Module 9: Raga and tala study · Lesson 2

From the melakarta chart to a janya, and comparing ragas

◐ Confidence: medium Last verified: 12 Oct 2026

Start from the chart

The full list of parents is the melakarta chart. It shows the 72 parent ragas in the order described in Parent and derived ragas: groups of six called chakras , with the first half using the lower Ma and the second half the higher Ma.

You can narrow the chart by name or number, by the Ma the raga uses, by chakra, and by a note it contains. Try a filter on one note and see how the choice of variant sorts the parents into groups. That is the same logic that generates the chart.

From a parent to its children

A Janya raga takes its notes from one parent. A good route for study is:

1. Open the page of a parent you have met in a song or exercise.
2. Read its scale and its explanation.
3. Look at its related ragas, where the page lists any, and at the derived ragas that name it as their parent in the raga index.
4. Open one of those pages and read the scale again, this time asking which notes of the parent are kept, dropped or ordered differently.

The page of a derived raga links back to its parent, so you can move in both directions.

The raga index

The raga index lists all ragas in a table. You can search by name or number, and filter by type (parent or derived) and by Ma. The column for chakra or parent tells you at a glance where each raga belongs.

Comparing two ragas

The comparison page puts two ragas side by side. Pick a first and a second raga, or follow the compare link from a raga page, which fills in the first one for you.

It shows each raga’s name and type, and then a note-by-note table with a column for each raga and a column that says whether the note is the same. Use it to:

• see how two derived ragas of the same parent differ;
• see how two parents differ by only one or two variants;
• notice which notes two apparently different ragas share.

What the comparison cannot tell you

Two ragas with similar notes may still be different ragas, because a raga is more than its scale (see What is a raga? and Ornaments and phrases). Treat the table as the first step in a comparison, not the last.