From Sacred Resonance to Systematized Sound: Ritual, Sound, Materiality, and Music in Ancient India (Harappan Civilization to 7th Century CE)

Abstract

The sonic ornamentation that shaped Indian musical thought forms a profound ontology of sound and meaning. The ritualistic sounds from the conch to the rhythmic beats of the drum lead to the argument that classical musical theory is not a sudden philosophical invention, but a retrospective conceptualization. The central idea here is that archaeology and the study of early Indian music theory almost never delve into each other’s past. Between these worlds lies a silence - almost like a missing note from the saptak, where emotion, theory and memory drift apart. Harappan studies have been regarded as visual, material, logistical, with the development of seals and shipments, whereas musicological studies of the Vedic period were interwoven with grammar, classification and treatise. The earliest centuries of Indian ritual sound practice remain unlinked to the later systematization of raga, sruti, and ensemble. The study therefore places Harappan sound-making objects, Vedic ritual instrumentality, and early temple acoustics contextualised by the rhythmic waves from the Nātyaśāstra and Dattilam. It reframes Indian musical history as a continuum of intentional resonance, where sacred resonance and architectural acoustics were not peripheral curiosities, but the formative emotional and material conditions that shaped the abstraction of musical categories that would later define classical thought.

DOI - https://doi.org/10.66496/LCAP.9788168710115.2026.10-21