Teentaal, Tivra Ma and a Mukhda That Starts Before Sam
An examiner is checking a handwritten sargam notation submitted for a drut khayal in Raga Yaman, set to Teentaal. The sheet begins with an aroha written as 'S R G M P D N S' with tivra Ma shown as a plain capital. The sthayi is written as one continuous line of swaras with no matra separators and no bar-lines. Tivra Ma is rendered 'ma' in lower case throughout. Mandra and taar notes carry no dots. The sthayi is aligned to begin on matra 1. The student's own recording, handed in with the sheet, tells a different story: the syllables 'eri' enter on matra 15 and the first accented word lands on matra 1 of the following avartan. The student shrugs: 'My teacher also writes it like that - the dots and lines are for printing, not for singing.' The exercise carries 4 marks for notation fidelity and 4 for the viva.
1. List the notational faults in the sheet and their corrections under the Bhatkhande system, explaining why each symbol carries information rather than decoration.
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Faults and corrections:
- Tivra Ma written as lower-case 'ma'. In the Bhatkhande convention, capitals are shuddha (S R G m P D N - with Ma as the exception pair), lower case marks komal (r g d n), and tivra Ma is capital M with a horizontal line above. Writing 'ma' in lower case is doubly wrong: lower case signals komal, and there is no komal Ma in the system - Ma has only shuddha and tivra forms. In Yaman every Ma is tivra, so the error runs through the whole sheet.
- No matra separators or bar-lines. A composition in Teentaal must show the sixteen matras, the four vibhags (4+4+4+4), and the tali positions (1, 5, 9) with khali at 13. Without them the sheet is a swara-string: another musician cannot accompany from it, and the student cannot check his own placement.
- No register dots. A dot below = mandra, a dot above = taar, undotted = madhya. Omitting them makes the octave of the composition unrecoverable, which matters acutely in Yaman where the phrase climbs to taar Sa and returns.
- Aroha incomplete/wrong. Yaman's aroha is S R G M̄ P D N S' with every Ma tivra; the sheet's plain 'M' contradicts the raga's lakshana on the very first line.
- Missing sam marker. Sam needs the double bar / × at the head of the avartan, and phrase-end marks (avagraha-type dashes) for elongation.
4 marks: fault 1 and fault 2 are each worth about a mark and a half; the rest are deductions within the remainder.
2. Explain the atit/anagat question raised by the recording, and describe how the sthayi should be laid out on paper.
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Diagnosis: the composition is atit - it begins before sam. The syllables 'eri' enter on matra 15, the phrase runs across matra 16, and the accented word lands on matra 1. The sam therefore falls inside the first phrase rather than at its start. (The opposite case, anagat, is a composition that begins after the sam.)
Why the student's layout is not a small error. By aligning the sthayi to matra 1, the sheet asserts something false about the composition: it says the piece starts on sam. A tabla player reading it would place the theka one-and-a-half matras out, and the whole point of an atit mukhda - the sense of the sam being caught rather than started - disappears.
Correct layout:
- Begin the notation on matra 15 of the preceding avartan, with matras 15 and 16 written in full under their vibhag.
- Place the double bar and × at matra 1, aligned with the accented syllable.
- Mark vibhag boundaries after matras 4, 8 and 12, with tali numbers 5 and 9 and khali 13.
- Show the mukhda's continuation across matras 2–4 so the phrase's span is visible.
Rule to give the student: the notation of a composition records where the sam falls relative to the text, not where the singer happens to begin. If the two coincide, say so explicitly; if they do not, write the anacrusis.
3. Respond to the student's claim that 'the dots and lines are for printing, not for singing'.
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Half true, and the half that is false is the half being examined.
- The true half. A teacher's private shorthand is legitimate: within a gharana, where the raga, the register and the tala are already in the singer's ear, a bare swara line is a memory aid, not a score. The student is right that his teacher's notes are not wrong.
- The false half. A submitted notation is not a memory aid; it is a document that a stranger - an examiner, an accompanist, a student in another city - must be able to realise. Register dots, komal/tivra marking, matra separators and sam marks exist precisely to make that possible without the teacher present. Remove them and the notation fails its only public function.
- Historical point worth one sentence in the viva. V. N. Bhatkhande's notation, worked out in the early twentieth century and published in the Hindustani Sangeet Paddhati, was designed to carry compositions across gharana boundaries - that is why it is fussy about register and tivra/komal. The rival system associated with V. D. Paluskar used Devanagari and was felt to be closer to singing practice but less portable. The exam uses the portable one.
- How to mark it. Award the viva marks if the student can sing the sthayi correctly and state the placement rule for atit compositions; withhold the notation marks, because the sheet cannot be read by anyone else. Correct singing does not rescue an unusable notation - they are separately assessed.