I/II
http://scroll.in/article/739703/what-explains-the-return-of-the-104-year-old-controversy-about-tagore-and-national-anthem
Foreign Hand
What explains the return of the 104-year-old controversy about Tagore
and the national anthem?
Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh is not the first to charge that Tagore
was praising King Emperor George V by referring to him as 'Adhinayaka'
.
Scroll Staff · Yesterday · 05:14 pm
It's the same song, same verse.
On Tuesday, Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singh, while speaking at the
26th convocation ceremony of Rajasthan University, is reported to have
said that the national anthem should be amended, with the words
"adhinayak jai ho" removed. As the Indian Express reported:
“Jan gan man adhinayak jai ho kiske liye hai? It is to praise the
‘angrezi shaasak’…the British. It is about time that it amended and
replaced by ‘jan gan man mangal gaye’. I do have full faith in
Rabindranath Tagore and respect him but still feel the national anthem
should drop the word ‘adhinayak’,” Singh said.
This is by no means the first time that such a charge has been hurled,
or such a suggestion mooted for suitably amending the national anthem.
As the news report went on to point out, Singh himself had raised the
issue at a recent function to felicitate donors in the field of
education and reiterated his demand at the convocation ceremony, a
demand that has in particular been revived since the days of the
Hindutva campaign against the Babri masjid of the 1980s leading up to
its culmination in 1992 with the demolition of the mosque at Ayodhya,
which happened under the watch of none other than Singh himself as the
chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.
The newspapers did it
But the controversy dates back more than a century, with the confusion
persisting from the time that the song was first reported to have been
sung – during a convention of the Indian National Congress in what was
then Calcutta on Dec 26, 1911. On December 12, 1911, George V, who was
then visiting India for the Coronation Delhi Durbar, had announced the
abrogation of the Partition of Bengal which Lord Curzon had effected
as the Viceroy in 1905. Congress, then in its loyalist phase, decided
to publicly acknowledge its allegiance to the Emperor and accord him a
royal welcome. That happened to be the agenda of the day for the
Congress convention. The event was reported as follows by some of the
newspapers.
"The proceedings began with the singing by Rabindranath Tagore of
a song specially composed by him in honour of the Emperor." – The
Englishman, December 28, 1911)
"The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore sang a song composed by him
specially to welcome the Emperor."
– The Statesman, December 28, 1911)
"When the proceedings of the Indian National Congress began on
Wednesday 27th December 1911, a Bengali song in welcome of the Emperor
was sung. A resolution welcoming the Emperor and Empress was also
adopted unanimously."
– The Indian, Dec. 29, 1911)
Delhi University's Pradip Kumar Dutta blames these reports for the
confusion that persists till this day:
The confusion about the song was stirred up by the ineptness of
the pro-British Anglo-Indian press. Their inefficiency was not
surprising (The Sunday Times once ascribed the authorship of Bande
Mataram to Tagore and described Jana Gana Mana as a Hindi song!) On
this occasion the Anglo-Indian press -- led by The Englishman - almost
uniformly reported that a Tagore song had been sung to commemorate
George V's visit to India. The reports were based on understandable
ignorance since the Anglo-Indian press had neither the linguistic
abilities nor the interest to be accurate. Actually, two songs that
had been sung that day. The Jana Gana Mana had been followed by a
Hindi song composed specially for George V by Rambhuj Chaudhary. There
was no real connection between the composition of the Jana Gana Mana
and George V, except that the song was sung -- not written - at an
event which also felicitated the king. The Anglo-Indian press [luckily
for Hindutva enthusiasts and unfortunately for secularists!] heard
Indian songs much in the way they looked at foreign faces: they were
all the same!
The above is also corroborated by reports in other newspapers:
"The annual session of Congress began by singing a song composed
by the great Bengali poet Ravindranath Tagore. Then a resolution
expressing loyalty to King George V was passed. A song paying a
heartfelt homage to King George V was then sung by a group of boys and
girls."
– The Bengalee, December 28, 1911)
"The proceedings of the Congress party session started with a
prayer in Bengali to praise God (song of benediction). This was
followed by a resolution expressing loyalty to King George V. Then
another song was sung welcoming King George V."
– The Amrita Bazar Patrika, December 28,1911)
The controversy should have been a non-starter as, Datta points out,
anyone familiar with Tagore's body of work would know how absurd the
idea was.
Contemporaries obviously found it hard to associate Tagore with
servility. Tagore was known for this opposition to the government.
Indeed, shortly after the Congress session the government passed a
circular that declared Shantiniketan to be a "place altogether
unsuitable for the education of Government officers" and threatened
punitive measures against officers who sent their children there to
study.
Soon, in 1919, after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, Tagore went on to
renounce his knighthood, conferred by none other than the same George
V. And, of course, as Tagore's political views on nationalism and the
national movement spread, the charge could not be sustained.
National song
But the controversy was back in 1930s when another controversy arose,
over another song this time, as a section of the Congress wanted to
adopt Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Bande Mataram as a "national song".
But it was considered problematic by many others within the
organisation as it was felt that its depiction of the nation as
"Mother Durga" went against Islamic theology which forbade the worship
of any God other than Allah and because of its origin as part of
Anandamath, a novel perceived to have an anti-Muslim message.
While the Indian National congress discussed the status of Bande
Mataram, Tagore himself wrote about the genesis of the controversy
about the Jana Gana Mana in a letter on November 10, 1937 to Pulin
Bihari Sen, which is included in Ravindrajivani, Prabhatkumar
Mukherjee's biography of Tagore:
"A certain high official in His Majesty's service, who was also my
friend, had requested that I write a song of felicitation towards the
Emperor. The request simply amazed me. It caused a great stir in my
heart. In response to that great mental turmoil, I pronounced the
victory in Jana Gana Mana of that Bhagya Vidhata [ed. God of Destiny]
of India who has from age after age held steadfast the reins of
India's chariot through rise and fall, through the straight path and
the curved. That Lord of Destiny, that Reader of the Collective Mind
of India, that Perennial Guide, could never be George V, George VI, or
any other George. Even my official friend understood this about the
song. After all, even if his admiration for the crown was excessive,
he was not lacking in simple common sense."
This should have settled the controversy, but because it continued to
swirl around, Tagore was irked enough to write on March 13, 1939:
"I should only insult myself if I cared to answer those who
consider me capable of such unbounded stupidity as to sing in praise
of George the Fourth or George the Fifth as the Eternal Charioteer
leading the pilgrims on their journey through countless ages of the
timeless history of mankind."
Indeed, anyone who reads the full five stanzas of the poem – in
original Bengali or in its translation – and not just the first stanza
that was adopted, and is sung, as the national anthem, would be able
to see the absurdity of the charge, for the poem, if anything, clearly
mocks the idea of a mortal king being the"Bharata bhagyaa vidhaataa"
deciding the fate of the country. In fact, the fifth and concluding
stanza of the poem includes a ringing exhortation: "Nidrito Bharato
Jaagey" (Sleeping India awakens), a phrase that eventually finds
itself invoked even in Nehru's famous Freedom at Midnight speech.
Why now?
So what explains the fact that the controversy keeps getting raked up
at regular intervals, particularly by Hindutva proponents? One clue is
provided by Datta:
The words of Bande Mataram feature India as a homogeneous Hindu
nation. Jana Gana Mana evokes the country as composed of a
multiplicity of regions and communities united in a prayer to a
universal lord. After all, Bande Mataram was composed by a colonial
administrator who could only visualise the nation in Hindu terms:
religious identity was the only available idiom for conceptualising
the nation then. In contrast, Tagore had seen the riots that broke up
the Swadeshi movement and had divined the obvious: religious
nationalism easily divided anti-colonial struggles. Jana Gana Mana can
be seen as one of the fruits of Tagore's search to find an alternate
inclusivist definition for the nation. Incidentally, it was one of the
harbingers of a decade that was to see Hindu and Muslim politicians
draw together
The other and more immediate concern of course is the fact that
whenever it is in power, a section in the Bharatiya Janata Party that
is close to the Rashtriya Seva Sangh sees it as an opportunity to
make the most of the situation by going back to the core ideology of
the Saffron family by rewriting history and redressing what it
perceives are historical wrongs. As the same newspaper report pointed
out:
Singh’s demand comes in the wake of a controversy stirred by
Primary Education Minister Vasudev Devnani, a prominent RSS face in
the state government, who had said that school textbooks in the state
are being re-written relegating foreign rulers and personalities and
with more focus on indigenous figures such as Maharana Pratap and
Aryabhata.
That such controversies also get seen by some as yet another attempt
to deflect media attention away from the beleaguered state and central
government is perhaps just a sign of the cynical times we live in.
Incidentally, however, one should note that the charge, such as the
one made by Kalyan Singh, is no longer just confined to the Hindutva
political activists. Even a self-proclaimed secularist, Justice
Markandy Katju – he of the scientific opinion that 90% of Indians are
fools – had also recently blogged about The British stooge Tagore and
the National Anthem. But then the good judge also believes that MK
Gandhi was a British agent, and dismisses Subhas Chandra Bose as a
Japanese agent.
II.
http://www.sacw.net/DC/CommunalismCollection/ArticlesArchive/pkDatta092004.html
[India's National Anthem] Are we still singing for the Empire?
by Pradip Kumar Datta *
One of the many targets of Sadhvi Rithambara's infamous hate cassette
-- which did so much to provoke feelings of resentment against Muslims
-- was the national anthem. She described it as an act of 'gaddari'
(treachery). Hindutva allegations against the Jana Gana Mana are not
new. But they have begun to circulate anew with fresh intensity with
the growth of the Hindutva brigade in the 80's. And have entered the
conversational common sense which has begun to treat these as if they
were established evidence. Quite recently a friend of mine abroad
alerted me to pro-Hindutva websites such as www.freeindia.org that had
convinced his otherwise secular students that the anthem had been
originally composed for Emperor George V. Even more recently, another
friend reported that she found herself isolated in a ladies party in
Kolkata when she tried to defend the anthem from these charges.
The jingoism of the anti-Jana Gana Mana campaign is based on an
appropriate irony. The charge actually rests on false evidence given
by the pro-British press. The song was first sung in a session of the
Congress in 1911. This session had decided to felicitate George V
since he had announced the abrogation of the partition of Bengal,
thereby conceding the success of the Swadeshi agitation, the first
modern anti-colonial movement that had started in 1905. The day after
the session the nationalist Indian papers normally -- and accurately
-- reported that a Tagore composition had been sung. The Bengalee --
along with other Indian newspapers as well as the report of the Indian
National Congress - reported that it was a "patriotic song". The
following year the song was published as "Bharat -- Vidatha". A
contemporary commentator in the vernacular Bharati described the song
as one in "Praise of the Dispenser of human Destiny, whoÖappears in
every age." He probably came closest to capturing its spirit. This
song was to later become known as Jana Gana Mana.
The confusion about the song was stirred up by the ineptness of the
pro-British Anglo-Indian press. Their inefficiency was not surprising
(The Sunday Times once ascribed the authorship of Bande Mataram to
Tagore and described Jana Gana Mana as a Hindi song!) On this occasion
the Anglo-Indian press -- led by The Englishman - almost uniformly
reported that a Tagore song had been sung to commemorate George V's
visit to India. The reports were based on understandable ignorance
since the Anglo-Indian press had neither the linguistic abilities nor
the interest to be accurate. Actually, two songs that had been sung
that day. The Jana Gana Mana had been followed by a Hindi song
composed specially for George V by Rambhuj Chaudhary. There was no
real connection between the composition of the Jana Gana Mana and
George V, except that the song was sung -- not written - at an event
which also felicitated the king. The Anglo-Indian press [luckily for
Hindutva enthusiasts and unfortunately for secularists!] heard Indian
songs much in the way they looked at foreign faces: they were all the
same!
Initially the controversy seemed a non-starter. Contemporaries
obviously found it hard to associate Tagore with servility. Tagore was
known for this opposition to the government. Indeed, shortly after the
Congress session the government passed a circular that declared
Shantiniketan to be a "place altogether unsuitable for the education
of Government officers" and threatened punitive measures against
officers who sent their children there to study. Undoubtedly helped by
these measures which shored up Tagore's nationalist reputation, the
song steadily acquired wide acceptability among nationalists in all
parts of the country - especially after its translation into English
as "The morning song of India" by the poet in Madras. In a survey made
just before the poetís death in 1941 at Mumbai, respondents felt Jana
Gana Mana to have the strongest "national characteristics" although
Bande Mataram was found superior on some other criteria. The dirt
thrown by the pro-British press seemed to have been completely wrung
out when Netaji Bose's Indian National Army adopted it as the National
Anthem; this was followed by Gandhiís declaration in 1946 that "the
song has found a place in our national life": that it was "also like a
devotional hymn".
But it was not as if it was all smooth sailing for the story of Jana
Gana Mana's popularity. The first round of controversy -- this time by
the Indians themselves - had been stoked in 1937. But it became a much
more general one from the late 1940's when a debate broke out over
what was to be the National Anthem. A section within the Congress
wanted the Bande Mataram, a song that was popularly associated with
the national movement. But Bande Mataram was controversial since its
invocation of the nation as a Goddess went against Islamic theology
which forbade the worship of any God other than Allah. Also the Bande
Mataram had been successfully converted into a sign of communal
antagonism by Hindu communalists (with the enthusiastic participation
of their Muslim counterparts who regarded the song as a horrible
provocation) and even chanted it as a slogan in riots.
In the 1930's, a Congress sub-committee had short-listed some
"national" songs that could be sung together with or instead of Bande
Mataram. It was then proposed (on Tagore's initiative) that the first
two stanzas of Bande Mataram could be sung. But this catholicity was
not felt to be feasible after independence. Occasions involving
foreign diplomatic missions or the Defence forces required that a
single "National Anthem" be played by a band as a signature of the
country. The Constituent Assembly was deputed to select the anthem. It
was in the ensuing lobbying to knock Jana Gana Mana out of reckoning,
that outworn and salacious bits of colonial misinformation about the
song began to be recirculated.
Jana Gana Mana was chosen as anthem in 1950 over Bande Mataram as well
as Iqbal's Sare Jahan Se Accha - although Bande Mataram was given
"equal status". An important reason was that Bande Mataram could not
be played by bands. Additionally Jana Gana Mana enjoyed an
international reputation. It had been greatly appreciated in the
United Nations at New York where it was first played as an orchestral
arrangement in 1947. Many said that it was superior to most national
anthems in the world. Within the country the overwhelming majority of
the provinces supported its nomination.
But there is also an underlying reason that is really responsible for
the controversy popping up at regular intervals. The words of Bande
Mataram feature India as a homogeneous Hindu nation. Jana Gana Mana
evokes the country as composed of a multiplicity of regions and
communities united in a prayer to a universal lord. After all, Bande
Mataram was composed by a colonial administrator who could only
visualize the nation in Hindu terms: religious identity was the only
available idiom for conceptualizing the nation then. In contrast,
Tagore had seen the riots that broke up the Swadeshi movement and had
divined the obvious: religious nationalism easily divided
anti-colonial struggles. Jana Gana Mana can be seen as one of the
fruits of Tagore's search to find an alternate inclusivist definition
for the nation. Incidentally, it was one of the harbingers of a decade
that was to see Hindu and Muslim politicians draw together. In short,
the two songs embody different ideas, histories and aspirations of the
country.
In fairness, the last word on the affair should really be given to the
poet himself (incidentally he had composed the music for Bande
Mataram). Answering a friend's query about the origins of the Jana
Gana Mana in 1937, Tagore said that a loyalist friend had requested
him to write a song in praise of the King. He had felt anger at his
friends presumption about his loyalism. It was this anger that led him
to compose Jana Gana Mana. He had written a song to a superior
authority, the "Dispenser of India's destiny". Tagore concluded. "That
great Charioteer of man's destiny in age after age could not by any
means be George V or George VI or any George. Even my 'loyal' friend
realized this; because, however powerful his loyalty to the King, he
was not wanting in intelligence." I may add here that we normally sing
the first verse alone: the third verse of the song refers explicitly
to the eternal lord.
Tagore said that he felt too pained by the unjustness of the charge to
come out with a public refutation. Perhaps he was wrong. He could have
considered the issue of survival. Not just of his public reputation.
But also the survival of self-confidence in some of his future
citizens who believe that they venerate their masters fifty years
after independence. And that they can sing songs to a King, dead for
an even longer period.
(Readers interested in more information may look at P. Sen's India's
National Anthem)
* Pradip Kumar Datta teaches at Delhi University.
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Peace Is Doable
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