Introduction to Indias Musical Traditions Following piece of writing is a critique on Techniques of Oral Transmission.

Before coming to this class, I personally never knew that in the past Sanskrit was preserved orally. When I read this articles about techniques of oral transmission and I was fascinated by the fact that How tons of knowledge is passed down to another generation just by recitation, from guru to sishya, from father to son. And hence, I got one more reason to say that India is AWESOME. For a moment I was enthralled by the memory, concentration and efficiency of the people of Vedic times or if we can say our elders or ancestors, who preserved the knowledge for years and years without any error or mistake. Preserving Rgveda, most ancient Indian text, without writing it down and still managing to keep it as it is, not a single variation, is quite a difficult job. Following were the methods used for such oral transmission practices: 1) Samhita Patha or continuous recitation: It is normal recitation considering all the rules of phonetic euphonic combination of Sanskrit. 2) Pada Patha or recitation word by word: In this type of recitation, each word is pronounced individually with a beak after each word and grammatical components in the words. This recitation suppresses the euphonic combinations. Like ab, bc, cd etc. 3) Krama Patha or recitation step by step: Two consecutive words were pronounced together, with each word appearing twice, at the end of the pair and at the beginning of the next pair.

4) Jata Patha or recitation in the form of meshes: In this, each pair from the karma patha is taken, repeated in the reverse order, then in the original order. Example: ab, ba, ab: bc, cb, bc etc. 5) Dhvaja Patha or flag recitation: The first and last pair of the stanza are joined, then the second and the one before last, and so on, until the last and first pair are reached respectively. Example: ab, yz: bc, xy etc. 6) Ghana Patha or dense recitation: Most difficult and elaborate of all types of recitation, in this type, each pair is taken, reversed, taken again with the addition of a third word, the three words sequence is reversed and then repeated in the original order. Then next pair is taken and the same process is repeated and so on. Above types of recitation were used by not only Brahmins but also local people to teach their children. And one of the main reason which made this recitation practices possible are these methods. But thinking of implementing this in todays life, what I feel is that, this kind of practices were only possible in the past. I will not say that it is not possible in present time, but for that one has to dedicate his whole time and energy for such task and at the same time that person has to do his day to day jobs, and in todays fast life not many people around the globe are have enough time.