Janya Ragas Explained: The Children of the Melakarta

The 72 melakartas are the parents. They are complete, symmetrical, seven-note scales. But walk into a concert and most of what you hear are the janya ragas — the children. Mohanam, Hamsadhwani, Kambhoji, Abhogi, Sri: these are janyas, and they carry the living repertoire.

How a child is born

A janya is derived from its parent in one of three ways:

• By dropping notes (varjya). Leave out one or two swaras and a seven-note parent becomes a five- or six-note child. Harikambhoji minus two notes is Mohanam, the beloved pentatonic.
• By bending the path (vakra). Instead of a straight climb, the raga zigzags — up a little, back, then on. Sri raga, a child of Kharaharapriya, circles through its notes before it lands.
• By taking different roads up and down. Bilahari climbs like a simple pentatonic and descends with all seven notes, a different shape each way.

The three archetypes, drawn

Here are the three ways a child differs from its parent, as living paths. Mohanam simply drops two notes. Bilahari climbs light and falls full. Sri keeps every note of its parent and is different only because its descent turns against itself — the vakra turn, ringed in red. Press play on each and watch the light walk the road.

Counting the notes

Janyas are classified by how many notes they use: five notes is audava, six is shadava, seven is sampurna. A raga can be audava going up and sampurna coming down, which is written audava-sampurna. This counting, plus whether the path is straight or vakra, is most of what separates one janya from another.

Why two ragas can share every note

Here is the beautiful problem. Bilahari and Sankarabharanam use the exact same seven notes. So do Sri and its cousins. If the notes are identical, what makes them different ragas? The path— the order the notes are touched, the phrases the raga loves, the notes it leans on and the ones it hurries past. A raga is not a scale. A raga is a scale with a personality.

Each of these has its own guide, with its arohanam and avarohanam, its Western and Hindustani names, and its songs: Mohanam, Hamsadhwani, Kambhoji, Hindolam, Sri, Bilahari.

The Melakarta Sphere shows every parent with its children orbiting as moons, and its Listen mode can even name a janya from the shape of the phrase you sing, hearing the vakra turn and not just the notes. To go deeper on the parents themselves, start with the visual map of all 72.