Rajan Parrikar Music Archive

Sagas and Itihasa: Cultural Cognates

[This essay was published in Icelandic in Morgunblaðið on May 18, 2026. See screenshot below.]

Iceland and India lie separated by ocean and a civilisational chasm no map can bridge. Yet the bones of language still carry what geography and time cannot efface. In both Icelandic and far older Sanskrit, traces of a common inheritance persist. Sanskrit vid, “to know,” echoes in Old Norse vita. Icelandic hvítt and Sanskrit shveta descend from a common root. So do sannr and satya. Geography divides. Language remembers.

There is another correspondence, not of words but of form.

The Icelandic sagas and the Indian itihasa are cultural cognates, defined not by origin but by function. They are often called ‘mythology,’ or worse, ‘historical fiction’ – terms that misplace them entirely. Nor are they history in the archival sense. They belong to another order altogether: civilisational memory given narrative form.

Arising from a long oral inheritance, the sagas hold the record of a people entire: lineages, settlements, feuds, and the judgements that follow. Law does not stand apart but enters life directly, spoken openly, contested, and borne by men who must sleep with the consequences they set in motion. Honour is neither proclaimed nor adorned but enacted, often driven to breaking point, as in the world of Njáll and Gunnar, where a decision once taken cannot be unmade and consequence moves with its own implacable momentum. Nothing lies outside the human field; everything is answered in action and aftermath.

That such literature arose in Iceland is one of the remarkable facts of human culture. From a population of a few tens of thousands, set on a harsh, exposed edge of the inhabited world, emerged a body of narrative with such control, depth, and unerring command of human motive that it resists easy explanation. The achievement is not merely striking but extraordinary and, given the scale that produced it, close to the improbable.

In the Indian tradition, itihasa, “thus indeed it was,” refers to the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. These are neither inventions nor chronicles. They are a civilisation speaking in its deepest voice, examining duty and action, tracing the bonds of kinship and the fractures that follow, laying bare love, betrayal, ambition, and renunciation.

At its heart stands the Mahabharata, the longest poem ever composed in human history. Scale is the outward sign of a far greater ambition: the attempt to encompass the totality of human experience. Its composer, the sage Vyasa, states at the outset: “What is found here may be found elsewhere; what is not found here is nowhere to be found.”

This is not boast. The Mahabharata does not console or simplify. It examines the entanglement of duty, desire, power, and consequence with a severity unmatched, refusing easy divisions between virtue and transgression. Dharma is not proclaimed; it is tested, strained, and often revealed only in the wake of action. Krishna, at the centre of the epic as the Supreme Reality in human form, bends the rules in obedience to a necessity beyond human measure.

The poem is not merely a war story. It stages the collapse of order and asks what remains when every norm collides with every other. Kings contend over law and legitimacy; vows bind and destroy; loyalties fracture. At its most charged moment, the Bhagavad Gita emerges as a text of the deepest philosophical insight, a sustained meditation on action, existence, and being. Narrative and philosophy are not separate strands but one movement.

Both traditions arose in worlds that trusted memory over the written record. They were not read but recited, and lived. A child in India meets Rama and Bhishma long before meeting them in print. The same was true in Iceland, where in turf homes, across long dark winters, names, lineages, and episodes were spoken, binding the living to the dead.

These figures do not remain confined to their narratives. They enter speech and moral imagination. To invoke Draupadi is to recall a woman humiliated yet unbroken; to speak of Karna is to summon loyalty bound to tragedy. The sagas do likewise: to name Egill is to summon fury yoked to genius.

The kinship between sagas and itihasa is evident. Their differences in scale and scope are equally clear. The sagas are anchored in a defined historical horizon: the settlement of Iceland, the ordering of society, the play of law and honour within a small, tightly bound community. Their domain is human, and their force lies in the directness with which a deed returns upon the one who sets it in motion.

The Mahabharata unfolds on a far larger canvas. It extends beyond the human sphere and places action within a wider frame of time, recurrence, and consequence. The question is not only how one ought to act, but what action itself means.

The sagas and itihasa answer the same human need: to give lasting form to experience. They are among the fullest expressions of that need – two civilisational vessels of memory shaped into narrative and carried across time.

Morgunblaðið, May 18, 2026

Melody Before Harmony

Is melody fundamental, or is harmony?

From a long civilisational view, melody is the primary element in almost all musical traditions across the planet. Human song begins as a single melodic line. Rhythm, and later harmony, are additions to that primal impulse. The melodic line carries expression, contour, inflection, breath, and language. It is music complete in and of itself.

Harmony, by contrast, is an invention. It emerges in the West from medieval experiments with organum, later systematised into counterpoint and tonal harmony, and eventually into the lush chordal textures of the Romantic and modern eras. Outside that lineage, harmony in the Western sense is largely absent.

Indian, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Central Asian, Chinese, and Japanese traditions are overwhelmingly melodic.

The distinction can be drawn plainly.

Melody is fundamental: it arises naturally from the human voice, exists across cultures, and remains whole even in isolation.

Harmony is contrived, in the following sense: it is a conscious construction, historically localised, and dependent on a framework of rules and training to sustain coherence. Western musical thought has too often elevated this contingent invention into a universal principle.

The word “contrived” is not meant pejoratively. Borrowing from mathematics, melody is analogous to integers, while harmony resembles complex numbers. Once developed the latter opens the door to polyphony and the construction of large-scale musical architecture.

The distinction comes into sharper focus when we examine Indian Classical and Western Classical music.

Western Classical music reaches its summit in figures such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven; the comparison is with the ne plus ultra of that tradition.

The difference lies not in achievement – even at that summit – but in where each system locates musical creation.

In Western Classical music, the roles of composer and performer are inherently separated. The score is authoritative and binding. The performer realises and interprets, but does not create the underlying musical material. The conductor is accorded some latitude in phrasing, dynamics, and tempo, but the notes, harmonic progression, and overall content are fixed. This is not incidental; it is built into the system.

The role of notation reflects this separation. Western Classical music depends on a detailed written score that specifies the musical content with precision. Indian Classical music, by contrast, is not written down. Notation, where it exists, is mnemonic, serving only as an aid to memory. The music itself resides in the trained mind and is realised in performance.

Harmony is central to this difference.

Harmony imposes simultaneity. Multiple voices must align at every instant. The system therefore demands tight synchronisation. Once a harmonic structure is in motion across several instruments, deviation by one performer is not freedom but an error. As a consequence, the scope for individual invention is necessarily limited. Creative authority resides with the composer, who conceives the music in advance; the performer realises it.

Indian Classical music is entirely melody-centric, and the performer is, in effect, the composer in the moment. The raga is not a fixed composition but a generative framework. The musician unfolds it moment by moment, guided by grammar but not bound to a pre-written score. There may be a skeletal composition, but it serves only as a basic runway from which melodic flight takes off and charts its own course in real time. The substance of the music lies in spontaneous creation. This spontaneity is not arbitrary; it arises from long training and internalised discipline.

A melodic system such as Indian Classical music operates unshackled by harmonic constraints. The artiste is accorded full creative and expressive freedom, without having to negotiate shifting targets. Within the boundary conditions of the chosen raga, the music unfolds as it is being made.

Melody was there at the beginning. It remains what it has always been: the ground from which music arises.

A final note: Certain vocal techniques, such as overtone singing, can yield more than one audible pitch at a time. Yet these emerge from a single melodic generator and do not amount to harmony in a structural sense. The argument stands.

PS: For what Western popular music really is, see Western Popular Music Is Trash.

Mistaking a Murti for an Idol

Many non-Hindus, and some Hindus, even those otherwise educated, hold a fixed image: a Hindu standing before a stone or metal figure, understood to be God itself. From this image arise familiar labels, chief among them “idol worship.” The purpose here is to clear that misconception.

The stakes are not merely conceptual. Across centuries, Muslim rulers and armies in India, and later Portuguese colonialists in Goa under Catholic sanction, destroyed temples and shattered images on a vast and sustained scale. They treated such worship as forbidden and its practitioners as infidels. The extent of this iconoclasm is part of recorded history.

The underlying error has not vanished. It persists today in recognisable form, where Hindu practice is still dismissed as “idol worship,” reduced to caricature, ridicule, and casual contempt rather than policed by the sword.

What the Hindu stands before is not an idol, but a murti. The distinction is fundamental. An idol is taken to be God. A murti is a form through which the divine is invoked and invited – a conduit, an access point.

The divine, in its highest conception, is formless; yet the tradition does not set form and attributelessness in opposition. The murti offers form without confinement, allowing an approach to the formless through form.

What imbues the murti with presence is pran pratishtha, the act of consecration. Without it there is only form; with it there is presence, not because the stone has become God, but because the form has been prepared, through ritual and intent, to receive and reflect the divine. The murti does not confine the divine; it functions as a focal point where the mind is drawn and held, an interface between the visible and the invisible.

This is why Hindus visit the temple: for darshan. The word means “seeing,” yet the act is reciprocal. One does not merely look upon the deity but stands before it and is seen in turn, held for a moment in that presence. The murti is the locus of that encounter.

Dattatreya murti from Goa

A related point often goes unnoticed. Even where no consecration has taken place, an image bearing the likeness of a deity evokes an immediate, almost unbidden reverence in a Hindu. The form of a deity long loved and revered carries a deep impress of meaning and memory, and is not met as an inert object but as something already charged.

To call this “idol worship” is to misapprehend the practice at its very beginning. The murti is neither a substitute for the divine nor a claim about matter. It is a discipline of attention, a way of gathering the restless mind and turning it toward that which exceeds form, yet consents to be approached through it.

Asha Bhosle: 1933-2026

Not of an age, but for all time.*

Asha Bhosle passed away today, April 12. No parallel anywhere. A voice that carried entire eras.

The photo was taken during the making of the Legacy album in 1995 under Ali Akbar Khan at Skywalker Ranch in Marin Country, California, where George Lucas placed his facility at Khansahab’s disposal for a week.

* Ben Jonson on Shakespeare.

Asha Bhosle and Rajan Parrikar (1995)
Photo by: Rana Bose

Tiger in the Sitar

There is the sitar, and then there is the instrument in Ravi Shankar’s hands.

This isn’t just a matter of virtuosity. India has long turned out masters every bit as accomplished, some greater, most barely known beyond its borders.

The change is structural. Shankar modified the instrument by adding kharaj (bass) strings tuned to the deep tonic, and by fitting a second resonator gourd along the neck so those low tones could open out and linger. The idea drew from older lineages of the Indian lute, the Rudra Veena especially, where the lower register has always borne the music’s gravity.

With that single change the sitar learned to speak from deeper ground.

When fully realised, the sound transforms. The pluck thickens and rolls with resonance. It recalls a tiger’s low growl, deep, primal. And then, unbidden, an image forms: Shiva, absorbed in meditation high in the Himalayas.

In the opening alap of Raga Gaud Sarang, a mid-afternoon raga, he remains in the lower register, unhurried.

As he draws those long meends (see note below) across the bass strings, something ancient stirs. The greater length and low tuning establish a firm fundamental, while the added resonance gathers around it in a dense halo of overtones. The curved bridge (called jawari) keeps the vibration alive, so the tone does not settle, but breathes, tilts, and ripples.

The melody that emerges possesses precision and intent. The swara is not merely a struck note, a fixed pitch. It is a tonal molecule, shaped by its graces and intonation, by its approach and placement within the phrase. The melodic line unfolds within the grammar of the raga and the boundary conditions it imposes, and resolves to its natural conclusion.

Most sitars dance light and agile. Ravi Shankar’s custom design carries weight, both in the hand and in the ear. But that weight would remain inert without the mastery to awaken it.

The lower octave can be unforgiving. Higher on the instrument, brilliance and velocity can sometimes paper over small sins. Here, every decision lies bare.

To make the bass strings truly sing demands flawless execution across those extended meends. The swara is drawn out, coaxed, burnished, and allowed full flower. A single hesitation or clumsy glide and the whole line can unravel.

Fitting the bass strings is one thing. Realising the swara fully in that register is quite another. With Ravi Shankar, the two meet seamlessly: intonation held true, pressure and release finessed to the breath, the swara born rather than forced. This is why it does not register as a thud or a trick, but as something integral to the music.

It also requires a disciplined hand on the andolan (a controlled oscillation around the swara). Even the smallest inflection on those thick strings carries consequence and must be sculpted with care. The resonance invites lingering, but the raga calls for restraint.

This is one of those moments where the swara stands in full dignity, or the performer stands exposed.

Note: There is no Western equivalent of meend. Glissando and portamento come close, but do not capture its essence. A meend traces a specific contour, often touching implied tones along the way without explicitly resting on them. In Indian classical music, it is foundational; it is how the raga speaks. If one must use a Western term, glissando or portamento will do, but with a mental asterisk.

Iceland – Irreplaceable

[This essay was published in Icelandic in Morgunblaðið on March 30, 2026. See screenshot below.]

Years ago I met an elderly farmer in the countryside beneath Hekla. As I stood taking in the land, he said: “My father was too poor to admire this beauty. Now my sons have too much to admire this beauty.”

It is a common human failing. We disregard the gifts at our doorstep and chase delight in distant realms. In Iceland’s case, the irony cuts deep.

Those born on this tiny patch of rock in this age won the luck of the draw. Karma placed you here in this cycle of existence. Your ancestors waged a ceaseless battle merely to sustain life. You, by contrast, dwell in an age of abundance and technological ease unimaginable to them. Yours is the blessed generation.

Let us turn to Iceland’s landscape.

Nothing else resembles it. Its visual essence is not merely distinct but utterly irreplaceable. The moment treeless expanses, volcanic strata, braided glacial streams, moss-draped lava fields, sulphur-stained soils and a pervasive austerity come into view, the recognition is immediate. The terrain proclaims itself, its signature unmistakable.

It stands in a class of one.

Comparisons to New Zealand arise often, but the analogy fails. New Zealand is undeniably lovely, but its allure fits a known genre. Forested peaks, fjords, alpine lakes and undulating hills place it within a broader landscape family that includes Alaska, Patagonia, and swaths of the European Alps.

A vista from New Zealand might pass for elsewhere. An image of Iceland could not.

Our world harbours expanses of staggering beauty. My native India boasts landscapes of extraordinary scale and variety: jungles, deserts, fertile plains, endless shores, and the colossal rampart of the Himalayas. Its wildlife ranges from elephants and tigers to birds and reptiles in astonishing richness. India dazzles through sheer magnitude and plenitude, a vast spectacle.

Iceland operates differently. Its beauty is subtle, spare, almost vulnerable. 

Elsewhere on Earth, geology hides beneath canopies of forest, layers of soil or human cultivation. Iceland stays wild, its bones visible. 

The scarcity of trees proves pivotal. Trees homogenise landscapes, obscure geology, and soften the land’s contours. In Iceland the landscape unfolds in primal splendour, uncamouflaged. Herðubreið would lose its essence if it were clothed in woodland. Here the orography of a mountain manifests in elemental purity.

While the Highlands evoke an alien enigma, the Vestfirðir withdraw from human scale. The ground feels ancient beyond settlement. Many cultures would instinctively recognise such places as hallowed ground.

Through its settled history Iceland’s terrain endured largely untouched by human hands. Until around fifteen years ago, when the scourge of mass tourism descended, initiating what I can only call the prostitution of this sacred earth.

In my photographic exploration, I have surveyed Iceland extensively by helicopter. In recent years the wounds upon the land have deepened alarmingly. Those advocating this harm cloak it in the hollow phrase “sustainable tourism.” It is a deceitful label wielded by profiteers who ferry crowds through Iceland, reducing the country to a commodity. Proposals to curb tourism ignite opposition from its beneficiaries, including politicians. We are told change is inevitable, that Iceland cannot be frozen in time. But decay too is change. Healthy societies evolve organically; they are not rushed.

My homeland offers a caution. Goa was once paradise; mass tourism has remade it beyond recognition. The damage extends beyond nature: the spirit of the place shifts, and so do its people. 

A similar tale unfolds in Iceland.

Not long ago, a wanderer in the countryside might spark curiosity and conversation. No more. Many farmers, wearied by tourism’s intrusions, greet strangers with reserve, if not aversion.

Today one can circle the island, tour the famed sites, and meet scarcely any Icelanders. Former family farms, acquired by Reykjavík capital, have been turned into tourist ventures staffed by transient overseas workers. Outsiders unbound to this soil purchase prime land near storied peaks, eyeing tourism development. The pattern mirrors Switzerland: vistas laced with facilities, tailored for endless crowds.

In essence, Iceland’s Disneyfication.

Alongside the debasement of the land itself, Iceland has suffered a more profound wound in the last decade: its demographic destiny. Projections warn that, without swift remedy, Icelanders may soon be outnumbered in their ancestral home.

And now EU accession is being fast-tracked, with sovereignty and control over borders the price.

The folly of Iceland’s leaders defies measure.

This was the planet’s final haven where a peerless, pristine landscape was wedded to a tiny but vital civilisation. That inheritance now hangs by a thread.

A truth from the Buddha, arising in my motherland India, comes to mind:

“To every man is granted the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates to hell.”

Morgunblaðið, March 30, 2026
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