Let me start by narrating an experience in one of my music class with my teacher. She was teaching me Kamboji and she told me usual Kamboji phrase is Pa Da Sa and you shouldn’t sing Pa Da Ni Sa for Kamboji. She added, Pa Da Ni can occur but as Pa Da Ni Da Pa Ma without touching Sa.

Gamaka s are basically oscillations that a musician adds to a musical note to make it more interesting, kind of like a caffe latte is just another cup of coffee until you top it off with a scoop of swirling cream. Gamakas give the melody a tensile quality, a weighty gravitas. The gamaka epitomises the sound of Carnatic music.

Imagine it like this: all by itself in its house a musical note (or svara as you should call it if you want to earn the respect of hardcore afficionados of Camatic music) gets lonely. Carnatic Svaras are sociable creatures that like to intermingle with their neighbours. So. A note will often drop in at the house of her adjacent note, pull her friend in to her place, and skip over back into the next house. Back and forth. This amicability is what we hear as the oscillations of a note.

Musical distrinctions
The Sangita Sampradaya Pradarsını, an early 20th-Century musical treatise penned by one Subbarama Dikshitulu, specifies up to 15 different fundamental types of tonal oscillation
The text, as translated into English in 2010, quotes a 17th-Century treatise to explain what a gamaka is “When a svara occurs in one sruti, the gamaka makes it take the shade of another sruti.” The specific gamaka s, melodic patterns and phrases which define one raaga are not used interchangeably with another. Usually. And this inimitability makes such modes, called ghana raagas, unique in their own right
The gamaka s applied to a certain note can reveal its affiliation to a certain raaga and serve as an indication of the melodic motifs to come. The gamaka plays a crucial role in the identity and identifiability of a raaga. It is considered the life-blood of the svara. In Carnatic music,, the musical note doesn’t merely exist. It is put to work. That is, it’s not enough for a svara to just ‘be itself in all its inherent beauty No, its value is gauged by how much it contributes to the form of the raaga