ABOUT a month ago, I found myself in a van, driving up to North Bengal to write about the ongoing election campaign. With me was a young press photographer, S. As we drove North, S began calling up people in different places to get a sense of what was happening. Reporters who were on the stump with Mamata Banerjee and Sonia Gandhi began to call back as the day’s last meetings ended. Each time S’ mobile rang it emitted the shard of Rabindra Sangeet that was its ringtone. A post-modern sound collage rapidly developed in the darkness of the van: Keno chokher joley bhijiye diley na, shukno dhulo jawtoe-ooo... ‘Hello? Yes tell me, what did Mamata say?...Right, right, okay, yes black money, the Left are like thieves themselves… listen, I’m getting another call so I’ll call back, Keno chokher joley bhijiye diley na, yes, so, is Rahul actually coming tomorrow? Hanh? Uff, got cut off, Why didn’t you let me drench the dust with my tears, hello, yes, so tomorrow, pakka? First meeting is where, Naxalbari? Why didn’t you let me drench the dust with my tears…

I started talking to S about his collection of Rabindra Sangeet and he laid it out for me very proudly. He had several versions of different songs on his mobile phone. On his home computer, he had downloaded about 7GB of R-Sangeet, from which he replenished his phone from time to time. Then there were the videos he had bookmarked on You Tube. In his off time, S, who is thirty-four years old, drives a Bullet and goes on long road trips, riding with friends in convoy. Many of them have Rabindra Sangeet as their preferred soundtrack. Adhunik Bangla gaan, contemporary Bengali songs, do form a part of his listening, as does some Hindi film music, but there is no western music, pop, rock or jazz to speak of. Clearly, it is Rabindra Sangeet that floats his boat.

As our driver rode wave upon wave of oncoming high beam truck headlights, S and I cracked open a bottle of whisky, bumped some of it into a half-filled bottle of mineral water and began to knock it back. After a while, it was my phone that rang, a contact calling from near Darjeeling, my ringtone being the assassin boss’s whistled tune from the movie Kill Bill. The whistling was sharp enough to make S jerk his head in alarm, even though he had his headphones on by now. I finished speaking, disconnected, took a swig of whisky and handed the plastic bottle to S who also took a hit before looking at me with concern. Then, in a gesture of utter generosity, he pulled off his headphones and offered them to me. ‘Dada, would you like to listen to my Rabindra Sangeet?’ he asked.

 

I now find Rabindra Sangeet almost impossible to listen to for any length of time.

Sometimes I think it’s like a city of one’s childhood in which one can no longer bear to spend too much time, or like an old, much loved relative, visits to whose old-age home one must keep as short as possible for one’s own sanity. Perhaps part of it is peer pressure. Many of my friends, both Bengali and non-Bong, would see photographer S as a complete loser, musically: this strange guy who insists on listening to ‘that sad droning and wailing’ and that too on the tinny headphones of his mobile.

Over the last thirty years or so, something strange has happened to Rabindra Sangeet in many so-called cosmopolitan circles. For newer generations of non-Bengalis there has never been this default mode of respect for everything Bengali that was programmed into middle class Indians who came of age around Partition and just before. That was the time when it was accepted that the new nation needed to be armed with a cultural identity as much as it needed a parliament or an army, and that Bengal, through Rabindranath, was one of the chief lodes of this possible identity, this branding that could sort of work internationally because Tagore was the one Indian artist the world had heard about and recognized. Therefore, even if the words were impenetrable, or twee in translation, non-Bengali Indian middle classes accepted the existence of Rabindra Sangeet and allowed it a certain, grudging importance. After all, like it or not, one of the songs was the country’s national anthem.

 

Gradually, this shifted. The fading of R-Sangeet was a part of the larger eclipse of Bangla culture as synonymous with the nation. By the ’80s, the cutting edge had slid away from Calcutta – the art films were coming from the South, the painting from Bombay, North Indian classical music from western India, the best literature in the vernacular languages from other parts of the country. The decline of Bengal coincided with the borders between ‘high art’ and popular culture beginning to blur as ‘Bollywood’ and the music produced by the Industry began to take on a certain value in the po-mo cultural analysis stakes. If there was an imaginary space to the side of the classical canon, there were now many different genres of music vying for it, from the Hindi film hits of the ’50s and ’60s to newly rediscovered folk music traditions of the Langas and Manganiyars and, indeed, the Bauls, who inspired Tagore himself throughout his life.

Neither securely highbrow, nor authentically of the earth, R-Sangeet was stuck in limbo. There was less and less reason (especially for non-Bengalis) to give space to this archaic regional music with its difficult, dated concepts. Thinking about it, there are two things that put people off about R-Sangeet. The first is the business of the words, the poetry, which is from another era whether it speaks of love, spirituality, the landscape, freedom or revolution. Even if you have a working knowledge of Bangla, some of the songs can be difficult to understand without help. The mix of Sanskritic Bengali, shaadhu-bhasha, local imagery and Tagore’s own poetic tropes did not travel well across time, especially in clunky translations.

The second is that the melodies are composed out of very few tune-clusters and usually at a very slow pace. It’s a double tightrope off which many singers fall, inevitably taking their audiences with them. Most would-be listeners would mentally roll their eyes when faced with the prospect of sitting through some ‘evening programme’ that involved serious abuse of harmonium and Tagore. Within Bengal, though Tagore stayed part of youngsters’ soundtracks till the late ’70s, by the late ’80s fewer and fewer young men were trying to woo their girlfriends through quotes or cassettes of Rabindra Sangeet.

 

‘Don’t you just hate Rabindra Sangeet?’ It’s one of the silliest questions anyone can ask. Flip it around – ‘Don’t you just love Rabindra Sangeet?’ – and for me, it’s almost as silly. Even though I can’t listen to R-Sangeet for any length of time, I can hardly bring myself to hate it. If you take Tagore’s working life as an adult artist to be from 18 to 80 (the age at which he died), that’s sixty-two years of almost relentless production: poems, novels, plays, short stories, essays and travelogues, doodles, drawings and paintings, the setting up and running of an entire university and… the words and music of over 2,300 songs. Assuming RT hit the ground running at 18 (although he didn’t), that’s about 38 songs a year or roughly 3-plus songs a month.

In comparison, Bob Dylan, whose 70th birthday many of us are marking right now, has composed a piffling 458 songs across the fifty years between 1960 and 2010, and actually a bit less if you don’t count the covers and versions he has recorded of other people’s songs. Also, barring an odd book or two and some quite good paintings, Dylan has actually done nothing very much for half a century save write and perform his songs.

 

Put Tagore next to Shakespeare and the incommensurability becomes even more striking. Having begun to write around the age of twenty-five or twenty-seven and making his exit aged almost exactly fifty-two, the Bard had a career span of only twenty-five or so years. The point is, despite all of RT’s other activities, the songs kept coming out with a frightening regularity, almost like a force of nature. The fact is, if you’ve lived in Bengal or around middle class Bengalis for any time over the last seventy years since Tagore’s death (coincidentally almost the exact period Dylan’s been alive), you will have come in contact with Rabindra Sangeet just as you are bound to have smelled spices frying in mustard oil.

In Bangladesh and Bengal, in Calcutta, in Bengali enclaves around the world, R-Sangeet is now part of the aural woodwork, impossible to sift out or fade to silence. Whatever he imagined he was doing when writing them, wherever he himself might have placed them in the hierarchy of the different mediums over which he had mastery, these songs of Tagore’s are the most widespread and accessible part of his ouvre. It’s impossible for all two-thousand-odd compositions to be gems, impossible for there not to be repetitions and overlaps in both words and music, but liking Rabindra Sangeet or hating it is an almost irrelevant matter; for middle class Bengalis it has been imbibed along with mother’s milk, imprinted in their cultural memory as a cornerstone along with shorsher maachh and the dhaakis’ drums during Durga puja.

 

But why did Rabindra Sangeet become this out-of-date, faintly embarrassing regional relic for the non-Bengali Indian middle class? How did it become further ghettoized, a peculiar local taste that only appealed to the Bengali bhadralok, unable to permeate beyond the membrane of Bangla consciousness?

Looking back to that late ’80s moment, I try and figure out why the same ennui did not attach itself to Indian classical or even the old, well-worn, Hindi hits. One theory is that both Hindustani classical and Hindi movie songs were live traditions, still developing, so that the older stuff had some connective tissue providing purchase in the mind. You could have dips, periods like the first half of the ’80s when precious little came out of Bombay film music that could compete with the hit-parade of the ‘golden’ ’60s and early ’70s, but you still had the old classics to which you could refer while hoping for a new gem, or you could listen to Bhimsen or Kishori Amonkar doing a new rendition of a raag and want to go back to their own earlier versions or one from their gharana or even one from a much older musician, just to compare.

On the other hand, Rabindra Sangeet, caught in the copyright chains of the Tagore Legacy Industry and simultaneously knocked sideways by the general indifference of the Tagore-denigrating Left Front, had simply stopped growing. What you heard in 1985 or 2002 was really only a better recorded version of what you could have heard in 1962, the earlier track probably done with fewer accompanying frills and a lot more feeling and understanding.

Today, there’s no way to actually ‘hear’ Tagore and Rabindra Sangeet. The old singers are gone and their recordings are scratchy, mono. The new ones who stick to the ‘correct’ form are saccharine and overproduced. The recent so-called ‘innovations’ using rock instruments and reggae rhythms, the digital fungii that have come up after the copyright restrictions were lifted, are mostly execrable. For people who fall outside the mass of hardcore Tagore-bhaktas, it’s almost as if the whole body of songs, despite thousands of recordings and You Tube uploads, is wiped out, waiting for someone to come and record them afresh.

 

Not that any of this bothers some people in Bengal.

On the morning the Bengal election results came out, sweeping away the Left Front after thirty-four long years, I made my way with photographer S to the Kalighat lane where Mamata Banerjee has her modest, pakka-hut of a house next to which, in a slightly larger building, is the equally unimposing Trinamul Party headquarters. All around this epicentre, the streets had been taken over by celebrating TMC supporters. Preparations had clearly been made for this day and banners and posters were strung up everywhere.

As we entered the actual lane leading to the house, waves of dancing supporters crowded past us sweating happiness and triumph, faces and bare bodies covered in green and orange paint, drums beating. In front of Mamata’s house the crowd had swelled into a dangerously dense human mass, the green powder marinading everything, lamp posts, bamboo scaffolding, white police uniforms as well as black camera lenses. It took a while to register and recognize the soundtrack in the background: from the loudspeakers strung up on the lamp posts came the constant drone of R-Sangeet. One song after another, all the rousing ones about spirit and fearlessness and walking alone if no one joins you.

A couple of weeks earlier, I’d attended a couple of Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s last election meetings where disciplined bands of singer-cadre, with and without the help of electric guitars and harmoniums, had sung the Red anthems of revolution, summoning the faithful once more unto the breach at the polling booth. Despite their rousing, upbeat rhythms, the songs had failed; the faithful had deserted the verses of biplab and Lal potaaka, of revolution and the Red flag, and returned to an older libretto; by 11 am on the morning of the result the entire Left Front cabinet was wiped out of the State Assembly. Now Mamata’s favoured soundtrack, Rabindra Sangeet, blared on the speakers at Kalighat while a deathly silence enveloped the CPI(M) headquarters at Alimuddin Street.

 

In a surreal flash, I imagined this Rabindra Sangeet playlist blaring as the revenge-bullets flew from handmade guns across the fetid May greenery of rural Sonar Bangla. I imagined the words ‘Naai, naai bhoy, hobey, hobey joy, khuley jaabey ei dwaar’ – ‘No, there’s no fear, there will, there will be victory, these doors will surely open,’ taking on a whole different meaning as Trinamul muscle went after the CPM goon squads who had terrorized them over the last so many years with the help of the police and local administration. It was a far cry from Hemanta Mukherjee singing ‘Keno Chokher Joley’ on my parents’ radiogramme.

As we left the celebrations we bumped into a journalist friend of mine, M, an American of Bengali descent, and she came along with us to our next port of call that day, Santoshpur, in deep South Calcutta. There, in the back lanes of a Trinamul controlled locality, things were somewhat quieter but no less happy. Again there were the funnel-shaped loudspeakers on the lamp posts and again, they were playing Rabindra Sangeet, though from a different playlist, this one happily including songs of love and desire. I pointed this out to S and he smiled happily. His happiness was short-lived. ‘This stuff makes me vomit,’ said M, my American-Bengali friend, actually shuddering. ‘My ma used to force me to go to Rabindra Sangeet lessons, and I used to have to sit through whole evenings of this shit. It still makes me come out in hives.’ S’s English wasn’t very fluent, but his comprehension was good enough to catch the full impact of this heresy.

 

Fundamentally a polite man, especially in front of foreign and semi-foreign ladies, S just turned and looked at M with an expression of deep pain and confusion. M, not for nothing a highly sharp veteran journalist, quickly read S’s face and realized her faux pas. I was caught there in the middle, between the ‘don’t you just hate it?’ and the ‘how can you not love it?’ In the sultry hot afternoon, the speakers blared the famous song of Tagorean rain: ‘Monoe-mor meghero sanghi, udey choley dig digantoro paarey… srabono borshaano shongitey, rimi jhim, rimi jhim, rimi jhim…’

 

* Ruchir Joshi is the author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, 2001 and has made Eleven Miles (1991), a feature-length film on the Bauls.