Apna Sangeet, Apni Azaadi India’s connection with music goes back thousands of years. Long before most cultures even defined music as an art, the subcontinent was treating it as science, philosophy and spiritual practice. Yet today, in the global music industry, Indian music often sits at the edges of a system it quietly influenced for centuries. From the Sama Veda to Saptaswara , we built some of the world’s earliest ideas of musical structure. Our seven notes, our raga system, our rhythmic cycles they weren’t just sounds. They were emotional maps, rules of expression and complete worlds of their own. These ideas didn’t remain here. Over the last few centuries, Western composers and musicians from Holst to Messiaen, Coltrane to The Beatles borrowed deeply from Indian melodic and rhythmic thinking. Our music reshaped their sound. But most of the profits, the copyrights, the industry power flowed elsewhere. History repeated itself. When the West industrialized music through vinyl, ...