Instrumental

Instrumental music in India grows from the same roots as its song and dance. The earliest systematic account comes from the Natya Shastra of Bharata Muni, which sorts instruments into four acoustic families and gives them a place in performance. The 13th-century Sangita Ratnakara of Śārṅgadeva later set out the threefold art of song, instrument, and dance, and both the Hindustani and Carnatic traditions still treat it as a founding text. Around the 12th century the music split along regional lines, as Persian and Islamic influence shaped the north into the Hindustani style while the south kept and developed the Carnatic style. In the 18th century the Carnatic Trinity of Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar, and Syama Sastri composed a repertoire that instrumentalists still play, and in the 1930s Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar fixed the modern concert order. Across these centuries the instrument kept its task: to carry a raga with the expression of a human voice.