The New Nation - Internet Edition

Spotlight on Rabindra music

Dr Karunamaya Goswami

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is the greatest Bengali poet and composer. He is also the only poet from the Indian subcontinent to win the Nobel Prize (1913). The book of poems for which the award came was Gitanjali (offering of songs). The collected poems were mostly songs representing some of the best of his compositions. Rabindranath was brought up in an excellent home environment of classical music. But he had little interest in taking rigorous training. He only enriched his sensibilities with diverse musical experiences from the home atmosphere. Tagore received, some musical schooling from his elder brother, Jyotirindranath Tagore.

It is on record that Rabindranath Tagore began to systematically compose songs from 1881. The number of his songs stands at about 2500. Sixty years of his life as a poet-composer is divided by critics into three phases. The first extends from 1881 to 1900, the second from 1901 to 1920 and the third from 1921 to 1941. The first phase has been described as the period of preparation. Tagore prepared himself musically and lyrically by composing his songs on the models of Hindustani classical songs.

The second phase has been called the period of experimentation. At this stage, Tagore made wide-ranging experiments in creating varied melodic patterns independent of Hindustani stock-songs. In this phase, he is also found to pay keen attention to the folk music of Bengal, particularly baul. Tagore composed most of his patriotic songs at this time and many of these songs were profoundly influenced by baul music. The third phase has been described as the phase of composition par excellence. It presents us with what is known as the Tagore musical style. The compositions of this stage were made on the basis of experiences gathered and experimentation made of a very wide range spread over forty years. The mature Tagore musical style evolved out of a combination of folk forms, particularly baul and classical melodies.

Rabindranath Tagore put his songs into four major categories. He called them puja, swadesh prem, and prakriti. There are two minor categories - vichitra and anushthanik.

Tagore's puja songs, also known as Brahma sangeet, are about six hundred and fifty in number. Composed mostly in the dhrupad musical style, these songs stand out as the best of Bengali devotional songs. The puja songs in their excellence of lyricism and music make the essence of allegiance to God universally inspiring. Even though Brahmaism has declined as a religious movement, Tagore's Brahma songs are progressively gaining in popularity. His experimentation in these songs gave a new direction to Bengali urban music.

His swadesh songs number about seventy. They include some of the best of Bengali patriotic songs. Tagore started his career as a poet-composer in a patriotic home environment and continued the mission till 1911 when the movement opposing partition of Bengal was over. Tagore composed his song "My golden Bengal, I love you", now the national anthem of Bangladesh, during the swadeshi movement. In most of his songs of this genre, Tagore experimented with folk melodies, particularly with baul and thus began a trend which took an ultimate shape in the third or the last phase of his life as a composer.

Tagore composed nearly 300 songs on the seasons of Bengal. His position in this respect is unique. No other Bengali poet composer worked so significantly and on such a huge scale. He does not merely describe the changes in nature - in flowers, in plants, in creepers, in wind, in rivers, in the sky, he also communicates the corresponding state of the human mind. The relation between music and nature has always been intimate and this assumed an organised shape in the classical music of India, where seasonal melodies were made and the six major ragas were linked with the six seasons. Nature always played an important role in shaping the aesthetic aspirations of men when they lived close to it. But they were being increasingly cut off from nature as the rural life suffered a decline to yield place to modern urban civilisation. Rabindranath tried to revive in his seasonal songs the old, affectionate and perhaps eternal relation between man and nature. He came to North Bengal to oversee his ancestral estate at an early age. There he passed many years in the closeness of trees, the green and golden fields, shaded villages and the restless rivers. At the age of forty, he founded the Shantiniketan school at Bolpur in Birbhum where also he lived very close to a pastoral environment. This closeness to nature inspired him to depict in hundreds of songs the changing mood of the Bengali mind.

Rabindranath composed over four hundred love songs. The stream of such songs flows smoothly from the first to the last phase of his creative life. He never tired of being inspired by the intrinsic charm and depth of the man-woman relationship and presented the basic feelings of life in their endless shades and subtleties. As in the music, so in the theme, there is a gradual development in his love songs. The first phase gives a robust feeling of personalised relationship. But in later phases the personal mode merges into the universal urge and the expressions, both lyrical and musical, become philosophical and nearly ethereal.

Unlike the traditional Bengali love songs, Tagore songs on love never present a jovial mood. These are pensive musings over a sense of separation between the lovers, both craving for a union which otherwise appears remote.

Rabindranath termed some of his songs ceremonial. They are befitting to some ceremonies and festivals. These songs speak of Tagore's great innovative power. Today Bengalis cannot think of holding many of their ceremonies without Tagore songs.

Tagore modeled his music on dhrupad. He recognised this on many occasions. Once he said, we have got two things in dhrupad vastness and depth and a sense of control and symmetry. These are the qualities he valued most as a composer. His objective was to heighten the essence of lyric and never to go for improvisation allowing music to prevail over poetry. He largely followed the four-movement structural design of dhrupad which immediately became the most widely followed musical model in Bengal. He worked ceaselessly to bring about a fusion of poetry and music. His success is regarded as phenomenal. Rabindranath pursued strictly the concept of composed music unknown to Bengal before his elder brother, Jyotirindranath, tried it. He gave an institutional shape to this concept by composing nearly two thousand five hundred songs on this model and established the idea of the absolute right of a composer over his composition. He left nothing, for the care of the posterity. Tagore took very careful steps in teaching his music and preparing their notations and in grooming a generation of performers to save his compositions from willful or carefree improvisations.

The growth of modem urban music in Bengal owes a great deal to Rabindranath. He gave it a new aesthetic direction and he himself exists as the greatest model of a composer-poet.

Nobel Laureate Tagore

Mohammad Shahidul Islam

Rabindranath Tagore, being first Bengali and Asian, won Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 principally for his prose translations of Gitanjali (song offerings).

William Rothenstein, Tagore's friend, the noted English painter and art reviewer, was deeply fascinated to the South Asian poetic works. He especially was drawn to Gitanjali, Bengali for "song offerings." The delicate beauty and charm of these poems prompted Rothenstein to urge Tagore to translate them into English so more people in the West could experience them. Unenthusiastically, with much persuasion, Tagore let him have the notebook. The painter could not believe his eyes. The poems were incredible. He called his friend, the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, also a Nobel Laureate (1923), and finally talked Yeats into looking at the hand scrawled notebook.

W.B. Yeats provided an introduction to Gitanjali; he writes that this volume "stirred my blood as nothing has for years." About the Bengali culture Yeats comments, "The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes."

The rest, as they say, is history. Yeats was enthralled. Thereafter, both the poetry and the man were an instant sensation, first in London literary circles, and soon thereafter in the entire world. His spiritual presence was awesome. His words evoked great beauty. Nobody had ever read anything like it.

A glimpse of the mysticism and sentimental beauty of Bengali culture were revealed to the West for the first time. Less than a year later, in 1913, Rabindranath received the Nobel Prize for literature. He was the first non-westerner to be so honored. Overnight he was famous and began world lecture tours promoting inter-cultural harmony and understanding. In 1915 he was knighted by the British King George V. When not traveling he remained at his family home outside of Calcutta, where he remained very active as a literary, spiritual and social-political force.

Yeats explains that Tagore's was "[a] tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing" and that it "has passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble."

Yeats later wrote many poems based on Eastern concepts; although, their subtleties at times evaded him. Nevertheless, Yeats should be credited with advancing the West's interest and attraction to the spiritual nature of those concepts.

Also in the introduction, Yeats asserts, "If our life was not a continual warfare, we would not have taste, we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and readers. Four-fifths of our energy is spent in this quarrel with bad taste, whether in our own minds or in the minds of others." This somewhat harsh assessment, no doubt, points out the mood of his era: Yeats' birth and death dates (1861-1939) sandwiches the Irish poet's life between two bloody Western wars, the American Civil War and World War II. Yeats also correctly measures Tagore's achievement when he tells us the Tagore's songs are not only respected and admired by scholars, but also they are sung in the fields by peasants. Yeats would have been astonished if his own poetry had been accepted by such a wide spectrum of the populace.

The following is an excerpt, Gitanjali poem (7):

My song has put off her adornments. She has no pride of dress and decoration. Ornaments would mar our union. They would come between thee and me. Their jingling would drown thy whispers. My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight. O Master Poet, I have sat down at thy feet. Only let me make my life simple and straight like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.

Tagore served as a spiritual and creative beacon to his countrymen, and indeed, the whole world. He used the funds from his writing and lecturing to expand upon the school he had founded in 1901 now known as Visva Bharati. The alternative to the poor system of education imposed by the British combined the best of traditional Hindu education with Western ideals. Tagore's multi-cultural educational efforts were an inspiration to many, including his friend, Count Hermann Keyserling of Estonia. Count Keyserling founded his own school in 1920 patterned upon Tagore's school, and the ancient universities which existed in Northern India under Buddhist rule over 2,000 years ago under the name School of Wisdom. Rabindranath Tagore led the opening program of the School of Wisdom in 1920, and participated in several of its programs thereafter.

Rabindranath Tagore's creative output tells us a lot about this Renaissance man. The variety, quality and quantity are unbelievable.

As a writer, Tagore primarily worked in Bengali, but after his success with Gitanjali, he translated many of his other works into English. He wrote over one thousand poems; eight volumes of short stories; almost two dozen plays and play-lets; eight novels; and many books and essays on philosophy, religion, education and social topics. Aside from words and drama, his other great love was music, Bengali style. He composed more than two thousand songs, both the music and lyrics. Two of them became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.

A world split apart

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

(From previous issue)

It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and, in fact, it has been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

And what shall we say about the dark realm of criminality as such? Legal frames (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil rights. There are many such cases.

Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature; the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society. (There is a huge number of prisoners in our camps which are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state resorting to means outside of a legal framework).

The direction of the press: The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media). But what sort of use does it make of this freedom?

Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist have to his readers, or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No, it does not happen, because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press. It stops at sensational formulas.

Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time and with what prerogatives?

There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the East where the press is rigorously unified: one gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment and there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspapers mostly give enough stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.

A fashion in thinking: Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events.

I have mentioned a few trends of Western life which surprise and shock a new arrival to this world. The purpose and scope of this speech will not allow me to continue such a review, to look into the influence of these Western characteristics on important aspects on [the] nation's life, such as elementary education, advanced education in [?t]

Socialism: It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world a way to successful economic development, even though in the past years it has been strongly disturbed by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of not being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. A number of such critics turn to socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.

I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. Shafarevich's book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no one has been found to refute it. It will shortly be published in English in the United States.

Not a model: But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those produced by standardized Western well-being. Therefore if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant scores. It is true, no doubt, that a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor and by intolerable music.

All this is visible to observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.

(Concluded)

Poem

Nature and Life Haiku- 1

Caterpillar and leader

Eat night and day

Price hike.

Cell phone missing

Student killed student

Person's enemy person!

Cell phone network

Extra love

Extra hate.

Cicada laughing

TV news

At chill night.

Clouds are making water

Front-rolling catfish

Forget dinner.

Coins jump

From the pocket

Living haiku.

Computer runs

Without command

Virus multiplication.

II

Crows have

No

Marriage ceremony.

Culture

Germinates

From love-seed.

Dance eats sorrow

Sorrow eats feelings

Feelings eat separation.

Dancing lady

On the billboard

Crazy product.

Decrepit body

With graying hair

Tidy love!

Dicotyledonous marriage

Kids

Sprout.

Digital happiness

Beckoning

Cyber love.

III

Dog barks

Dog bites

Dog is dog.

Drinking melon-heart juice

Summer replenishes

Thirst.

Dying poet

On hospital bed

Wanted to eat.

Emotion appears

Beyond Oxford Dictionary

Irrational blooming.

Every day

Sun walks for moon

Infinity pathway.

IV

Fireflies

Can't

Make a day.

Firefly night dinner

Desire dance

With dream.

Fishes

Dancing into tank

Rain arriving.

Floating plankton

Moonstruck water nymph

Goggled at moon.

Followed my shade

Killed the whole day

Insanity.

Green cricket singing

On a jackfruit tree

Yesterday's crying.

High-rise window

Loves

Crying air.

I don't cry-

Only listen

Crying music.

I'm still

Shadow walks

West-east highway.

Ashraful Musaddeq