Tag: Rabindrasangeet

Currency of Songs

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

October 2018

First published in Usawa Literary Review

It’s October, but still uncomfortably muggy in Delhi. We’re crammed in a small car, five of us, including the driver, and frantically looking for a school in Civil Lines, one of the oldest areas in India’s capital city. The search gets long-winded as we have no GPS and directions from passersby keep leading us into lonely alleys. The school we’re looking for is the venue of a Durga Puja, the autumnal festival I’ve returned home for, from Canada, where I’ve been living for a decade now. By the time we finally find the school, it is way past lunch time, and my seven-year-old niece, who is with us, is hangry, a neologism I’ve heard friends in Canada use to describe someone whose anger is induced by hunger.

We take a customary look at the idol of Durga, then dash for the food court area the Kashmiri Gate – as this venue is called – Durga Puja is famous for. A, my niece, is led to the spot where steaming mutton biryani made with succulent, spiced goat meat, is being served on shiny aluminium foil plates. There are kebabs on offer as well, but the little girl isn’t interested in any of those items. She surveys the stalls and settles on samosas as a fresh batch of these deep-fried triangles arrives before her. I reach for my purse, but A stops me. She has her own money bag with some real money her parents gave her as festival allowance. For a plate of samosa that costs 20 rupees, A pulls out not two, but five ten-rupee bills – the entire amount she’s carrying – from her purse. She places all the five notes – 50 rupees on the table for the cashier. Everyone around her breaks into laughter. At seven, A knows her counting, but clearly, she doesn’t have enough experience in dealing with currency notes to know their value. The cashier kindly picks up two of the bills and asks her to keep the rest. After finishing her samosas, a less hangry A decides to cool off with an ice cream. She gives the vendor 20 rupees and he gives her a 5-rupee coin back after deducting the price of the chocolate cone she grabs.

Later as I try to guide A through counting currency, she tells me she’s got it all. “Look, you give someone money, they give you money back,” she insists, her knowledge fresh from the transaction with the ice cream seller. The child’s innocence humours and stuns me at the same time. To her, currency notes are the same as any other — only less interesting — thing you share with people to get something (including more of it) back. It’s of no greater value than the pencils or hair clips she exchanges with a friend. I refrain from giving her financial management lessons. This is her teaching moment, and for a change, I am the student. ***

April 1999

It has been nearly three weeks since I’ve stopped going to work. A supervisor has been putting me on difficult shifts for weeks in a row. At first it seems innocuous, but when the pattern keeps repeating itself alongside favours being granted to other colleagues for no discernible reason, I stop going to work. I don’t have it in me to confront people and have internalized the idea of resigning as I spend time doing mostly nothing at home. I say mostly because almost every morning, I walk down our street, a fat book in hand, to the house of Mastermoshai, as I call Sudhir Chanda, the elderly gentleman who teaches me the songs of Rabindranath Tagore.

Mastermoshai is a professional Rabindrasangeet teacher. Professional only in the notional sense, considering his indifference, bordering on abhorrence, to money in exchange for his lessons. Through close to half a century that would see New Delhi, the city of Mastermoshai’s work and teaching, transform from a quasi-socialist to a neoliberal economy, plush with high-paying private sector jobs, redoubled spending power for the middle class and steady inflation, the teacher’s tuition fee – a laughable 30 rupees – remains unchanged. Even that amount he hardly cares for. One is free to drop into his class, named Robigeetika, and learn without paying a single rupee.

During one of his occasional visits to our house he learns about my absence from work and asks me to make better use of my time – by going to his house for music lessons. No money is mentioned. All he asks for is that I call him once before leaving the house to make sure he doesn’t have any other appointment that day. Mastermoshai specifies no time either – any time before noon is good for him. I lap up the offer. I need something that can fill up my heart like soil does a freshly-dug grave. Music seems like a safe and sanative layer at the time.

Read the rest in Usawa Literary Review
Borshamongol with Robigeetika and Mastermoshai; Bhaswati in green sari in the front; Mastermoshai right behind her, facing a microphone.

All the Octave’s Notes

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ 2 Comments

First published in ABRÁCE LIVE!

A royal courtesan scorned by her lover
A warrior princess who makes her life over
Brothers cursed to turn into beasts
A farmer’s wife who cooks up a feast
The first songs I heard throbbed with dreams and rivers
That’s what music is, a lifelong lover.

A bottle of fortified milk with its sipper inside my mouth, I would lie on the bed or the sofa as the story of Buddhu and Bhutum, two royal newborns cursed to the lives of a monkey and an owl, entered my toddler ears. Long before I knew what music meant, my ears were getting trained to catch a variety of notes. Saving money from their modest salaries, my mother and her younger brother would buy LP records to play for us on a turntable in my grandparents’ house where I was growing up. They were bringing home a variety of musical influences — Rabindrasangeet — songs written and composed by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali Nobel laureate, shyamasangeet — written and sung in the praise of Goddess Kali, Atulprasadi — devotional and love songs written and composed by Atul Prasad Sen, a Bengali composer, lyricist and singer who was also a lawyer, social worker, educationist and writer. Of everything that was played, though, what I and my brother, nearly three years older than me, loved were dramatized musicals (also known as dance dramas) by Tagore and musical folktales of the kind narrating Buddhu and Bhutum’s story in Bengali. The heightened effect of drama, rendered through songs and musical dialogues was the perfect blend of music and storytelling that had our attention, hungry for the goofy.

At the Monday/Thursday class
eight of us circle our guru,
his cotton wool beard just about
eclipsing that concessional smile.
Bageshree holds the room
and our octaves together.

(From my poem, Bageshree)

While singing and listening to music remained a constant in both home and school, it was only in middle school that I came to identify the octave’s notes. My mother enrolled me into private classes in Hindustani classical vocal music, one of the two branches of Indian classical music (the other being Carnatic). She saved money again, this time to buy a harmonium to help me practice my lessons at home. In school, we got to learn a fair share of Hindi patriotic songs and Rabindrasangeet.

And then there was the radio at home. In between preparing for school work and practicing my classical music lessons, the radio — our primary source of listening to music — had replaced the turntable by this time. To me, the radio was a magic box. You turned on a knob and it brought you Hindi film music from the golden era of the 1950s and 60s, you moved the knob to your right and it played English pop songs and Western classical music. Somewhere in the middle, if you persisted, you could catch BBC World News, albeit with the hissing impatience of a faltering signal. Twice a week at dinner time, my mother religiously tuned into two Western music shows — Forces Request on Mondays and A Date with You on Thursdays. While the former featured songs requested by members of the Indian armed forces, the latter was a request show for regular listeners. This was my first window into The Beatles, The Carpenters, ABBA, The Beach Boys, Glen Campbell and many other singers and bands. That they coexisted in my musical universe with luminaries of Hindi film music like Sahir Ludhiyanvi, Sachin Dev Burman, Shailendra, Salil Chowdhury and many others as well as Rabindrasangeet in the melodic voices of Kanika Bandopadhyay, Suchitra Mitra and Debabrata Biswas was simply as natural as the multilingual world I inhabited that required me to switch form Bengali to Hindi to English based on the environment I found myself in.

In grade eight, my musical world became even richer as our first cassette tape player entered the house. It was a small machine, custom made for us by an acquaintance. In the machine’s early days, our cassette collection totaled to two tapes. Yet, the musical wealth these two cassette tapes brought was truly infinite. You’ll see why.

The first tape was a predictable choice — a Rabindrasangeet album my mother bought. The other one, procured by my brother, would alter my musical universe forever. It was a jugalbandi (duet) of sitarist, Ravi Shankar and sarod player, Ali Akbar Khan, accompanied on the tabla by Alla Rakha , legendary musicians all three of them. It was a concert, Ravi and Ali, guru brothers — a relationship tag disciples trained by the same guru would go by — recorded at the Philharmonic Hall in New York City in October 1972, a month after the death of their guru, Allauddin Khan, who happened to be Ali Akbar’s father and Ravi Shankar’s father-in-law. At the beginning of the tribute concert, Ravi Shankar introduced him as one of “the greatest musicians.” I find it curious that the year and the month of that particular concert coincided with my brother’s birth.

The virtuoso musicians played three rāgas (“a melodic framework for improvisation in Indian classical music akin to a melodic mode. The rāga is a unique and central feature of the classical Indian music tradition, and has no direct translation to concepts in classical European music. Each rāga is an array of melodic structures with musical motifs, considered in the Indian tradition to have the ability to “colour the mind” and affect the emotions of the audience.”), opening with Hem Bihag, created by the departed guru, Allauddin Khan himself, followed by Manj Khamaj and Sindhi Bhairavi.

Listening to Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan strum the strings of two different instruments in such meditative and yet unintrusive harmony took me to a place I’d never been before, and one I didn’t want to leave. To say that they were complementing each other would be woefully inadequate. It was as if they were playing each other’s instruments, not the one they themselves held. I hadn’t had the opportunity to listen to a true jugalbandi before this, and I remain grateful to this day that my initiation to this collaborative form happened with such a stellar performance. The moment I heard the first notes of the sitar and sarod in alaap (the non-rhythmic melody structure revealing the rāga), at once pensive and uplifting, I knew this was the love of a lifetime. Once they moved on to Manj Khamaj, this time their notes finding the company of Alla Rakha’s beats on the tabla, I felt being enveloped in Delhi’s December sunshine, an experience I’ve forever cherished, with a balmy tropical winter sun bringing a kind of warmth which instead of whip-lashing you, cloaked you in a warm embrace.

A soothing sadness, the colour
of mellow afternoons, glides in.
Tears soak stationary hours
and passing cataclysms.

Negotiating years and terrains
Manj Khamaj keeps breathing.
A footsure confidant. In its
folds, wars lose their way.

(From my poem, Manj Khamaj)

To this day, listening to this Manj Khamaj jugalbandi teleports me to such a comforting, snug tropical winter afternoon. As I listen to it for a millionth time, the music embeds itself into my immediate surroundings with such intimacy that I can’t tell where one instrument takes off and the other follows, as if the sitar and sarod were two brothers themselves, with the tabla as their loving guardian that held them together and became playful with them in turns. Through all my musical discoveries and learning, this album has remained a sublime true north that never fails to bring me back home, metaphorically and otherwise. It’s a discovery I made because of my brother, and that memory, entwined with the divine effect of the music itself, makes this widely-acclaimed concert intimately personal for me.

Ever since that brush with music at the deepest level, at the level of the spirit, I’ve found my musical world continue to expand, to include Sufi music, Latin American jazz, African folk music, the work of innovative composers like Gustavo Santaolalla and Ludovico Einaudi. In this world the inner and the outer become one for me and boundaries lose all meaning.

Music had held me by the hand when the world seemed to slip away from under my feet; it has calmed my nerves when medicine or sleep couldn’t; it has brought me joy in the middle of enervating ennui and it has often taken me back to that crispy sunshine of my childhood winters in Delhi.

Guest Blog: Anandamayee Majumdar

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ 6 Comments

Anandamayee Majumdar has been translating Rabindranath Tagore’s songs for a while now. Her translations are available on Gitabitan in English, where she and her friend, Rumela Sengupta, have transcreated more than 700 songs of Tagore so far.  Here Anandamayee shares the challenges and rewards of translating Tagore.

Translating Rabindrasangeet

I am deeply honoured and humbled by the fact that Bhaswati asked me to write something about translating Tagore songs, a topic she wanted to post in her own blog. Here I will describe the motivation and experiences that have been relevant to me in my work. I understand that this is nothing more than a personal experience.

Translation of Rabindranath’s songs is an arduous job, and often times a frustrating one. For one, those who are conversant in Bangla, know how difficult it is to educe similar resonance and melody (surely to be missing in a translation) of the song. It is hard enough to create the same aura of just the poem itself, let alone the rhythm or the melody. Therefore to the Tagore fan of Bengal, any transcreation can easily seem like a travesty.

I need to clarify that so far as records go, there have been two kinds of translations, serving two different purposes. Both are worthy of effort, in my opinion. One, in which the transcreator tries to weld the lyrical threads of the song into her work, creating a poetic essence of the song. The other kind of translation, is that which matches the beats and measures of the original poem. The aim of the latter, is to be able to read it, as well as sing to it.

I personally think, simply to be able to educe similar emotions as the original song can be tremendously difficult, with translated work. One can only try one’s best, and not be too complacent about it. Yet, the translator at some point finds her own wings. Nobody else can tell her what to do. Since similar to creation, transcreation too can become a work of art and ingenuity. Therefore, no two paths could be the same. And so, there could be different ways to transcreate the same song by two different people.

When I first came outside Bengal to the US, I was posed with a problem of sharing Rabindranath’s songs with my friends, who were not conversant in Bengali. I had to translate a few songs to my friends at University of Connecticut in 2001, so we could share them and sing them together. I found that these translations when shared, resonated with the English speaking community — specifically, with those that had spiritual awareness in their lives. Later I was also asked to translate some of Rabindranath’s famous operas, Chitrangada and Shaapmochon by a dance academy for their own performance. These were aimed at the participants and the audience, who were mostly non-conversant in Bangla. Later, I was quelling out my own stress of traveling long distances every week, by translating Tagore songs; also, I was determined not to let my long hours of travel turn out to be entirely futile.

The desire to organize and stockpile these translations, or transcreations as we call them, came from my friend Rumela Sengupta, my soul-mate and dear friend from college, who was also transcreating Tagore songs as a way to connect to her spiritual core. We shared a similar passion for Rabindranath and his songs, and had often hummed them together back in our youth. Rumela created a blog in 2009, that she named ‘Gitabitan in English’, at http://gitabitan-en.blogspot.com. An artist among other things, she brought into it a flair of her own. True to her spirit, she gave it the space and beauty it needed for making this a home cum pleasurable workplace for us, to funnel our emotions and creative passions, to heal our inner selves, to connect to others who loved Rabindranath, and to somehow reach out to those who needed him through our transcreations.

After this blog was born, the contributions became more motivated, and more regular. We began to choose songs to transcreate on a certain day, based on our needs and emotions of that day. Then again we also tried to be context sensitive, to be able to produce some work that would be seasonable and synchronous to the time of year or any concurrent collective occasion. This makes the work more relevant in some sense. We also tried to respond to the specific requests that were sometimes made of us, of transcreating certain lyrics.

We realized that others who had a chance to view the blog often left important comments, and that it would need a separate space of discussion. Rumela set up a discussion forum in Facebook, called Thoughts of Tagore where the transcreations were immediately posted. Friends Suman Dasgupta, Soumya Sankar Basu and Arindam Sengupta and others, often gave us razor-sharp and profound critique that we needed to craft these transcreations into the molds they would eventually become. Their feedback often times, honed the meaning, freshened the imagery, or bore out the essence with crispness. These individuals are our much coveted co-creators.

Since Rumela set up the blog, we have transcreated more than 700 songs. Since Rabindranath’s Gitabitan — his entire collection of songs, encompasses more than 2200 songs, we have a long way to go, to make the entire garden of songs available in English.

Whenever an urge to express arises, I seek one of his songs that seem to guide my emotions, my results of immediate soul-searching. This is all a very personal story to some extent. The good thing is, Tagore-songs import messages that are so universal, I need not bother that they have lost their aura in the present day. So the real challenge is to reach out through a contemporary, universally agreed upon diction, one that spans continents and cultures.

To put this into context of the work that is ‘out there’, we have read the works of many other translators to date, most noteworthy, maybe are Arnolde Bake, Khitish Roy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, William Radice, Ketaki Kushari Dyson, Amiya Chakravarty, and others. We have often been referred to their work, by the pundits we have asked for feedback along our way. We have read most of the existing work of these trendsetters with great passion.

I recently came across a US citizen named John Thorpe visiting Bangladesh, his work brings him to a culturally thriving milieu in the neighborhoods of Rajshahi University. In his fifties now, he has been translating Rabindrasangeet for fifteen years, his aim is to be able to sing them. He sings in both the original Bengali version and in his version of English, with a deep, majestic voice. I noticed his choice of words was quite fresh and contemporary. The fact that he tried to preserve the original cadence, did not cause havoc to the poetic essence. Fascinated by his efforts, I tried following this route on my own. I had previously been urged by quite a few individuals to try this out, but had refrained. I had not found the correct motivation at that point. But now, listening to John sing, it felt right. The path was frustrating, rewarding and effort-some at the same time. One may work on one or many more transcreations a day if this challenge of rhyming or singing to the transcreation, is not present. But with the challenge of allowing the rhythm to flow naturally just as the original, and to let the poetic essence exude just as well, the choice of expressions need such a lot of experimentation, that it often takes a while to finish the process. It is a frontier that is still fresh for me, and I feel both the butterflies and the exhilaration of an explorer.

I am aware of my own lacking conditions, and therefore, my passion for attaining a hold on English literature has grown over time. I confess that I am no English writer, or even a student of literature for that matter. Literary limitations do bother me a lot. I hold, therefore a great value for those specific constructive critique and comments that seem sincere and heartfelt, from the readers of this blog — they have molded my work. I also have been privileged to come across some enlightened writers (in English), who have a lovely command over the English language, and who I take to deeply, mainly because they write from the heart and have an effeminate style.

I believe that if we can let an inspiration wash over us, we can heal ourselves, and that could light up any creation. Without inspiration, without the flame that kindles our desire into action, anything that we do becomes dull. This has happened to many of my own transcreations. On the other hand, sometimes I just happen to sit down and start. This often results into a primary draft which does not appeal at all. But over time, that draft serves as the stepping stone, a skeleton of the work. By and by, I try to chisel out the extraneous, the unimportant, and preserve only the substance that feels right. Language itself is so fluid and magnetic. If one is not intrigued by its beauty, if it is not delectable, as well as spiritual, one can not create a worthy translation, because Rabindranath is both about profound spiritual beauty and consummate expression. As a transcreator, one has the obligation as well as the freedom to take the song (the poem and the melody together), and make it one’s own. It should not be a feeble attempt at making it available in another language, it should be borne out of one’s own heart.

I try to borrow idioms and ideas from everyday life sometimes. I do try and keep a mental note of new phrases, and idioms, and striking nuances of speech, that may come handy and could be used later for some future work.

Editing plays a major role in crafting out these transcreations. I usually edit a lot of times even after a post has appeared on the blog… until I feel that I have given it my best. Even then, it is good to come back to that post after a while, when you can read it as a third person, without attachment.

My interest is also an inherited one. I have had the exposure to Tagore’s songs since I was a child. The learning and practice of Tagore’s songs, poems and opera have been made natural for me by my family. My grandfather Subodh Majumdar was one of the first people in Bengal to self-teach Tagore songs, and to distribute them to his family and country. Renowned singers have taken their music lessons and inspirations from this unusually gifted man. In his thirties, he was making critical discussions on the notations of  Rabindrasangeet with the venerable notation-maker and musician (grandson of Tagore’s brother) Dinendranath Tagore in Santiniketan. Subodh Majumdar was also taking sitar lessons with maestro Ustaad Vilayat Khan at Sangeet Academy in Kolkata. At his own home in Khulna, he was teaching the sitar, Khol, Pakhwaj, violin, harmonium, tabla, flute and Esraj to his seven children.

Rabindrasangeet (among other songs) filled the breath of the house. My father Subrata Majumdar who was also extremely multifaceted,  had transcreated Tagore songs and poems in his twenties. Some of these got published in the family magazine. When I first came across these translated songs and poems, they read so well, I can still recall my elation at reading those soulful, crisp passages. My parents, my aunts also happen to be musicians and teachers in Tagore songs in their own rights. I am much indebted to my family, who have made Rabindranath my companion and friend, since I was a child. Therefore, transcreating Tagore was just one of the things that I can trace back to my family, like many other things.

For me, this is the story of how these transcreations came about, what I think about them, and what works for me. I think that pathway also describes the motivations and frustrations met along the way, for this work.