The Raga Guide: A Survey of 74 Hindustani Ragas

It is always exciting to come across a work that is scholarly as well as artistically engaging, in which the familiar distinctions between academic and popular, and scientific and aesthetic, are blurred. or outright resisted. The Raga Guide, a text accompanied by thorough transcriptions, plates of ragamala paintings, and four CDs of musical performance, is such a work. The latest and most comprehensible addition to a family of publications that have attempted a systematic categorization of Hindustani raga, the Guide evidences careful consideration of previous authors' works, with detailed attention paid to more recent developments in the music's performance.