Indian classical music is among the most sophisticated artistic systems ever developed by a civilisation. Its theoretical architecture - the raag system, the concept of time in tala, the relationship between performer and tradition - took more than two thousand years to construct. It is, by any measure, a civilisational achievement.
And yet, we have no archival objects for it. We have recordings. We have concert programmes. We have biographies of masters. But we do not have documented cultural works - objects that carry the history, geography, and context of the music in a form one can hold, preserve, and pass on.
In the Western tradition, manuscripts, scores, instruments, and archival objects have been collected and preserved for centuries. These objects tell us not just what the music sounded like, but what world produced it. They are cultural facts. They carry civilisational memory.
House of Swar exists to create this category for Indian classical music. Not to compete with recordings. Not to replace concert experiences. But to add the dimension that has always been missing - the documented, ownable cultural work.
There is a difference between consuming culture and holding it. When you listen to a raag, you receive it. When you own an archival work that documents the raag's history, its teachers, its geography and its context - you become a custodian of it.
Custodianship is not a passive act. It is a commitment. The person who holds such a work is responsible for its presence in the world. They carry a truth about civilisation that would otherwise exist only in scattered records, living memories, and academic abstractions.
The Founding Edition - Journey of Sitar - is the first such work. It documents the complete cultural geography of the sitar across five hundred years and the Indian subcontinent. It is not a decoration. It is not a product. It is a documented cultural fact. And it is available to five people in the world who wish to hold it.
The Founding Edition is the beginning. House of Swar will document other instruments, other traditions, other periods in India's classical musical history. Each will be produced with the same archival rigour. Each will carry the same institutional commitment to accuracy, beauty, and permanence.
In ten years, we intend for a House of Swar collection to be a significant cultural archive in its own right. Not merely beautiful objects, but an assembled documentation of a civilisation's relationship with its own music.
This is what we are building. Slowly. Carefully. Without urgency.
- House of Swar