Bajirao Mastani is Sanjay Leela Bhansali (SLB)’s take on period films. SLB’s baseline epicness of films is already very high, and period films naturally give a lot of room to just go crazy. Hats off to his team and him for creating a grandiose work of art.

But this isn’t a movie review (I don’t think I qualify for those posts yet!). Somewhere in between the first half of the film as I was enjoying the grandiosity (have I used the word enough?), I got drenched in the wide breadth and depth of emotions that Raag Purvi showers on the listener.

It was this song right here:

Mohe rang do laal

A few seconds in, and you just know this is not something you listen to everyday. Let me attempt (for my own future self) to break down this raag in the naivest possible fashion. The notes in play are:

C, C#, E, F#, G, G#, B, C

Before we proceed further, I’d like to introduce a simpler notation of scales that uses numbers to denote the note being played.

  1. Assign 0 to the root note
  2. Integer N refers to note that is N semi-tones ahead of the root note

Hence the above raag can be described as 0, 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12. But this is a gross over-simplication. These notes are not necessarily played in this sequence, not altogether as a group. Moreover, you hear the notes C#, F#, G# being replaced by D, F, A respectively which transform the scale to a major scale (I’m not sure if that is the best way to put it).

It is really the C# and F# notes that add a lot of color (mostly dark shades) to an otherwise positive-sounding scale. From what I understand, this scale is close to raag Yaman (0, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12) and raag Bilawal (0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12). The ‘6’ in Yaman adds to a certain ecstacy on top of the already joyous emotion expressed in raag Bilawal. And 2 -> 1 in Poorvi balances that with a suppression of sorts. You can see freedom/happiness, but it’s not time yet to celebrate it (really arbitrary analogy, I know). In case you are curious, here are some raag samples of various Indian raags.

I realize that at this point I have probably stopped making sense since I sound like I don’t know what I’m talking about. You’re right. In my defence, I think being able to clearly explain what a sequence of musical notes expresses in words is at the boundaries of language.

Next, I turn to the question of when and how does someone think about composing in this raag? It is clearly not a natural raag. It is not a raag that you hear birds sing while taking an early morning walk (or may be they, I don’t take a lot of early morning walks). I wish I could ask this question of people who have composed music in this raag or who have practiced it enough to be able to think of situations where this raag is natural. Till then, I can only attribute the reason to use this raag as to its uniqueness. Of course, I simply can’t see (or hear) this raag being played in a “Baby, teri sandal mere paas hai” kind of songs. No! Just, no.

Finally (yes, I wanted to keep the conclusion as abrupt as the start), how does one think of raags in the first place? A combinatorial way of constructing raags, is to think of drawing urns (notes) out of a bag with (or without) replacement with ordering. So many possibilities, and yet only a few that sound good. Another approach is to construct complementary notes, just as one would create a new shade using complementary colors. For example, in raag Purvi, you may find that (6, 7, 8) and (11, 12, 13) are triplets rooted around an anchor note (usually either a root note or its fifth in a scale). More generally, you may expect to find (7-X, 7, 7+Y) and (-X, 0, +Y) where X and Y are positive integers. This needs to be developed more.

So, the idea of this post was to introduce you to this amazing raag Purvi and notice how different it is from anything (if you exclusively listen to Breaking Benjamin) and most everything else we usually listen to.

Here are some more songs in this raag (this list will be updated as I find more):

PS: SLB is a music composer?! Woah, I didn’t know that.