Usually, the raags in our classical music are named either after deities, tribes, individuals or places while some reflect the seasons. Two seasons most prominent in this regard are sawan and basant. There may be something organic; the relationship between the raags and the season for it is said by those wanting to release music of its mythological moorings that the six foundational raags are actually based on the six seasons in this northern part of the subcontinent.

People generally ask in their innocence whether the raags have the ability of bringing about a change in the forces of nature and that it does rain with the singing and playing of the meghs and malhars or that the singing of deepak can light a fire. There is some organic link between the striking of the right tonal combination and the nature’s response to it, for it is known to happen that the opera singers with their countertenor notes can shatter glass. It is not an individual instance or an incidence that can be laid at the door of an accident but it does happen every time the right note or notes are struck.

There could be a scientific explanation resting somewhere but the more important thing in artistic terms is that it signifies a living relationship between art and nature. That nature is not indifferent to art and the longing or emotional upsurge of the artist, in this case music, is a reflection of an integrated universe where the artist is not an individual, alone and totally alienated.

But no such innocent and naïve questions are asked when poets use the imagery of their anguish moving mountains or of sundering the skies. The yearning of the lover though has the ability to crack the firmament, it fails to move or entreat the beloved. It is understood as imagery and the manner of the poet expressing the depth of his anguish but where a musician is concerned it is not accepted as imagery or a metaphor but as something that takes places physically. Nobody questions Faiz whether spring is a manner of speech of an actual happening with the sighting of the beloved "mausam-e-gul hey tumhare baam par aane ka nam". It is taken as a metaphor but when a musician says that his music has the power to light up the lamps, it is taken in a more literal sense.

In the West, with the rise of a worldview that expressed the conquest of nature and then its improvement by design, there appeared a fissure between man and nature. The famous philosophical explanation has been expressed in terms like alienation with the artists becoming an outsider, a lone figure who did not express the mainstream sensibility of society. In Europe, the first major revolt in the direction which society was taking and the voice of the artistic concern was the Romantic Movement. The poets wept over the destruction of nature, the demolition of age-old identification markers in the mad rush to industrialise society. The industrial revolution could not be stopped with the poets marginalised and forced to express an opinion or view that was contrary to the perception of society moving forward, within the assumption of the general idea of human progress.

Other than the great poets of the Romantic Movement, the composers of the time too were identified with the movement and many think that it was the height of musical expression achieved in the European context.

In the Romantic Movement, certain priorities were established like putting too much emphasis on the individual as against the more structured and objective criterion of an established order under the label of the classical. The latter came to typify something that was generally more fixed and less flexible and allowed fewer opportunities for individual experiences. So as a corollary, it was more subjective and appealed to sentiments that were more personal, and hence, more innovative in character.

The second important aspect was that the emotional and sentimental side was given precedence over the rational. It was as if the entire human experience could not be explained rationally and there had to be an overriding emotional quotient to the human response to whatever was happening to humans. This was an act of rebellion against the Age of Reason.

Did any real break or a rupture occur in the organic unity as professed in our music and poetry? It did not at least through the last thousand years when a new synthesis emerged which could be safely labelled as Indo-Muslim culture; as the first schism that could be detected was in its decline when under the colonial impact in the 19th century, the poets started to distinguish between gham-e- dauraa’n and gham-e-janaa’n. In the classical sensibility, there was no division between the two as a more unified response was desired from among the poets and the musicians. Probably Ghalib voiced this lack of unity when he categorically differentiated between gham-e-ishq and gham-e-rozgaar and the same division then was carried forward by Hali, Iqbal and saw its culmination in the flowering of the Progressive Writers during the course of the 20th century.

Did any corresponding division or dissociation of sensibility take place in music at the same time? It is difficult to say. The same unity that was experienced and expressed earlier remained the staple hallmark of the emerging and then maturing kheyal gaiki in the course of the 19^th and 20^th century. Perhaps, in the post-independence era, the decline of the high classical tradition could be seen as a symptom that the classical sensibility was on its way out and more piecemeal artistic solutions were being arrived at.

With the advantage of a post-modernistic hindsight, one can probably say that the impact was not universal, nor was it consistent -- it was as if the newer realities were being negotiated by various artists in accordance with their mediums, particularities and traditions.