Dhrupad of the Dagars: conceptual foundations and contemporary questions

Dhrupad of the Dagars, Conceptual Foundations and Contemporary Questions by Ashish Sankrityayan deals with the history of the tradition of the descendants of Behram Khan, renowned today as the Dagars, and the conceptual foundations of their art, in the overall context of Indian music. It deals at length with the traditional system of pedagogy of the Dagars, and the changes that came about in teaching methods in the last several decades, and establishes through the documented teachings and explanations of the Dagars, and in particular of Rahim Fahimuddin Dagar, reportedly the last storehouse of knowledge of the tradition, that dhrupad is the culmination of a long process of development from the vedic chants, and differs in a fundamental sense from the forms that developed later, in the very concept of a note, of tonal relations, and of raga - that the music of the Dagars is based on the older shruti-grama-murcchana system, and the concomitant use of a system of sound, resonance, and gesture through what are called the vedic svaras: udatta, anudatta, and svarita, that got supplanted by the new thata or mela system based on twelve notes, around the seventeenth century, with the older system surviving as esoteric knowledge in a few traditions.

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