Tagore at the Traffic Signal

As of late, Rabindra Sangeet has emerged in unexpected places, whether covered as club song or voiced by Amitabh Bachchan. Does Tagore’s music, as he had hoped, stand the test of time?

01 April 2012
‘Lukochuri’ (1958) introduced Tagore’s song ‘Mayabono biharini’ to cinema.
‘Lukochuri’ (1958) introduced Tagore’s song ‘Mayabono biharini’ to cinema.

AMONG THE THINGS prohibited to me as a child, there are three I have yet to undertake: touching paper with my feet, eating kül (Bengal berries) before Saraswati Puja and singing Rabindra Sangeet in the bathroom. I must confess that I was therefore embarrassed to read about young Sandeep’s Chhotomama singing a Tagore prayer song—“Bahe nirantar ananta anandadhara”—in the bathroom in Amit Chaudhuri’s novel A Strange and Sublime Address. Tagore songs, like Wimbledon, demanded a certain dress code. That had been broken. The other moment in the delightful novel when Chhotomama sings Rabindra sangeet mercifully ended with the words, “That is why I sing without cause.” Why else would a bathroom Rabindra Sangeet-singer sing? I have since discovered an anecdote that I now narrate as filial revenge: “I have heard him humming to himself in the bath-room, then suddenly call his Banamali ... and say: ‘Fetch Dinubabu immediately and tell him to stand outside my bath-room window and be ready to take down a new song, words and tune together.’” The words are Leonard Elmhirst’s about Rabindranath Tagore, his longtime friend.

Rabindranath Tagore reads to a gathering in an image from 1925.. MANSELL / TIME & LIFE PICTURES / GETTY IMAGES Rabindranath Tagore reads to a gathering in an image from 1925.. MANSELL / TIME & LIFE PICTURES / GETTY IMAGES
Rabindranath Tagore reads to a gathering in an image from 1925.
MANSELL / TIME & LIFE PICTURES / GETTY IMAGES

A Bengali drawing room figure, Tagore is often invoked in moments of conversational unease and boredom, sometimes emerging from a Bengali girl’s voice as song in the prologue to her arranged marriage; he would also, when the aesthetic demanded, hang like a lizard on the wall and gaze tirelessly from a Batik wall-hanging produced at Santiniketan’s Amar Kutir. It is interesting, therefore, to see Tagore’s recent emergence in unfamiliar places, both ghare and baire: in the bedroom, and at traffic signals in Kolkata, blaring out from loudspeakers as part of a government programme to celebrate his 150th birth anniversary.

Sumana Roy writes from Siliguri, a small town in sub-Himalayan Bengal. She is online at www.sumanaroy.com.

Keywords: film Rabindranath Tagore theatre song Rabindra Sangeet Bedroom interpretation
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