CHAPTER V
TĀLA OR TIME MEASURES
Musical time in India, more obviously than elsewhere, is a development from the prosody and metres of poetry. The insistent demands of language and the idiosyncrasies of highly characteristic verse haunt the music, like a 'presence which is not to be put by.' The time-relations of music are affected both by the structure of the language and by the method of versification which ultimately derives from it,' says one student of Indian music from the west. Until the nineteenth century, there was practically no prose in India and everything was learnt through the medium of verse chanted to regular rules. Both in Sanskrit and in the vernaculars all syllables are classified according to their time-lengths, the unit of time being a matra. Very short syllables of less than a matra also occur.
Great stress has always been laid by Indian grammarians upon giving the 'exact value' to syllables in verse; and as there is no accent at all in Indian verse, the time-length is all important. This may account for the great development of time-measures in Indian music. The different time-measures for verse are most carefully laid down and have to be strictly adhered to. When grammar, philosophy, history and geography are learnt in verse, one gets the sense of duration and rhythm highly developed, and it is this sense of duration that is the central thing in Indian time. Any one who studies Indian prosody can easily see the great difficulty, to say the least, of obtaining a pleasurable result by combining Indian verse with western tunes. One of the most difficult things for the foreigner to get away from in an Indian vernacular is the stressing of syllables. The division into words is not at all important in Indian verse, and so music does not take particular note of this. In India words are more often set to music, rather than music to words. It is easy to see then the
