In classical Indian aesthetics, art forms like music, poetry, and drama were considered to be interwoven expressions of rasa, the distilled essence of emotion. The Natyashastra laid out the nāyaka–nāyikā bheda (typology of heroes and heroines) as archetypes of feeling, gesture, and context. These figures would later migrate seamlessly into the world of ragas and depictions thereof in art and verse. The ragamala tradition translated these abstract tonal entities into richly detailed visual tableaux, endowing each raga with a persona, mood, and mise-en-scène that echoed the older emotional typologies. What emerged was an ekphrastic continuum between nātya (drama) and raga, as music came to acquire a humanised dramaturgy.

No wonder, that in the ragamala paintings of north India, ragas were personified through vivid scenes of human emotion. Raga Lalit, an early-morning melody, traditionally appears as a clandestine lover slipping away at daybreak after a furtive night of passion. Painting upon painting describes a similar template of the “fair mistress laying exhausted upon her bed at dawn” while her lover silently departs after a passionate night. Such imagery situates Lalit firmly in the shringāra rasa, the aesthetic of romantic love, suffused with the poignant ache of viraha (separation) at first light. The music historian Katherine Butler Schofield notes that these artistic vignettes of nāyak-nāyikā (hero-heroine) love were not mere illustrations, but part of a shared emotional vocabulary between art and music, a seamless ekphrasis where viewers “internally ‘heard’ a composition when viewing its image”. The raga’s visual economy thus establishes a mood of illicit love and bittersweet parting at dawn, setting the stage for the songs composed in its honour and effect.

This interweaving of music, painting, and poetry was more than allegory; it reflected a deeper confluence of cultural concepts of love. Schofield notes that in the Mughal era, the Persian idea of ishq (passionate love, often with mystical overtones) found common ground with the Indian idea of rasa. She observes that in particular, the shringāra rasa resonated profoundly with the ideas of ishq in Mughal music and poetry. Mughal connoisseurs seized upon the figure of the yearning nāyikā from the Indic tradition as a vehicle to explore ishq, whether worldly or divine. In songs of that period, the boundary between sensual and spiritual love was intriguingly porous: the same verse could be sung as a tale of human lovers or as a Sufi metaphor.

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Raga Lalit, with its imagery of lovers at dawn, epitomised this contiguity. The raga’s very name means “the charming one”, and significantly, it was conceived in classical musicology as a rāginī (a “wife” raga) often portrayed in a state of delicate, erotic emotion. (It is another matter that Faqirullah classified Lalit as Bhairav’s rāgaputra (son), averring that it is a sampūrnaraga “to be sung in the heroic mode” or vīra rasa. Sampūrna ragas by definition use all seven notes, and the modern Lalit omits the fifth.) Thus, from the outset, the modern Lalit carried the aura of ishq: sensual delight mingled with the pang of separation, an emotional flavour that early patrons and artists savoured as both aesthetic relish and spiritual allegory.

Night-long laments in Lalit Bandishes

Unsurprisingly, the traditional bandishes, or song-texts, composed in Lalit echo the ragamala tableau of nocturnal passion and daybreak separation. Many khayāl compositions in Lalit are steeped in the imagery of raiyna/rāta (Hindi for night) and the longing of lovers. For instance, one vintage khayāl begins “kahān jāge rāta” (“Where have you been up all night?”), voiced as a plaint by the heroine who has spent dark sleepless hours, her anticipation unmissable in her verb for the lover: “awake” rather than “asleep”, insinuating infidelity. Another popular bandish goes “jāge sāri raiyna, o balamā”, meaning “I/ we stayed awake all night, Oh my dear,” emphasising nocturnal anguish. In performance, a vocalist rendering this bandish in pre-dawn hours effectively channels the raga’s original ethos, while the seasoned listener can almost picture the oil lamps guttering out as the sky pales, with a lovelorn voice asking why the night passed in the agony of love.

Likewise, the romantic bandish “Raiyna ka sapnā main kāse kahūn” (Who shall I tell the night’s dream / the dream-like night?) poignantly captures the intimacy of midnight visions that cannot easily be shared come morning. Often, in contemporary practice, these songs are followed by a rejoinder in the lyrics about the dawn: a classic line in many Lalit compositions is “bhayī bhor” or “bhor hi āye”, signifying that dawn has arrived—sometimes with joyful relief but more often with reproach that the beloved returned only with the morning light. A drut composition recorded by Bhimsen Joshi, for example, moves from “Raiyna kā sapnā” in the ektāla to a sprightly conclusion “Bhayī bhor, gājarwā bāje”(“the morning is come, and the bells are ringing”), evoking the morning soundscape that stirs the forlorn heroine.

Similarly, the Jaipur bandish “ghatana lāgī raiyna, jāgo jāgo rī gara lāgo rī’”(”the night begins to wane, wake up, wake up, hold me”) signals that the lovers’ time together is slipping away, even as she urges the hero to wake and embrace her before dawn breaks fully. The text compresses within a single breath two contrary impulses: to prolong the intimacy of the night and to hasten the farewell that the morning imposes. Lalit’s liminal tonal palette lends itself to such ambivalent temporalities: the melodic line can hover between lassitude and urgency, just as the text hovers between the night’s erotic languor and the dawn’s inevitability, shuddh Ma presses against the tīvra. The bandish thus enacts the classic Lalit moment of the surfeit of waking love at the inevitable edge of departure, where passion is intensified precisely because time is running out.

Through such texts, Lalit’s lyrical canon dwells in the nocturne of love: secret rendezvous, longing gazes through the night, the quiet melancholy of early morning separation. These lyrics align perfectly with the ragamala iconography of Lalit as the lover’s abhisār (clandestine tryst) and departure. Even when listeners do not comprehend every word (since lyrics are often in literary Braj or regional dialects), the recurrent motifs of ratiā (night), nayak-nayika love, and bhor in these bandishes cue the mind towards the universal tale of lovers parting at daybreak. The emotional arc from midnight to sunrise is built into the very core of Lalit’s poetic repertoire.

Erotic meets sacred

While most Lalit song-texts maintain a consistent mood of romantic yearning, one striking Punjabi bandish stands out for its dramatic shift in tone between verses. This composition, known by its opening line “Phabadā yāra dā jobanā” encapsulates Lalit’s bipolar semantic life, oscillating between the sensual and the sacred. In the sthāyī (opening verse), the singer exults in bold erotic imagery: “phabadā yāra dā jobanā, duje nazar nahī ānvadā” (The beloved’s youthful bosom is so alluring, I can see nothing and no one else). These two lines are unabashed in their celebration of physical beauty, sketching a scene entirely in keeping with Lalit’s traditional role as a raga of illicit passion. We are back in the private boudoir of the ragamala: the lover is mesmerised by his darling’s jobanā, his eyes cannot stray elsewhere (“duje nazar nahin ānvadā”, no second glance comes to me). It is a sensuous, earthy couplet, delivered in the lively cadence of Punjabi folk speech, and one can imagine it being sung with a playful, even provocative lilt. Indeed, the vocabulary here, phabadā (becoming, enticing) and yāra dā jobanā (beloved’s bosom), is intensely physical and intimate, invoking shringāra in its most tangible form.

Then comes the antarā (secondary verse), and the entire atmosphere swivels sharply. Suddenly, the lyrics proclaim: “alif mīm bich farak nā koyī, alif mīm ban ānvadā”. In this cryptic Sufi-style metaphoric language, alif and mīm are two letters of the Arabic alphabet: here understood as ciphers for Allah (alif) and Muhammad (mīm). The verse declares: “There is no difference between Alif and Mīm; Alif has appeared having become Mīm.” In other words, Allah and the Prophet are one, a statement of mystical union or an affirmation of the divine manifested in human form. This couplet has the flavour of a manqabat/nāta (devotional Islamic songs): it would be perfectly at home in a Sufi shrine or a qawwālī assembly, extolling the inseparability of the beloved Prophet from the essence of God. The lover’s erotic moment has abruptly turned into pious philosophy.

It is baffling how to interpret this bandish’s two halves. Might the antarā be a later extrapolation, serving a more puritanical age? The usual explanation in Indo-Islamic poetic tradition that earthly love (ishq-e-majāzī) can serve as a metaphor for divine love (ishq-e-haqīqī) falls pitifully short here because the second verse does not veil its devotional intent in metaphor at all. Rather, it names the Almighty outright. We are not dealing with a subtle Sufi allegory where the beloved’s beauty might secretly mean God’s benevolence. Rather, “alif mīm bich faraq na koye” spells out a theological doctrine in the plainest terms after an explicit, carnal prelude. The slippery slope between love and devotion that Schofield identifies as fundamental to Mughal music culture is certainly present, but here it is jarring in its bluntness. It is as if the song itself embodies a midnight-to-morning transformation: lust turning to prayer at the break of dawn.

How did such a song come to be, and what does it tell us about Lalit’s, or for that matter, any raga’s semantic and sentimental malleability? One possibility is that “phabadā” was composed at cultural crossroads, perhaps by a Punjabi court musician or Sufi poet who saw no incongruity in melding sensual and spiritual images. The Punjabi language has a robust tradition of Sufi poetry that freely traverses between the domains of the tavern and the temple. Even so, the concrete explicitness of this bandish’s sthayi versus antarā remains confusing.

In performance practice, this bandish has remained among the most consistently performed in recent memory. Musicians have handled the semantic anomaly in various ways. Some treat the verses as independent fragments: the first as a light-hearted ingress and the second as the “true” bandish carrying the raga’s gravitas. Oftener, contemporary vocalists simply sashay through the Punjabi lyrics without dwelling on their meaning, focussing instead on the musical nuances. In fact, this composition’s Punjabi words have been so unusual and perhaps inconvenient for the largely non-Punjabi khayāl circuit that the song is frequently mispronounced or misspelt, a fate that has been long accepted by the tappā, another Punjabi genre that has flourished in Purab. Recordings list it under cryptic titles like “Bhavada yaarda jobana”, or other such garbled phonetics, betraying how performers and record companies alike have been unsure what to make of it.

This practical mis-singing and misspelling underscores a broader subtext: in khayāl, the integrity of song-texts is often secondary to the raga’s melodic exposition. The words are a vehicle, important for setting a mood but ultimately disposable if they threaten to distract from the music. The case of “phabadā” illustrates this disposability: its graphic eroticism has been effectively neutered in circulation, left as an odd curiosity that most artists gloss over on their way to serious climaxes.

The changing aesthetics of Lalit

The split personality of “Phabadā yāra dā jobanā” hints at a larger historical shift. Over the past century, Lalit has evolved from an erotic, even risqué, raga into one associated with piety, devotion, and serenity. Early 20th century Hindustani music underwent a conscious process of sanitisation and “embourgeoisement”, as the locus of performance laicised from royal courts to public concert halls and radio.

In the late 1900s, self-styled reformists like Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande and Vishnu Digambar Paluskar attempted to elevate Hindustani music to a more classical, spiritually upright status, often implicitly contrasting it with the allegedly “corrupt” music of the tawāifs and Muslim ustads. This went hand in hand with a campaign to expunge overt eroticism from the repertoire. This project was carried further in the postcolonial cultural dispensation, exemplified best in the prudish diktats of the then All India Radio chief B.V. Keskar.

A famous example, documented in Saba Dewan’s film The Other Song, is the thumri “Lagat jobanwa mein chot” (My bosom bears a wound). This song was recorded in 1935 by the iconic singer Rasoolan Bai in all its unabashed glory: “Lagat jobanvā me chot, phūl gendvā na mār” (My breasts are wounded; do not throw flower-balls at me). But by the mid-20th century, a bowdlerised version of this thumri also came into circulation. Rasoolan Bai herself, performing in a new, squeamish ecumene, sometimes changed the pivotal word jobanvā (bosom) to karejvā (heart). “My heart is wounded, don’t throw flowers,” she sang, converting, as it seems, a carnal image into a platonic one. In “the tiny space created by that one cleansed word”, as a reviewer put it, unfolded an entire saga of social policing: the erotic song of the courtesan was rewritten to fit the decorum of modern classical music. Cleansing of lyrics was a part of the broader project to dissociate classical music from sensuality, a project often coloured by communal and gender biases.

Against this backdrop, the treatment of Lalit in modern performance can perhaps be understood as part of the “devotional turn” in Hindustani music. In old texts and paintings, Lalit’s identity was intertwined with illicit love and dawn partings, but in the hands of 20th century maestri, Lalit, like many other ragas became a vehicle for introspection, spiritual depth, and technical purity, largely stripped of its erotic connotations. This spiritualisation, especially of morning ragas like Miyan ki Todi and Lalit, is also perfectly in tune with the spiritual ordering of the day that crystallised in the late colonial and modern periods, where mornings were increasingly reserved for prayer, introspection, and devotional practice, even as the evening hours might retain a residual licence for sensuality, romance, and lighter entertainments. In this reordered daily rhythm, Lalit’s repositioning from the raga of clandestine passion at dawn to the raga of prayerful serenity seems almost inevitable.

Lalit’s very sonic structure, which omits the fifth and uses both a natural and sharp fourth, creates, perhaps, need for high concentration, which is a small segue to what can be described as austere, meditative ambience. Modern connoisseurs routinely describe Lalit using adjectives like “serene” or “devotional” or “serious”, evoking prayerful calm in the quiet hours of pre-dawn. It is no coincidence that an overwhelmingly large number of contemporary press reviews and other discourse on Lalit emphasises its spiritual gravitas: for instance, one source calls it “sweet and mellifluous” yet fundamentally calm and prayerful, best sung at daybreak when the world is still. The raga’s romantic roots have been sublimated into a more generalised feeling of bhakti, consigning it under the large blanket of the shānta (peaceful) rasa, its erstwhile eros spayed to a surrender.

In performance, this transformation was spearheaded by influential vocalists of the post-Independence decades. Amir Khan (1912–74), one of the titans of khayāl, is often credited with shaping the modern approach to Lalit. Known for his slow, expansive, and introspective style, Amir Khan imbued Lalit with an unprecedented solemnity. In his hands, a bandish like “kahān jāge rāta” became less about the literal question of a lover’s whereabouts and more about exploring, note by note, the raga’s austere beauty. He famously prioritised swara intonation and mood over explicit text expression, sometimes even abstracting the lyrics into pure sound. This approach effectively de-eroticised the material; even, one might argue, emptied it of all semantic content through the sheer force of his exceptional musicality. The words “jāge rāta” might tell of a sleepless romantic night, but Amir Khan’s rendition, floating on the drone of the tanpura at 6 am, could just as well have been a midnight vigil for the soul.

Even today, one is left with an impression of profound seriousness, as if his Lalit were a musical meditation rather than an ardent rendezvous. Similarly, many other post-Independence musicians, including contemporaries like Ashwini Bhide Deshpande, have treated Lalit with cloying, devotional reverence, frequently choosing song-texts that indicate mystical themes or divine love. Jasraj even recorded verses from the Sankatamochan Hanumanashtak (a Tulsidas hymn to Hanuman) in this raga to great effect, merging its dawn setting to the story of the infant Lord Hanuman gulping the morning sun and plunging the three worlds into instant darkness (“bāla samaya Ravi bhaksh liyo jab tīnahun loka bhayo andhiyāro”).

This was a musical masterstroke on multiple levels: it referenced a mythic dawn (the incident of the sun being swallowed at daybreak), invoked a spiritual hero (Hanuman) at the precise hour of his worship, and musically it fitted the raga’s scale like a glove. The audience, whether or not they caught the lyrical meaning, could not miss the devotional fervour. Jasraj’s experiment was met with great acclaim: here was Lalit presented unequivocally as a sacred dawn raga, complete with a familiar, built-in prayer. A studio recording of his pointedly titled “Divine Dawn: Raga Lalit” presented the raga as an object of spiritual inspiration. The erotic nayika of yore has long fled; in her place stands the radiant figure of a Lord at sunrise.

Another modern great, Rashid Khan, adhered to the contemporary classicist ethos too. His Lalit renditions were contemplative and refined. In fact, Lalit was the first raga that he formally recorded, though that is not especially consequential in this context. What matters is the frequency and seriousness with which he returned to Lalit across his career. Instead of treating it as a routine morning “item”, he revisited it insistently over the years, often with a new bandish. Rashid Khan is insufficiently recognised for this aspect of his musicianship. He brought into circulation an unusually large number of bandishes in Lalit, at least 15 in different combinations, far more than is typical for his stature in contemporary khayāl practice. As late as 2016, at the Bengal Classical Music Festival, he sang “kāhe sautaniyā dhing biramāye” (“why would you go to the co-wife’s house?”) for the first time in nearly 20 years, another bandish centred on jealous reproach and erotic suffering.

Indeed, compared with the semantic de-predication of the song-text in Amir Khan, Rashid Khan’s performances show a trend back towards acknowledging lyrics (in that he enunciated the bandish more clearly, though the Punjabi song-text “phabadā” did present fundamental language problems, but his musical expression in these renditions leaned towards the Amir Khan method). His emotional emphasis, like Amir Khan, was on the bhāva (feeling) of the raga rather than on the erotic storyline of the bandish. He might accent the pathos of a phrase like “saarī raiynā” (all night) with sighing glides and desperate khatkās (musical knots), yet that pathos could just as easily suggest a devotee’s long night of prayer as a lover’s anguish. The ambiguity worked in favour of open, polyphonic interpretations of the raga.

Are Khayāl texts dispensable?

The journey of Raga Lalit from eros to devotion offers a microcosm of the changing aesthetic preferences in Hindustani music. In today’s performances, the song-text functions as the vehicle for the raga. If a lyric aligns with the modern performer’s emotive intent, it may be highlighted; if it clashes, it may be adjusted or ignored. The curious case of Lalit’s bandishes shows both these tendencies. On one hand, explicitly erotic lyrics like “phabadā yāra dā jobanā” survive only in a token way, often garbled in pronunciation and glossed over, indicating that the actual words do not much matter to the artist or audience beyond providing a skeletal framework for the melodic development. On the other hand, artists selectively elevate certain lyrics that reinforce the desired solemn mood, as seen in Jasraj injecting a Hanuman hymn or Bhimsen Joshi lingering on a phrase like “bhayī bhor” (morning has come) to emphasise the contemplative sunrise moment.

This raises a provocative question: are the khayāl song-texts essentially dispensable? Many purists would argue the poetry of a bandish is an inseparable part of the raga’s identity. Yet, the ease with which substantial portions of Lalit’s poetic content have been repurposed or forgotten suggests a pragmatic reality: the rasa matters more than textual connoisseurship in contemporary practice. The history of Lalit illustrates how a raga can undergo a sort of semantic cleansing without losing its musical core. We no longer “hear” the illicit tryst in Lalit unless we consciously look for it. Instead, we hear serenity, gravity, even hints of prayer because that is what successive generations of performers have chosen to emphasise. The original bandishes are still there in books and archives, but their semantic layers have been peeled back or overwritten by new contexts.

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In this light, Saba Dewan’s hunt for the purported “missing song” appears somewhat otiose. In her search for a “long-lost” thumri “lagata jobanwā mein chot’”, Dewan scoured villages and interviewed elder musicians, lamenting the absence of recordings, even asking, with feigned innocence, the meaning of the word joban. Ironically, the Hindustani repertoire abounds in such imagery if one knows where to listen. The song was “lost” only until collectors shared it freely on YouTube. Meanwhile, compositions in erotic registers, such as our Lalit bandish, have always been around, not quite either “lost” or “missing”. When jobana became an awkward word, musicians simply replaced it with karejwa or slurred it in performance. The music went on, uninterrupted.

So it is best to read Lalit’s evolution from passion to patience less as a rupture than a glide: two moods turned on the same axis. Etymology helps us hear the continuity: both passion and patience descend from the Latin pati, “to suffer, to endure”. The old Lalit of clandestine passion with its nocturnal ache, the lover’s wound was already a schooling in pati: to feel is to suffer. The modern Lalit of dawn’s prayerful patience with its held notes and unhurried vilambits, answers with the other half of that root: to endure is also to feel, but differently, with restraint and inwardness.

What changes across a century of performance is the weighting of that shared pain—once burnished in the heat of desire, now tempered to the coolness of virtue. The raga does not abandon its first language but attenuates it in performance practice, carrying the nocturne of longing into a morning of composure. Between passion and patience, wound and vigil, Lalit sustains a single, continuous verb—to suffer what the heart cannot help at night, and to endure it long enough until the clarity of dawn. 

Kanav Gupta is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Music, University of Nottingham.