A fresh slice . . .
Kaiser Haq explores music, art and the rhythm of harmony
Studies of various aspects of Rabindranath Tagore are legion, and a fair proportion of them deal with his achievement as a lyricist and composer. One of the best-loved critical studies in Bengali, Abu Sayeed Ayub's Pantha Janer Shakha (The Traveller's Friend) analyses this aspect of Rabindranath. Yet this beautifully produced volume a collector's item can rightfully claim to be the first of its kind. The novelty of Reba Som's book is that it is a critical biography that foregrounds Rabindranath's musical genius while keeping in view its organic connections with other aspects of his oeuvre. The reader is offered a fresh perspective on Rabindranath as a whole and not only on his music, for, as Dr Som neatly puts it, "music was the fount from which his creative energies flowed." Dr Som is uniquely qualified to tackle the subject and at least partially fill a sad lacuna in Tagore studies in English. Trained as a historian, she has authored several scholarly books on Indian history, most recently Gandhi, Bose, Nehru and the Making of the Indian Mind (Delhi: Penguin/Viking, 2004). She is currently director of the Rabindranath Tagore Centre in Kolkata. She is an accomplished singer who has specialized in Rabindrasangeet, and in course of her extensive travels and prolonged sojourns in foreign lands her husband, the book's dedicatee, is a retired diplomat has had fruitful exchanges with Western musicologists. It is a pity that most biographies of Tagore, especially those in English, scant his musical side. The reason is not hard to find, though. Tagore's songs have not so far travelled much and they do not translate well, both in a literary and musical sense. I have heard upcountry Indians dismiss them as "rona gana" (doleful melodies) and I wish I could dismiss them as utter philistines, but then I found they were also appreciative listeners of Hindustani classical music. Clearly the issue is more complex than it seems at first. Western audiences too have by and large been deaf to the beauty of Tagore's songs, as indeed they have been to Indian music in general. Rabindranath himself realized early on that music was far less universal an art than it was supposed to be. There is a degree of cultural relativism in musical matters that can prevent mutual appreciation between cultures. Thus Rabindranath found himself amused by the bird-like trills of a Western soprano; and when he as a young visitor in England sang for guests at parties there would be suppressed titters. And yet Rabindranath realized how important it was to achieve universal understanding, and persevered in his attempts to use music in the endeavour. Dr Som's account of Rabindranath's interaction with non-Indian music makes engaging reading. His absorption of influences from Western folk and popular music is well known, and it is a testament to his musical acumen that they sit so well alongside what he has inherited from the Indian classical and folk traditions, particularly the kirtan and Baul songs. Less well known is the attempt by certain Western composers to adapt his poetry and lyrics to Western musical forms; it is an enterprise that ought to be further encouraged. Now that copyright restrictions have expired one hopes that Western composers will be more forthcoming to engage with the greatest musical genius of modern South Asia. From our side a work like Dr Som's can help. I think it is thoughtful of her and the publishers to include a CD with 60 representative songs from a number of the finest exponents of Rabindrasangeet, among them Hemanta Mukherjee, Suchitra Mitra, our very own Bannya, and Dr Som herself, and to append both transliterations into the Roman alphabet and English translations. These should help the serious non-Bengali listener overcome the linguistic impediment to a fuller appreciation. To me the most intriguing section of the book is the one exploring the symbiotic link between Rabindranath's music and his strange late flowering as an artist. Dr Som notes that to him both music and art "sprang from the rhythm of harmony", and quotes him explaining that "in the pictorial, plastic and verbal arts the object and our feeling with regard to it are closely associated, like the rose and the perfume. In music the feeling, extracted in sound, becomes itself an independent object." Dr Som detects a "distinct musical quality" in "the landscapes and a few of the portraits", and quotes a German critic who claimed that he could sense "the music of his (i.e. Tagore's) being in these strange paintings". The illustrative samples of the paintings in the book have been well chosen. As Dr Som notes in her preface, while much scholarship has gone into this book, it is meant as much for the common reader as for the scholar. Her anecdotal style and short chapters make for easy reading. One could, however, wish for more thorough editing so that the odd idiomatic infelicity e.g. "severe physical form" to mean plain old ugliness would not pull the reader up short.
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