With the onset of spring heralded by the month of Phagan, then continuing through Chet and culminating in Bisakh, various versions of raags basant and bahar are sung. This is both to acknowledge the arrival of the months of regeneration and to evoke an aesthetic response to this vitalisation of energy.

Our musical expression is integrally connected -- through a metaphoric relationship -- to the various festivals that emanate from this land and its seasons. The tradition of music as it evolved over thousands of years, absorbing, assimilating and then coalescing the various external influences into a unified form till the first half of the twentieth century, did not see a divorce in this relationship, though there may have been phases of estrangement.

Words raag, rus and rang have the same root perhaps yearning back to the time when there was no dissociation of sensibility.

In the contemporary age, this organic relationship between man and his environment or man and nature has been severed or is not as immediate as it may have appeared to the generations that were not obsessed with the idea of designing and remaking both man and nature. There was greater contentment in living alongside nature.

In the past few centuries, with the rise of the sciences egged on by Cartesian duality, a major thrust towards technological refashioning of the world, this organic relationship was threatened, spawning philosophical outlooks that increasingly placed man in an alienated universe. The Romantic Movement was perhaps the first major revolt against this kind of dualism. As the arts and literature too were greatly inspired by these ideas, which of course had a base in the overall attitude towards nature and its environment, two separate courses was charted out.

It was not unfamiliar to see traces of that alienation effect in literature, films and painting. The human figure disappeared from the canvas as an integrated man disappeared from literature. It was as if the characters were fragmented and did not have the unified resolve to confront the various exogenesis that were thrown up from time to time. It was not necessary for a work of literature to have a beginning, middle and an end.

Among those advocating a socialist vision, the refashioning of the society along egalitarian lines was conceived by humanising the processes of production and placing them at the larger service of mankind. In music, the absoluteness of the tonic note was overridden by atonality.

And the artist was no longer the inevitable voice of the collective; he did not represent a societal vision. Rather he was cut off and pushed to a corner, delving into his subjectivity to come up with a heap of broken images. He remained the conscience of society but was not part of the crowd. He was an individual who found it increasingly hard to communicate with the larger mass of people. On the other hand, in the West, artists and writers started looking for motifs, themes and forms from non Western sources, attempting to find traces of that integrated vision in those cultures.

The supreme alienation, fragmentation and disenchantment that grew out of the post second world war situation, so to say, presented a model that was to be emulated by the rest of the world in the quest for modernity. But all this was happening in the world that had gone through the industrial revolution.

In the rest of the world, including ours, the industrial revolution did not take place; rather only the fallout of that revolution was detected in our societal patterns. No corresponding changes in our manner of thinking and emotional responses took place; it was as if something was happening on its own, placing these societies on the receiving end of that change.

The perception in the classical periods, including our own, was that nature and man were not moving in isolated spheres -- man lived in an integrated universe and the forces of Nature rallied to his cause. If he desired nature to respond, nature did respond. But in contemporary era in music in our part of the world, the artistic fallout has been the unhinging of the raag from its emotional source. Now it can be sung as an independent entity not necessarily following the rules that had established its ambience.

As a next step, the raag treated as an independent entity, only as a sequence of notes which could be creatively tampered with to create a mood irrespective of its original laid-down emotional framework, completes the dissociation of the composition from the aesthetic emotion of the raag.

Raags basant and bahar have many facets to their inevitability. In music, the various raags like basant and bahar have been sung since times immemorial. It is not only joy at regeneration of nature but also an expression of our integration with it. This élan, the energy or force that gives birth is celebrated all over and so basant becomes a symbolic representative of it. And since our home and habitation is this particular piece of territory, distinct from all other territories, for our emotional well-being we need to sing praises of its landscape and contours without any reservation and doubt, and accept its full ownership.

These raags with horis/dhammars have been played out and expressed, these are also compounded with others raags in what in our music we known as misr male, and the same aesthetic emotion is evoked for example in basant mukhari, handol bahar, adana bahar, basant bahar, to name only a few. All art is about regeneration, the journey coming to an end with the lovers meeting and sealing it off with kisses, sweet and twenty.

Some of the most enduring compositions, both in raag basant and bahar, are attributed to Amir Khusro. Some of these were inspired by the relationship between Nizamuddin Aulia and him, especially relating to the phase when the former was recovering from a severe illness.