Kalā

Music, dance, theatre, festival performance, and later screen forms — the arts as practiced, taught, and theorised on the subcontinent.

Orientation (map language — does not wait for a reviewer)

These are domain names and pedagogical facts widely used by practitioners and teachers. Stating them here is orientation, not research:

• Hindustani and Carnatic are the two major classical art-music systems in common Indian pedagogy.
• Raga organises melody; tāla organises cyclic time; performance often includes composition and improvisation within that grammar.
• Tāla cycles (beat, division, accent) are real structural features of practice — the existence of the system is not a fringe claim.
• Dance and music traditions are living pedagogies, not only museum objects.

Where “obvious” becomes research

Edge	Why it needs a sourced essay
“Exactly eight classical dances from ancient times”	The familiar list is tied to modern recognition and pedagogy
Fixed eternal counts of ragas or tālas	Pedagogical lists vary by school and period
Unbroken multi-millennium continuity for a named form	Continuity and change both need evidence
Acoustic or neuroscience claims about instruments or rhythm	Need literature; easy AI overclaim zone
One-line origin slogans (“Persian created Hindustani”)	Contact is real; slogans are not history

Scope

Classical music streams; treatise lineage (Nāṭyaśāstra and later) as intellectual history; dance and theatre traditions; folk and popular performance; festivals as performed calendar; cinema and recorded music as continuations and breaks.

Care rules

Prefer practitioner-accurate vocabulary. Institutional labels (Akademi lists, syllabi) are facts about recognition, not automatic proof of antiquity. When pairing with Vijñāna (acoustics, tāla mathematics), keep science claims inside the science literature.

Load-bearing concepts

Concept	Orientation	Depth later when…
Hindustani / Carnatic	Two major classical streams in standard pedagogy	Origins, periodisation
Raga / tāla	Melodic and cyclic-time frameworks	Named-raga history; cycle math; drum science
Nāṭyaśāstra	Foundational treatise lineage	Dating layers, what the text prescribes
Mudrā	Codified gesture systems	Semiotic or historical claims
Festival as performance	Time kept by ritual and season	e.g. calendar astronomy

Topics we plan to cover

Mridaṅgam acoustics; temple bells; Makar Saṅkrānti drift; Cheriyal as painted storytelling.

• Hindustani music: rāga and tāla (essay in preparation)
• Carnatic music: instruments, acoustics and tāla (essay in preparation)