A Note, A Voice, & Some Words

“Put yourself in their place and see their difficulties,” says the knowing one.  “Dwelling on your sorrow and your difficulties as a dissenter is not just self-centered, it’s foolish.” As a longtime observer of life in India, I see this as sound advice. 

Like almost every country in the world, the India of recent years has been witnessing a bid to change the fundamentals. “The Constitution should go. Democracy should go. Hindus, the land’s great majority and its original inhabitants, should FINALLY rule India. Muslims should become Hindus or go to Pakistan or somehow hide themselves. Christians should call themselves Hindu Christians or Christian Hindus. Sikhs too should say they’re Hindus. Buddhists likewise. Western symbols, like the English language, should either disappear or merely express Hindu truths. Let India create the Hindu age!” 

This is their pitch, and it often gets enthusiastic and frightening support. One problem for them, however, an insurmountable one, is that in the end the existence of even one dissenting mind will disturb their mental peace. 

GOLDEN SONGS

Another huge problem for them is music. In recent weeks a young friend has been sending me links to golden Indian songs of yesteryear, “film” songs as they’re often called, distinct from classical Indian music. Millions of Indians shed a visible or invisible tear as they listen to these old favorites, which were sung by unforgettable Hindu and Muslim voices and expressed on the screen by unforgettable Muslim and Hindu actors. No movie watcher, whether Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi, was disconcerted when a greatly loved actor suddenly broke into a “hit” song in the voice of a greatly loved singer. 

The instant such a song (luckily there are thousands of them) plays on a phone today, it summons a world where Indians and Pakistanis, and Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, lived or loved or quarreled or died as human beings in a space where co-existence was the norm and supremacy an unworthy wish. In a fraction of a second, the mere opening note of the music for a song of this kind blasts away, out beyond the stadium, a month of hate speech. 

It’s not the music alone that clears the air. The words of these songs are remedial too, for they resonate with those “foreign” terms of Persian or Arabic provenance whose banishment is heatedly demanded by champions of a Hindu Rashtra. These latter resent the fact that Urdu, an Indian tongue very close to Hindi but enriched by Arabic and Persian, remains one of India’s national languages and continues to be stamped on India’s currency notes. 

SEARCH FOR PURITY

In the name of “purity” and “native-ness,” supremacists in India’s current government have changed the names of many cities, districts, railway stations, universities. They have the power to change more names, to rewrite history books, produce and promote films telling history as they want it told, impede films that tell a different story, change syllabuses for schools and colleges, remove books from libraries, and rearrange museums to promote the desired ideology. 

They’ve done some of this already, and they can and may do more. What seems to be beyond them, however, is to re-record old songs after cleansing them of “foreign” words that remain part of the everyday speech of millions of Indians. 

Another friend has just sent me a summary of the life of one of India’s most-loved “film” singers from a past which is not all that distant, K. L. Saigal (1904-47), whose full name, Kundan Lal Saigal, is perhaps not remembered even by some of his most devoted fans. Whether written by the friend himself or by someone else, the summary describes Saigal’s singing in these words: “What a voice dunked in a barrelful of rich baritone, soaked in innocence and earnestness, layered with pathos and yearning and coated with honey. The tonal quality of Saigal’s songs with his complete command over the three octaves and maintaining unvarying pitch gave his voice an unmatched quality.”  

Unlike most of the great singers who followed him -- Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammad Rafi, Kishore Kumar, Asha Bhosle, Mukesh, Manna Dey, and others -- Saigal acted and sang in the films containing his music -- he did not record songs for other actors. He was usually accompanied by tabla and a harmonium, and “his voice alone carried the song.” Calling Saigal “the first superstar of Bollywood music,” the friend who sent me a summary of Saigal’s life lists the names of what he regards as the Saigal immortals, along with the films in which he sang them: 

Ek bangla bane nyara (from President,1937)
Babul mora (Street Singer,1937)
Karoon kya aas niras bhaee (Dushman, 1939)
Mai ka janoon kya jadoo hai (Zindagi, 1940)
So ja Rajkumari so ja (Zindagi, 1940)
Aye katib-e-taqdeer mujhe itna bata de (My Sister, 1943)
Do naina matware tihare (My Sister, 1943) 

WHAT SAIGAL SUMMONS

Let me add that I am old enough to remember most of these songs from almost the time they were first sung. 

Part of Saigal’s magic, and of his wonderful relevance, is that the India he summons is undivided India. For his young life ended before India was partitioned, when he was only 42. A Punjabi-speaking Dogra born in Jammu, Saigal spent his professional life in Lahore, Kolkata, and Mumbai. In his time, people living in Kolkata and Mumbai thought of Lahore the way they would think today of Bangalore or of Hyderabad, and people in Lahore thought of Delhi the way they would think today of Karachi. 

Supremacists in today’s India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh, those who think that Hindus and Muslims are two different “nations” and cannot live together except in a relationship where one dominates and the other submits, celebrate India’s 1947 partition, which was followed in 1971 by Bangladesh’s secession from Pakistan. I do not celebrate the partition, but I have no wish to undo it. I want both Pakistan and Bangladesh to thrive as independent countries where everyone in the population receives the state’s protection and a chance to flourish, no matter their religion, language, caste, ethnicity, province, whatever. 

And I want the same in and for India. 

What was noticeable in India during last month’s four-day India-Pakistan conflict, and in the days following, was the complete lack of any expression of interest by what may be called the Indian establishment in the lives and conditions of the people of Pakistan. Not only were negative feelings towards Pakistan’s government, where the army unquestionably plays an outsize role, automatically extended to the people of Pakistan, the latter were blanked out of the Indian conversation. It was as if the people didn’t exist. Or if they did exist, they didn’t matter.

PHONY TEARS

When you place this wiping out next to the loud and repeated criticism by champions of a Hindu India of the 1947 partition, you wonder how honest that criticism is. The supremacists’ tears over the partition seem quite phony. You realize that any regret there is restricted to the loss of land. In their view, the exit from India of the population that comprises Pakistan should be cause for gratitude. 

Dissenters will have a different take. They will insist, as I do, that the people of Pakistan are human beings. That they are neighbors to Indians. And that with them, and with the people of Bangladesh, the people of India should keep friendly and mutually profitable relations. 

Thankfully, moreover, an old song, in fact thousands of old songs, will remind us that friendship has survived the borders created in 1947 and will survive the assaults of supremacists of different hues, races, languages, sects, and religions.