Where the words are held higher than the notes they ride

As a Bengali who adores Tagore, I am used to hearing him trashed by Indians who do not have access to him through his own language, Bangla. There is, of course, the canard, still in circulation, that he wrote Jana gana mana in sycophantic praise of George V. Only recently, some Bengali-speaking friends in Delhi wrote — not so much complainingly but more out of a sense of being injured — of a distinguished Punjabi historian who, uninvited and with full awareness of how much they revered Tagore, volunteered the opinion that Tagore was a highly overrated writer who got the Nobel Prize only because Westerners at the time (1913) valued a certain version of Eastern mysticism. Now while there is some truth to that claim — and many Bengalis have written about it — the adoration that Tagore receives from the Bengali community the world over does not derive from or even depend on his having received the coveted prize.

The prize matters to unworthy chauvinistic sentiments but the Bengali love of Tagore really comes from their appreciation of the extent to which he gave to their language its modern form and capabilities.

 The situation gets worse when it comes to songs written by Tagore that now belong to a genre called Rabindrasangeet. Indian friends without any Bengali have often told me how “boring” they find Tagore’s “whining” tunes, and, of course, I know people whose tastes have been so moulded by Indian classical music that they turn up their noses at the mention of Rabindrasangeet. Once a Bengali lady who sings beautiful bhajans in Hindi told me that Rabindrasangeet represented for her the lowest depths she could ever imagine descending — or perhaps I should say, condescending — to, if asked to sing in a social gathering of Indians.

Now, the songs collected under the rubric Rabindrasangeet were not always so called. There was a time, running well into the mid-1920s, when they were known as Robibabur gaan or Songs by Robibabu and sometimes included in books with titles like Veshya-sangeet (Songs Sung By Prostitutes) that often distorted the original words of Tagore and set to them to tunes that had nothing to do with the poet. Tagore actually had to fight court cases for over ten years to get ownership and control of his own songs. I suspect the category Rabindrasangeet is a later invention of the All India Radio.

Tagore wrote well over 2,500 songs and they mostly carry tunes composed by him except for some written in his youth for which his elder brother Jyotirindranath Tagore scored the music. In fact, the two brothers wrote and composed together quite a few songs of nationalist and operatic genres  — one of them contributing the words and the other the tune or both together — and sometimes the attribution of authorship to one or the other is just plain wrong. Towards the end of Tagore’s life, Pankaj Kumar Mullick set a long Tagore poem to music and sang it for the film Mukti (1937). Tagore blessed his efforts. But on the whole Tagore wrote both the words and the tunes for his songs and drew on a wide repertoire of music, ranging from Scottish and Irish ballads or songs of folk or national heritage (some of Robert Burns’ songs, for example) Indian ragas, Hindustani light classical music (such as thumri), through to Bengali folk music (baul in particular), Western music, as well as some Karnataki compositions.

He also experimented with tala. His grasp of north Indian raga system was very sure. Sailaja Ranjan Majumdar, a great exponent of Tagore songs at Shantiniketan, tells the story of a particular week when every morning he would leave Tagore a slip of a paper simply expressing his desire for a song in a particular raga and would come back in the evening to find his prayer answered! Many of Tagore’s songs are actually based on a very creative and subtle blending of several ragas. Tagore’s songs were not really “popular” until towards the very end of his life. Bengali cinema played a role in popularizing them in the late 1930s and the ‘40s. He rode a second wave of popularity posthumously in the 1960s when his centenary was celebrated.

Why do most Tagore songs fall flat on the ears of so many Indians without any knowledge of Bangla? Of course, there is no ultimate accounting for taste but there is one particular reason that these songs cannot be fully appreciated if one cannot follow the words. This reason lies in the way that Tagore conceptualised his songs. He argued his point powerfully in a series of letters exchanged with Dhurjyotiprasad Mukherjee, the famous professor of Economics from the University of Lucknow. Fundamentally, Tagore’s point was this.

He saw music — tunes, that is — as a vehicle for his words. Tunes gave wings to his words and made them soar by adding dimensions to their meaning that could not be conveyed by their sounds alone; they needed what tunes added to them. What Tagore did not want to borrow from classical traditions of singing was the practice of music or tunes pushing the words into insignificance, so that what one enjoyed in the end were the various moves of the raga itself. In his letters to Mukherjee, Tagore fundamentally asserted his right as a poet to give supremacy to his words and to make music subordinate to language. His songs are ultimately poems set to tune, and you do not get their full value if you do not know Bangla. But this may be their limitation as well. 

The author is professor of history and South Asian studies at Chicago University