages, but their attention was centered on winning the heathen lands to Christianity and their writings contribute little to the history of cultural exchanges. In fact India, and generally the East, had become so remote from the European mind that Marco Polo's account of what he saw in the East was long distrusted as a fable, though much of it was quite authentic and factual, as modern research has shown. The more significant contacts between India and the West in modern times began with the arrival of the Portuguese in the last years of the fifteenth century. But they too concentrated more on religion than on trade; however, when their claims to a monopoly of trade relations with the East, based on a preposterous Papal bull, were soon challenged, and the Dutch, English and French entered the Indian ocean, there ensued a brisk competition among the rival European trading companies for securing trading privileges from the Indian powers, and this, by force of circumstances, led to their increasing interference in the political relations of the native kingdoms and principalities. By their readiness to learn from the experience of others, their astute capacity to take calculated risks, and by their good fortune, the English gained the most signal successes and became the rulers of all India by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The story of this political expansion has been told often and is well known. Our primary concern here will be with the social and cultural changes that accompanied this historic expansion of British colonial power, the influx of Europeans and other westerners for trade, conquest and other ends pursued in India, their mutual relations and their relations with the children of the soil, the social contacts and the mutual cultural influences that resulted, and the abiding results, material and spiritual, so far as they can be traced, for the civilizations of the West and the East, as they may be observed particularly in England and India.

The achievement of the independence of India in August 1947 was an event of epochal significance. It has meant that about four hundred million human beings have become concerned with finding a worthy place for themselves in the political and economic map of the world. The work of rehabilitation, solidification, reconstruction and development done in diverse departments of life in the country in the past nineteen years has been an eye-opener both to Indians and outsiders and is slowly revealing the tremendous energy of the Indian population, which had also expressed itself before through the hard and agonizing process of the years of struggle for freedom. India's independence has also had a pronounced intellectual and cultural consequence. 1 It has given a heightened stature to the great prophets, heroes and statesmen of India's struggle for liberation (1857-1947). It has invested the political parties and movements of this country with an Asian and even international significance. India has embarked upon the colossal task of transforming an under-developed agrarian economy and static society to the status of a modern industrialized country within the framework of parliamentary democracy, and this imparts to the political and economic experiments of this country great significance even for outsiders. The number of books on modern India is rapidly increasing. It is satisfying to note that some of these books are bound to have an influence for decades.