Welcome to my Tales of Tails and Talas project storybook! Here, we will compile a list of stories about the fearless ape, Hanuman. In the Ramayana, we learn of Hanuman as the loyal right-hand man (monkey?) to the king of the apes, Sugriva. While some of the feats that Hanuman does perform in the Ramayana are legendary in and of themselves, there are more legendary feats that are told in the Hanuman Chalisa. The Hanuman Chalisa, is a forty-verse (plus bookending couplets) hymn that documents the heroic feats of Hanuman, explores Hanuman's powers and abilities as a deity in his own right, and confirm his devotion to Rama.
The use of Talas (Sanskrit: musical meter) in the title stems from how the Chalisa is delivered. It is a hymn, so it is usually sung. There are no shortage of reference videos out there that show what this would sound like, and I'll embed a couple of samples down below. Taala (also seen as "Tala") refers to the musical meter (or rhythm) of a piece. Of all of the fundamental building blocks of music, rhythm and pitch (pitches here would be a part of a scale -- "raaga" or "raga") are at the forefront of importance. This is especially true in vocal music, where we can interpret differences in rhythm (long vs. short) and pitch (high vs. low) to infer stress points. For example, if a vocalist were to have a relatively long held note on a relatively high pitch, then we can predict that the text being spoken is an important point, as it is receiving a lot of emphasis.
Some of these tunes from the Chalisa may sound strangely familiar to our ears, even though we've never heard them. Why is that? Sometimes, the raaga used is similar to that of scales used in Western Art Music (what we are accustomed to listening to). However, what makes the same notes different in different contexts? Anuja Kamat, a prominent scholar of Indian music, terms the difference "musical intonation" [intonation here as in referring to how something is intoned, not the intonation we have come to associate with how in tune the note is] and likens it to a difference of accent in different spoken languages. At the risk of going into the weeds, you can check out her TedxPanaji talk about that here.
With all of that in mind, I'm excited to share stories of Hanuman with you! I also aim to introduce you some great music that expresses the text of Hanuman Chalisa and delve a little bit into how it effectively tells the story of Hanuman and the manner in which it does so.
I hope that you enjoy!
Image: Hanuman Chasing the Sun