This paper examines the unusual ragotpatti (origin of raga) section of Ksemakarna’s Ragamala (1570), in which each raga is said to originate from a specific sound of the animate or inanimate world—from birdsong and animal calls to the noises of everyday labour. While art historians have analysed these verses for their influence on the ragamala painting tradition, their music-theoretical implications remain largely unexplored. Modern scholarship on raga has often characterised elements such as time and season associations, and visual and aesthetic embodiments, as “extra-musical,” peripheral to raga grammar and performance. Through a close reading of sonic analogy in earlier sangitasastra (technical treatises on music), this paper investigates the musicological function of these origin sounds. By examining how premodern theorists mobilised so-called “extra-musical” material to conceptualise raga, the paper argues that such sounds were not peripheral but central epistemic devices within premodern raga theory. For ethnomusicology, this case study invites a reconsideration of raga theory not as a bounded sonic object reducible to tonal structure, but as a form of acoustemological knowledge that embedded musical identity within ecological, visual, and social worlds.