Bilaskhani Todi

Bilaskhani Todi carries one of the more vivid origin stories in the repertoire: tradition holds that Bilas Khan, son of the court musician Mian Tansen, was attempting to sing his father's beloved Todi in mourning after Tansen's death and, grief-stricken, altered its notes without meaning to, creating a new raga in the process. Like most such stories the details aren't independently verifiable, but the name preserves the memory of the mix-up either way. That mix-up shows up in its classification too: despite the name, Bilaskhani Todi isn't filed under the Todi thaat at all — its actual note content, komal Re, Ga, and Dha alongside shuddha Ma and Pa, matches Bhairavi far more closely, and that's where Bhatkhande's system places it. The connection to Todi survives mainly in performance practice: heavy meend across Re and Ga, the same treatment those notes get in genuine Todi-thaat ragas, applied here to an otherwise Bhairavi-shaped scale. Its ascent is audav — Sa, komal Re, komal Ga, Pa, komal Dha, Sa' — but sources are inconsistent about the descent: some give a full seven-note sampurna fall, others (including the shape used here) drop Pa from the descent entirely in favor of a passing shuddha Ma, which would make the raga audava-shadav rather than the audava-sampurna label it usually carries. Vadi and samvadi sit on komal Dha and komal Ga, the same pairing as Bhairavi itself, and the two ragas are close enough that a Bilaskhani Todi performance can drift toward straight Bhairavi if the Todi-style meend isn't kept deliberate and constant.