“Garland of Ragas is an interactive project that has quietly waited to step into the light. As India races into its digital future, much of its ancient wisdom, some of it whispered down through millennia, risks fading into silence. Among the most vulnerable are the classical arts: intricate, profound, and too often overlooked by younger generations. Their beauty remains, but their audience drifts.
Through the nøn-secular archive, our intent is clear: to breathe new life into the old, to carry forward what time threatens to forget. Garland of Ragas is our response, an offering, a revival. At its heart lie the Ragamala paintings: delicate, symbolic portraits where music, poetry, and visual art meet.
Ragamala, meaning Garland of Ragas, gives this project its name and its soul.”
We began with a simple, open-ended brief:
“How can the poetic soul of 'Ragamala' paintings be reinterpreted into
a modern visual language that resonates with today's generation and preserves its relevance for the future?”
When reimagining something as vast and intricate as Indian classical music and the world of Ragamala paintings, we found ourselves returning, time and again, to a single thread: Emotion.
In Indian classical arts, emotion is not an embellishment, it is the essence. Each composition, each brushstroke, each note is steeped in Navarasa (the nine foundational emotions believed to shape human experience). These nine rasas (emotions) became our first anchor. Every raga carries within it a dominant rasa, and from this idea, our reinterpretation began.
From the Navarasa, we built a bespoke color theory, our first layer of translation, where each emotion found its hue.
But the question remained: how does one give form to sound? How does the intangible become visible?
This led us to Cymatics (the study of sound vibrations made visible through geometry). Each musical note, or swara, resonates at a specific frequency, producing patterns that emerge in nature, in sand, in water. Drawing from Chladni’s foundational research, these patterns became visual scaffolds for the raga’s voice.
The convergence of Navarasa and Cymatics gave rise to a layered system, a new visual language to express the emotion, tone, and texture of each raga. Each piece in this series is not only an artwork, but also a key: a distilled set of information and feeling, pointing toward a larger possibility.
The long-term vision: to create a living, growing visual archive of Hindustani Classical Ragas—a space where tradition and modernity meet, and where the sound of the raga finds new form, again and again.