This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com I was reviewing The 80 Minute Râga, a recording of the raga kanara prakaar by Ali Akbar Khan. It's worth noting that my technical understanding of Indian philosophy is very basic, and so this piece is more artistic than it is philosophical.
"Dharma" derives from a Sanskrit word which roughly means to uphold or sustain, but could be said to mean ‘that which supports’, which implies an inner structure to a thing. That which supports, in the sense that from within it provides the skeleton that gives something its conceptual shape, the relationship between material and its dharma like that of a bed sheet draped over a clothes-horse. In the story, which I think I got from Eknath Easwaran’s foreword to his translation of the Bhagavad Gita, dharma seems to be used in a similar way to that of an essential nature in Aristotle. In the accompanying essay Easwaran says that another meaning of dharma is ‘duty’ and ‘righteousness’, and so another aspect of meaning emerges in the story which suggests an intrinsic link in Hindu ontology between moral compulsion and metaphysics. Under the fabric, material, there would be a rigid skeleton of moral law; the sort that gives one unwavering faith. I think I hear the influence of this structure in how Khan and Misra thunder on with perfect conviction, totally annihilating all doubt under their chariot wheels and leaving only basic truth, not arrived at by logical principle but found in the soul underneath all the wrongness of the material world. I don’t know where they think they’re going, or I should say, where they are bringing me, because it seems they at least know.