ABSTRACT
We know about the music of ancient and medieval India (up to c. c.e. 1300) only through the documents in which scholars sought to describe and prescribe it. The transition between the so-called ancient and medieval eras of Indian history was gradual, and was the result more of a trend toward feudalism and an evolving state of mind than of the rise and fall of kingdoms and dynasties. Historians have consequently dated the onset of the Middle Ages anywhere from the fall of the Gupta kingdom (c. 540) to the first Muslim invasions (c. 1000). But in terms of intellectual history, the records of early Indian music reveal a tradition of relative cultural continuity. Musical ideas and the remarkable clarity of the Sanskrit language in which these ideas were expressed proved more durable than the societies in which their authors lived.
