By N S Ramachandran (University of Madras, 1938) | Compositions >>
Gamaka has been defined by Sarngadeva and others as the ornamentation of a note by shaking it. But evidence from their works can be cited to show that the idea of gamaka is more extensive than the connotation of this definition; it has been used to convey the idea of beautifying a note not only by the shake but by any other means which seem to be efficient or adequate. For instance by the adjustment and control of the volume of a single note it can be made to assume different shades of colour, and these effects can be, and have been legitimately classed under the category of gamakas. […]
This complexity in the nature of gamakas, as used in vocal and instrumental music, has been noticed and exhaustively treated in Sanskrit treatises on music. They offer an abundance of material on this subject as well as on others. […]
“The sage Bharata considered the voice an instrument in itself, calling it the sharira vina, or bodily lute. In that light, the similarities between the cakras and the Western anatomical scale are satisfyingly unifying, but they aren’t, if we think about it, surprising. Indian or European, we have, after all, the same instrument: the human body.” – Samanth Subramanian in Body and soul
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Browsing through a copy of the very new, extremely handsome, second edition of The Oxford Illustrated Companion to South Indian Classical Music, compiled by Ludwig Pesch, I came upon an intriguing diagram. In a chapter titled “The Voice in South Indian Music”, there is a line sketch of two furrow-browed men, each a mirror image of the other. Under the left-hand man is the caption: “Cakra concept—Indian voice culture and its centres of energy”; under his counterpart: “Placing the tone—Western voice culture based on anatomy”.
The two voice cultures developed independently, but the illustration points to keen similarities. In the West, the lower registers of the scale are thought to emerge from the area around the lower spine, where the attendant qualities of energy and sensuality reside. The scale then moves up the body, passing the heart (calmness, cordiality) and mouth (projection, flexibility), ending with its upper registers hovering around the crown of the head.
This anatomical scale, Pesch says, is often used by opera singers and those who sing the romantic song-cycles known as Lieder, and they associate specific spots in the anatomy with specific notes. For example, the resonating chamber of the human chest produces the vowels “a” and “o”, while the throat produces the vowel “u” and the consonant “m”.
The Indian system of voice, on the other hand, is based on the system of cakras (or chakras), centres of energy that run up and down the longitude of the human body. At the base of the spine is the muladhara cakra which, according to Pesch, is “thought of as the source of primordial sound”. In one lyric of his song Shobillu Saptaswara, the composer Thyagaraja strung together these bodily origins of the musical notes. “Naabhi hrut kantha rasana naasaadhula yandu,” he sings—the notes “glow in the navel, the heart, the neck, the tongue and the nose of the human body”. These are, Pesch says, “more than poetic images if understood in the light of other traditions of voice culture”.
A couple of years ago, a music teacher introduced me to this concept, and she urged me to try it for myself by paying attention to the physicality of my slow ascent up the scale. She started me off half an octave below the base note of “Sa”, which had to be dredged from the pit of my belly. I sensed the note of “Sa” itself reverberating around my chest, and one octave higher, the upper “Sa” felt like it was trying to escape through the bridge of my nose. Three or four notes higher, and sure enough there was a fizzing around the edges of my scalp (that was as high as I could go; beyond that, it was all supersonic).
The sage Bharata considered the voice an instrument in itself, calling it the sharira vina, or bodily lute. In that light, the similarities between the cakras and the Western anatomical scale are satisfyingly unifying, but they aren’t, if we think about it, surprising. Indian or European, we have, after all, the same instrument: the human body.
Source: Raagtime by Samanth Subramanian in Body and soul, Livemint, 13 March 2009
URL: https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/jws2RmIuMprzTCiGzDldnN/Body-and-soul.html
Date Visited: 12 July 2025
contributed by Sreevidhya Chandramouli | Lyrics, notation and translations >>
Though the employment of gamaka in music is plain enough it is a long time before we come across the term gamaka in Sangita literature. Bharata does not use the word gamaka in his Natya Sastra. […]
Among authors who came after Bharata, Narada in his Sangita Makaranda and Matanga in his Brhaddesi mention gamakas though they do not enumerate any list of them or seek to define them. Along with the idea of gamaka, the expression ‘gamaka’ was perhaps being slowly evolved. Narada in dealing with alankaras says that he will describe 19 gamakas but their definitions are missing in the existing recension of his treatise. Matanga freely uses the term gamakas in the definition of ragas and gitis. As in so many other respects, he is the writer who gives the most important information on this subject between the time of Bharata and Sarngadeva. […]
The gamaka has come to occupy a vital place in our system of music. It is not simply a device to make melodic music tolerable, and it is not its function merely to beautify music. It determines the character of each raga1, and it is essential to note that the same variety of gamaka appears with different intensity in different ragas. The function of the same gamaka in different ragas varies subtly and establishes all the fine distinctions between kindred melodies by an insistence, which is delicate but withal emphatic, on the individuality of their constituent notes. The gamaka makes possible the employment of all the niceties in variation of the pitch of the notes used and is therefore of fundamental importance to our music. If the personality of any raga is to be understood it cannot be without appraising the values of the gamakas which constitute it.
Source: Ragas of Carnatic music by N S Ramachandran, University of Madras, 1938, CHAPTER V. Gamakas and the Embellishment of Song, pp. 112-158
URL: https://archive.org/details/RagasOfCarnaticMusicByNSRamachandran
Date Visited: 18 March 2022
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- The most concise definition of a raga may be that by Joep Bor: a tonal framework for composition and improvisation. [↩]