Visual Sources

Visual sources of music and dance in South Asia abound throughout the subcontinent and over millennia. Contemporaneous with the cave paintings of Europe, Paleolithic or Stone Age cave paintings in several parts of India (including present-day Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh) provide the earliest sources, depicting dance formations still common today among some groups and drums of several shapes (Vatsyayan 1982:10). In the urban civilization of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa...