A thaat is a classification frame: seven swara positions, one per scale degree from Sa to Ni, that Hindustani music theory uses to sort ragas into families. It is not a raga itself — a raga is its own ascent, its own descent, the phrases it favors, and the swaras it lingers on, and two ragas can share a thaat while sounding nothing alike. Bhatkhande's system names ten of these frames, and every one of them is declared below as a set of semitone offsets from Sa, in 12-TET — the same reference approximation every reference surface on this site carries, because Hindustani intonation bends between these positions in ways twelve equal frets cannot show.
The ten thaats
Every column below is derived: each thaat's swaras come from its declared offset set read through the fixed chromatic-to-sargam naming table, and its komal/tivra count is a scale-degree-by-scale-degree comparison against Bilawal — the all-shuddha reference thaat, itself the row with nothing to compare against but zero.
| Thaat | Swaras from Sa | Komal/tivra vs Bilawal |
|---|---|---|
| Bilawal | Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni | 0 |
| Khamaj | Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Komal Ni | 1 |
| Kafi | Sa, Re, Komal Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Komal Ni | 2 |
| Asavari | Sa, Re, Komal Ga, Ma, Pa, Komal Dha, Komal Ni | 3 |
| Bhairavi | Sa, Komal Re, Komal Ga, Ma, Pa, Komal Dha, Komal Ni | 4 |
| Bhairav | Sa, Komal Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Komal Dha, Ni | 2 |
| Kalyan | Sa, Re, Ga, Tivra Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni | 1 |
| Marwa | Sa, Komal Re, Ga, Tivra Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni | 2 |
| Purvi | Sa, Komal Re, Ga, Tivra Ma, Pa, Komal Dha, Ni | 3 |
| Todi | Sa, Komal Re, Komal Ga, Tivra Ma, Pa, Komal Dha, Ni | 4 |
A thaat is not a raga
Two ragas sharing a thaat can sound almost unrelated: the thaat says which seven swara positions are available, not which ones a raga actually uses, in which order, ascending or descending, or how long it lingers on any one of them. Some ragas even use notes outside their assigned thaat as passing tones. Treat this page the way its title says: ten classification frames, not ten melodies, and not a substitute for hearing the raga itself.
The offsets are declared once, in semitones from Sa, and every other number on this page and its ten leaf pages — the swara names, the komal/tivra counts, and the board positions — is computed from them. Nothing here is typed in twice.
Six of the ten frames share their exact set of seven pitch classes with a scale this site already publishes in 12-TET: Bilawal with Major, Khamaj with Mixolydian, Kafi with Dorian, Asavari with Minor, Bhairavi with Phrygian, Kalyan with Lydian. The other four — Bhairav, Marwa, Purvi and Todi — match nothing in that library, and each of their pages says so rather than forcing a Western name onto it. That count is recomputed by set comparison in CI, never asserted.
Where to start
Start with Bilawal: it is the reference every other row is measured against, so its row of zeros is the baseline the other nine make sense relative to. Then walk outward one swara at a time — Khamaj and Kalyan each move a single position, downward and upward respectively, and comparing those two is the fastest way to feel that a count is not a description. Kafi, Bhairav and Marwa all sit at a count of two and share almost nothing else. Asavari and Purvi reach three; Bhairavi and Todi reach four, one entirely downward and one in both directions at once. Run each thaat's board position table against the fretboard explorer and keep the chord reference nearby for the Western comparison it deliberately is not.