Music is a passion with the Bengalis who express their feelings, emotions
and spiritual experience in songs. The open spaces, the winding rivers
and the beautiful villages have from the long past have inspired
rural bards to compose and sing songs of their joys and sorrows to the
tune of the bamboo flute and the ektara (one-stringed lyre) or the dotara
(two stringed lyre) and the dhal and khol (percussion instruments). Some
raga forms native to Bengal were admitted into the corpus of North Indian
or Hindustani music. Elements of the Karnatic school of music are also
found in these songs. There are different styles in classical ragas.
