Of all the Indian arts one of the most popular is that of music, and perhaps of them all the least known to Europeans. Almost every one who has been in India knows that native music exists, but there are comparatively few who recognise the deep hold that it possesses over Indian minds. Europeans, as a rule, leave India with the idea that the national music of the country consists only of noise and incessant drumming, varied, perhaps, by nasal drawling—equally repulsive as unmusical. That there is a real musical art—with an employment of various scales, abounding in rhythmical beauty and full of passionate expression, seems to many almost incredible. And yet this is so.