Abstract: The Sangita Ratnakara is an important 12th century treatise of Indian musicology, composed in metric Sanskrit verse. The author Sarngadeva treats the production of vocal music in the human body comprehensively, as a physical and energetic phenomenon. He further elucidates the mathematical aspects of musical phrase formation. The work is rich in terms of technical details.
We summarize the first chapter of the work, referring to the Sanskrit text with English translation, comments and notes of R K Shringy (Motilal Banarsidas, 1978) (approx. 400 pages), which focuses on the distinct notes (svara, sruti), their production in the body, their number and variety and rules of composition. We note the empirical and descriptive treatment of the subject matter, an important epistemological consideration
About the speaker: Shailaja D Sharma is a Professor of Mathematics at Azim Premji University, specializing in statistics. Her research interest is in the history of Mathematics, and particularly in Indian epistemologies. She recently co-edited a book titled “The Computation Meme: Computational Thinking in the Indian Tradition” (IISc Press, 2024) which discusses the computational thinking underlying Indian traditional knowledge systems. She has characterized the probability distribution for Indian playing dice, as the “Chausar Distribution”. She contributes to the public discourse by way of newspaper articles and talks.