[Reader-list] songs without boundaries

[Harsh Kapoor]

For those who may be interested, posted below is the full text of the
article by Rehman along with the URL.
cheers
Harsh
==========

Himal, May 2003
PERSPECTIVE
http://www.himalmag.com/2003/may/perspective.htm


Singing the nation

by Nasreen Rehman

The old imperial tune: God Save the Queen.

Literature and music have long been a means of celebrating the cults
of gods, kings and nations. In South Asia, the Bhagavad Gita, the
Mahabharat and the Ramayan are early examples of this, from the
Sanskrit tradition. There are of course, variations upon the general
themes in different regional languages, and also local songs of
praise and adulation for kings and deities. When the Turks, Persians
and Afghans came to settle in India, they brought with them their own
traditions of glorifying the king, such as, Firdausi's Shahnama (1010
CE). Additionally, they too, had carried with them traditions from
Arabic of singing, hamd and na't and tarana in praise of their God,
Prophet and saints, respectively.

Through the ages, there is ample textual, pictorial and iconographic
evidence of thriving traditions of courtiers, painters, musicians and
poets retained by rajas and badshahs. Their main purpose was to
entertain their patrons, by eulogising them whilst heralding births,
celebrating marriages and proclaiming victories. This often had
little bearing on reality, as the artist would exaggerate the king's
good looks, valour and generosity, no matter that the monarch was no
looker, busy losing battles and taxing his subjects into penury; the
painter would paint a picture of exaggerated grandeur and beauty and
the poet would write in similar, inflated language.
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Anyone who has attended an official function in India, Pakistan or
Bangladesh will confirm the resilience of this tradition of
sycophancy, as long speeches are delivered praising prime ministers
and presidents, ministers, governors, petty functionaries and sundry
dignitaries, while much of the state infrastructure crumbles, or
extolling the virtues of artists, authors and celebrities or some
literary work, painting or musical performance, regardless of the
artistic or literary merit of the works in question.

The national anthems of India, Pakistan and, to a much lesser extent,
that of Bangladesh are rooted in this tradition of eulogising and
mythologising. However, they have to be viewed in the context of the
late 19th and the early 20th centuries, which saw the emergence of
Indian nationalism and Hindu and Muslim nationalisms in British
India, culminating in 1947, with independence and partition,
resulting in the creation of Pakistan; and just 24 years later,
another partition and the creation of Bangladesh.

South Asian nationalisms in the 20th cen-tury draw on the experiences
of more than a century and a half of earlier models of nationalism.
Early Indian nationalism had modelled itself on the European
nationalisms of the 19th century. Beginning with the 1848
revolutions, the end of the 19th century saw the nation-state emerge
in Europe. It was a time when much of the current map of Europe was
conjured. Writing about this time, the left historian Eric Hobsbawm
tells us,
 	It is clear that plenty of political institutions,
ideological movements and groups - not least in nationalism - were so
unprecedented that even historic continuity had to be invented, for
example by creating an ancient past beyond effective historical
continuity either by semi-fiction (Boadicea, Vecingetorix, Arminius
the Cheruscan) or by forgery (Ossian, the Czech medieval
manuscripts). It is also clear that entirely new symbols and devices
come into existenceŠ such as the national anthemŠ the national flagŠ
or the personification of 'the nation' in symbol or image.

The idea that nations are imagined finds a place in Hobsbawm's The
Invention of Tradition. Anybody who has seen the prescribed history
text books in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh can see the manner in
which nationhood, history and truth are constructed and contested:
the national anthems are important manifestations of the construction
of 'nationhood', simultaneously the perpetuators and reinforcements
of feverish nationalism.

Prototype sentiment
The institutional uses of the fictions and myths of India, Pakistan
and Bangladesh, and their anthems, have to be seen in two stages.
First, the anti-colonial struggle and later the nation-centeredness
of the postcolonial world in which hegemonic ideas of nationhood were
packaged and offered as the authentic version of being. In the late
19th and the early 20th centuries, these concepts had a great impact
at a time when there were already large populations living in cities
where concepts of mass culture and the packaging of ideas had taken
root. The association between productive relations and the technology
of communication was an important factor in the propagation of these
ideas - print languages created unified fields of communication.
Newspapers, periodicals and novels all contributed to creating mass
and nationalist trends.
Singing the concept of an akhand Bharat or of a Persianised sultanat
or of a shonar Bangla when part of Bengal is in India is unreal

When the Indian National Congress adopted Vande Mataram as its anthem
in 1896, there were several models that were before it. Perhaps, the
first song celebrating a nation-state was Marseillaise (1792).
Composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, the French national anthem
asks the sons of France to awake to the glory of the fatherland. The
obvious gendered nature of the song notwithstanding, the general
theme of the anthem is to fight for liberty, to use freedom as a
sword and shield.

The British national anthem, God save the Queen (tune credited to
Englishman Henry Carey, contentiously to Frenchman Jean-Baptiste
Lully, and left 'anonymous' as preferred by Buckingham, adopted
1800), was also the national anthem of India for a time, as it was
part of the British empire. Today, it sounds utterly ridiculous in a
democratic country, for citizens to pray that God bestow riches on
the monarch, while entrusting everything to him or her. However,
there is a redeeming clause, at the end:
 	May she defend our laws,
And ever give us cause,
To sing with heart and voice, God save the queen!

There could be a positive construction that singing the praise of the
monarch is contingent upon her or him being subservient to the rule
of law.

The other anthem that would have been accessible to the Indians
because it was in English was The Star Spangled Banner (lyrics by
Francis Scott Key 1814, adopted 1831), a paean to the American flag.
In the current state of the world, where the United States seems
poised to be the sole world power, it sends a chilling message. And
so, as bombs dropped on Baghdad:
 	And the rockets' red glare, the bomb bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there

And the sinister significance in the context of the Rumsfeld-Bush
worldview, where the US is quite openly comfortable with bombing
other nations of:
 	Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust"
And the star-spangled banner forever shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!


Both the United Kingdom and the United States of America are avowedly
secular countries. However, in singing their nation, God is invoked
time and again, for protection, justification and glorification of
the country. But these were not the only models available to the
Indians. The Internationale, written by Eugene Pottier at the fall of
the Paris Commune, in 1871, translated into hundreds of languages,
was the rallying cry for the oppressed and exploited of the world to
rise and overthrow their masters. It has offered inspiration to
social and political activists for over a century now. It was sung by
anti-fascist groups during the Spanish civil war; conducted by Arturo
Toscanini at the La Scala at the end of the second world war to
celebrate the fall of the fascists in Italy. In 1989, it was sung by
Chinese students at Tienanmen Square before the massacre.
 	Arise, ye prisoners of starvation,
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!
For justice thunders condemnation,
A better world's in birth
No more tradition's chain shall bind us,
Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall!
The earth shall rise on new foundation,
We have been none, we shall be all

Calling upon the wretched of the earth to unite against oppression,
this anthem subverts the idea of the nation-state; yet, it was
adopted by the Soviet Union as its national anthem. It was also
available to the Communist Party of India, in its English and
Hindustani translations. However, the first anthem that the Indian
nationalists chose to sing in praise of their nation, came from the
tradition of mythologising a fictive imagined nation personified as a
goddess, was Vande Mataram, which appears in Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee's 1882 novel, Anand Math. It was recited at the 1896
session of the Indian National Congress. The fact that the novel and
the context of the anthem were overtly anti-Muslim and treated them
as a separate nation, and that the invocation of the deities, Durga,
Kali and Lakshmi ran counter to the secular credentials of Congress
obviously did not bother the leaders who selected it.
 	Thou art Durga
Lady and Queen,
With her hands that strike and her
Swords of sheenŠ

Vande Mataram or 'hail motherland'
became the rallying call of freedom fighters through the freedom
struggle. Many chose to either forget or overlook the fact that the
first song celebrating the cult of the Indian nation was rooted in
suspicion and hatred by one imagined Indian community of Hin-dus
against another imagined community of Muslims that it viewed as
outsiders. The writer Nirad C Choudhuri described the atmosphere of
the times in which the song was written.
 	The historical romances of Bankim Chatterjee and Ramesh
Chandra Dutt glorified Hindu rebellion against Muslim rule and showed
the Muslims in correspondingly poor light. Chatterjee was positively
and fiercely anti-Muslim. We were eager readers of these romances and
we readily absorbed their spirit.

Muslims and Hindus in the Congress, as well as the Muslim League,
reacted sharply to the choice; within the Congress, in a cosmetic
move, it was decided that only the first two stanzas of the poem
would be sung (the stanza quoted above was excluded). Surprisingly,
however, nobody inside the Congress or outside pointed out that
Hindus and Muslims were not two separate nations. There was no
significant debate on 'nationhood'; in the discussions, there seemed
to be an acceptance that Hindus and Muslims were two distinct
communities.

Anthem DNA
In 1911, Jana Gana Mana was used for the first time at the Calcutta
session of the Indian National Congress, where much of the activity
was geared to preparations for the visit of the British monarch.
Caressing the terrain of the 'nation's' geography, this ballad, which
was adopted as the Indian anthem, marks its narrative with references
to nine regions and two rivers - Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha,
Dravida, Utkal, Banga, Vindhya, Himachal, Yamuna, Ganga. It was
written by Rabindranath Tagore, for the 1911 visit of King George V,
who is described reverentially as Bharat bhagya vidhata or 'the lord
of India's fate'. (A controversy brews over the composer of Jana Gana
Mana, with most believing that Tagore was the composer while Captain
Ram Singh, a Gurkha in the Indian National army and close associate
of Subhas Bose, is also credited.)



After partition, there was some controversy about the choice of a
national anthem for India. Finally, after a parliamentary
debate, it was settled that Jana Gana Mana would be the national
anthem and that Vande Mataram would have "equal status". On 25 August
1948, in a statement to the Constituent Assembly, Jawaharlal Nehru
described his position on the national
anthem:
 	The question of having a national anthem tune, to be played
by orchestras and bands, became an urgent one for us immediately
after 15 August 1947. It was as important as that of having a
national flag. The Jana Gana Mana tune, slightly varied had been
adopted as a national anthem by the Indian National Army in South
East Asia and had subsequently a degree of popularity in India also.
I wrote to all the provincial governors and asked their views about
adopting Jana Gana Mana or any other song as the national anthem. I
asked them to consult their Premiers...

Jana Gana Mana was retained, ironically, even though half of Punjab
and all of Sindh went to Pakistan, while currently, more than half of
Bengal is the independent country of Bangladesh. In highly
Sanskritised Bengali, the national anthem is in a language that is
largely incomprehensible to the majority of the population of
northern India and completely incomprehensible to the people of
southern India. But it has the advantage of being very short and
largely a litany of names of various regions. India is called Bharat
in it - does this in anyway inform the Indian right wing's dreams of
the mythical "akhand (undivided) Bharat"?

Nehru making the independence address,1947.

Another very popular anthem in India, which is almost as popular if
not more than the national anthem is the tarana by Iqbal, Sare jahan
se accha Hindositan hamara, hum bulbulein hain iski, yeh gulsitan
hamara. Set to music by Pandit Ravi Shankar, it became the anthem for
the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) in the mid-1940s. All
the professionals associated with IPTA were progressive, radical and
anti-communal. Ironically, Iqbal, who wrote in this poem, "mazhab
nahin sikhata apas mein bair rakhna" (religion does not teach us to
fight amongst ourselves) in 1930, dreamt of a separate homeland for
Indian Muslims. Iqbal died in 1935, after conceiving the idea of
Pakistan but before he could see its creation. No doubt, if he had
been alive, he would have written the national anthem for Pakistan.

As it was, the choice of language and poet for 'singing Pakistan' was
in itself an indication of how the country would develop. A majority
of the population lived in East Pakistan with Bangla as its mother
tongue; in the provinces of West Pakistan, Pashto, Balochi, Punjabi
and Sindhi were first languages. Urdu had been prominent in the
Punjab, and the British had used it for administrative purposes. It
was also the tongue of the mohajirs from present day Uttar Pradesh
and Bihar. Quite arbitrarily, Urdu was declared the national language
of Pakistan and became the language of the national song. Tragically,
a beautiful, rich and lyrical language came to be associated with a
repressive state, out of touch with itself and its people.

At a time when Faiz Ahmed Faiz was already acclaimed as the greatest
living Urdu poet, lyricist and litterateur Hafeez Jullandhri was
given the task of writing the song. Not surprising, since Faiz, a
revolutionary poet, had written a lament after independence, mourning
the bitter dawn of bloodshed and partition. The new state of Pakistan
saw itself free, not just from the fetters of imperial Britain, but
free from the feared domination of 'Hindu India'. In defining the
nation, Hafeez looked to the Persian tradition for inspiration. This,
when the great masters of Urdu poetry, such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz and
Miraji, had already altered the Urdu canon by departing from the
traditional usage of classical Persian to explicitly local and
indigenous imagery and language. There are no more than two
indigenous words in the song, and one of them is 'ka' - the
preposition 'of'.

Hafeez could be congratulated for the phrase, "Pak sarzameen ka
nizaam, quaat-e-axuat-e-awam", which asserts that the primary concern
in the pure land should be the strength and benefit of the populace.
But he digs a deep hole with "qaum, mulk, sultanat, painda tabinda
bad, shadbad manzil-e-murad". Which 'qaum' or nation is he referring
to? In using the word 'sultanat', is he harkening back to the days of
empires, falsely represented as Muslim empires in India?
Quaat-e-axuat-e-awam - the order of this sacred land is the might of
the brotherhood of the people - says the anthem of a country where,
almost as if defying those words, Muslims have bled and killed each
other since its creation.



Top: Sheikh Mujib at March 1971 rally; Jinnah relaxing.

While the Pakistani anthem ceded a lot of linguistic ground,
Bangladesh seceded from (West) Pakistan largely on the grounds of
language. In Pakistan, people still wonder why a Tagore song was
chosen for Bangladesh, yet to come to terms with the fact that
Bangladesh was about language and not about religion. Language was at
the core of the resentment that East Pakistanis felt against West
Pakistan. The partition of Pakistan into the independent state of
Bangladesh gave a lie to the belief that South Asia had two nations:
the Hindus and the Muslims. The Bangladeshis chose their anthem in
the light of their struggle, therefore, Rabindranath Tagore, a Hindu
Bengali, was chosen, when in fact they could have chosen the more
revolutionary Nazrul Islam. The Bangladeshis chose to highlight the
Bengali aspect of their identity. Tagore is therefore the creator of
two national anthems in the region. Amar Shonar Bangla, ami tamaye
bhalo bhashi - was writ-ten in 1906, in the context of the partition
of Bengal. Its words and tune, based on a Baul song by Gagan Horkora,
in their simplicity are immediately accessible to any Bangla speaker.
Invoking the mother goddess and mother earth, Tagore praises the
rivers, the breeze and the seasons: it seems that his Bengal has
eternal autumn and spring. There is, of course, no mention of the
cyclones and storms that wreak havoc in the lives of millions
annually. [See 'In search of shonar Bangla', page 33.]

False notes
The Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi national anthems are very much
in the tradition of their Western counterparts, glorifying a
make-believe land where the landmass becomes an end in itself - a way
of identifying the individual citizen, who is bound and defined by
unreal geography and who sings the praise of an unreal nation.
Singing the concept of an akhand Bharat in the Indian anthem or of a
Persianised sultanat in the Pakistani or of a shonar Bangla when part
of Bengal is in India takes these three countries right into Saadat
Hasan Manto's imagination.

In Manto's 1948 play, someone asks about the fictional Punjabi
village, Toba Tek Singh. In reply, he is told, "If it was in India
yesterday and is in Pakistan today, how do I know where it will be
tomorrow?" If, many years later, the question had been about Dhaka,
he could have been told that Dhaka had been in India, then it was in
Pakistan and now it is in Bangladesh. Who knows where it will be
years from now. There is a need to explode the myths of akhand
Bharat, Pakistan, the pure land of the Muslim ummah or the exotic
beautiful Bengal of sweet breezes.

The anthem of the Hindu right wing: Vande Mataram

The nation, hiding behind terms such as authenticity, tradition,
folklore, community, obscuring its origins in what Benedict Anderson
has called "the most universally legitimate value in the political
life of our time", uses its national anthem to perpetrate its myth.
The singing of national anthems at school assemblies and after the
screening of films is no longer mandatory. However, who can overlook
the hypocrisy inherent in a moment of glory at some international
sporting event - the flag is hoisted, and people weep as the national
anthem is played for the victorious country, and members of
marginalised and victimised communities go forward to collect
accolades for their nations?

Where there are common threads of poverty, hunger, malnutrition,
illiteracy, filth and squalor, here is a suggestion for the peoples
of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh: zard patton ka ban jo mera des
hai, dard ki anjuman jo mera des hai by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. The majority
of our populations live in appalling conditions of deprivation -
somebody could add a few lines for the communal and ethnic strife
that tears us apart. Perhaps, this will remind us more of our
realities and might actually shame us into some action instead of
standing and singing and celebrating non-existent nations. Like most
other national anthems, the national anthems of Bangladesh, India and
Pakistan have no bearing on the reality and existence of the majority
of their populations. The national anthems are as false as the
nations they celebrate.