Six Aksharas Against an Eight-Akshara Cycle
The music club of a Higher Secondary school in Thrissur has a twelve-minute slot in the school anniversary programme and has built its Carnatic segment on a kirtanam composed by a Class XII student. The sahitya has four lines, and each line, sung at first speed, takes exactly six aksharas. The group wants to set it in Adi tala. In the first full rehearsal the mridangam player stops and says the tala is being sung wrongly: by the third line the words are landing on the druta instead of the laghu, and the group cannot arrive at samam together. The singer insists she is keeping tala correctly and that the fault lies in where they start. There are three weeks to the programme, twenty-two students in the group, no time to recompose the sahitya, and the teacher has asked for the piece to be performed in two speeds. A senior student has suggested switching to Rupaka tala instead.
1. Diagnose what is actually going wrong. Show the arithmetic and say whether the tala, the sahitya or the starting point is at fault.
Read the worked answer
Adi tala is eight aksharas: laghu 4 + druta 2 + druta 2. Each line is six aksharas, so every line leaves a remainder of two.
- Line 1 ends at akshara 6 (still inside the first avarta).
- Line 2 ends at 12, that is akshara 4 of the second avarta.
- Line 3 ends at 18, that is akshara 2 of the third avarta.
- Line 4 ends at 24, which is samam again.
The cycle realigns only every four lines (lcm of 6 and 8 is 24, i.e. three avartas). The reported symptom fits exactly: 18 mod 8 = 2, and aksharas 5–6 of an avarta are the druta pair. So the words do land on the druta by line 3.
Conclusion: nobody is counting wrongly. The fault is a structural mismatch between line length (6) and cycle length (8). Diagnose this before choosing any fix, and check whether the sahitya can absorb two extra aksharas by elongation at the line end.
2. Two fixes are proposed: (a) keep Adi tala and change the starting point; (b) move to Rupaka tala and start at samam. Evaluate both with arithmetic and recommend one for a three-week deadline.
Read the worked answer
(a) Adi tala with a shifted start. To end a six-akshara line on samam, the line must begin two aksharas after samam (aksharas 3–8). That is an anahata eduppu. Starting before samam (atita) does not work here: from akshara 7 the line runs 7, 8, 1, 2, 3, 4 and still ends four short. Cost: two aksharas of gap or held note at every line end, and beginners find an off-samam entry hard to hear.
(b) Rupaka tala is six aksharas (druta 2 + laghu 4). The line then fills one avarta exactly, with samam falling on the first syllable and no remainder, so drift cannot occur. Cost: the group must relearn the anga pattern, and any chittaswara or rhythmic passage already written for Adi becomes unusable.
Recommendation: with three weeks and no composed rhythmic passage mentioned, take Rupaka. If an Adi-based chittaswara already exists and must be kept, take the anahata eduppu instead and drill the entry with the mridangam alone.
3. A senior suggests that singing the whole item in second speed will 'absorb' the extra two aksharas. Assess this.
Read the worked answer
Speed changes absolute duration, not proportion. Six units against an eight-unit cycle stays 3:4 at any speed, so the same two-unit remainder reappears, merely faster. If anything, second speed makes the mismatch harder to hear and therefore harder to correct.
Strictly, if the sahitya syllables are doubled into the tala (two syllables per akshara) a six-syllable line occupies three aksharas, leaving a remainder of five, which is worse.
What second speed can legitimately do is make a planned two-akshara gap feel natural rather than like a hesitation. So it can mask the fault, not cure it. Use speed only after the structural fix, and rehearse the transition from first to second speed at samam with the mridangam counting aloud.