A sad song for world music day

Everyone loves to sing and dance. There are songs for childbirth and there are very well-crafted compositions sung at death. There are victory dances. There are anti-war songs and blood-curdling verses of gore and brutality driven by the belief it is a patriotic duty to do so. Revolutionary music eggs the comrades on to their dream of sugarcandy mountains. Hitler promoted Wagner. His opponents watched cabaret shows, which he hated. Sheema Kirmani in Karachi and Malika Sarabhai in Ahmedabad dance for democracy. Bharatnatyam exponent Sonal Mansingh in Delhi is ecstatic about her exclusive meeting with Narendra Modi.

It is a lie that the Afghan Taliban or the Gulf Arabs who subscribe to puritan Islam shun dance and music. The erstwhile Muslim Mujahideen in Kabul would be all too frequently netted by Soviet sleuths watching the latest Indian movie. Low tier Gulf Arab women dance a monotonous movement before their puritan patrons by waving their hair shoulder to shoulder. The most rabid video of Salafis from Mosul begins with a musical score.

In the anti-Nazi love story of the 1942 movie Casablanca, Die Wacht am Rhein was sung by German soldiers at Rick’s bar, who then were drowned out by exiled French singing La Marseillaise. Both were mesmeric, and that is the tragedy of music.

The German song though must grip the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, the Hindu group that idolised Hitler, and remains the only ultranationalist entity to hold an annual ritual of arms worship, or shastra pooja.

The German Rhine song was to become a role model for later Right-wing nationalists: The cry resounds like thunder’s peal, like crashing waves and clang of steel, The Rhine, the Rhine, our German Rhine, who will defend our stream, divine?

The late anti-war singer Pete Seeger gave South Asia two of its most frequently heard songs against injustice and war, We shall overcome, and Where have all the flowers gone? His first recordings in New York in 1940 with the Almanac Singers became the theme song for American labour activists for generations. The group also recorded anti-war ballads, which proved embarrassing when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the American Left became patriotic. I believe Seeger had to row back somewhat from his staunch pacifism to accommodate exigencies of his battling partisans.

There can be good or bad art, dance or music on either side of the sharp ideological divide. V.D. Paluskar sang a most moving composition of Vande Mataram replete with Hindu religious motifs at a pre-Independence session of the Congress, while the spreading of Hindu revivalism in recent years was handed over to jarring crooners like Narendra Chanchal and Anoop Jalota. (You could see it as the essential cultural difference between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party — the former promoted quality aesthetics of a Brahminical elite, the other relied on tinsel garishness that went with the culture of overcharging mohalla shopkeepers.)

Music sometimes becomes a duty. Most Indians would not know the first thing of what their heavily Sanskritised national anthem means. Most Pakistanis would struggle to divine the Turko-Persian words composed by Hafiz Jalandhari as their nation’s choice for anthem. Yet we can’t help marvelling at the earnest fervour with which these songs are sung. In this confusing melee of music imposed as patriotic duty, my choice goes for sheer lyrical beauty to the Tagore-composed Sri Lankan anthem — Namo Namo Mata — though I would loathe lip-syncing it with the Sinhalese troops who raped and massacred their Tamil compatriots. Now they are also targeting Sri Lankan Muslims.

Shubha Mudgal has been singing everything she likes about Indian music. Her range of Hindustani classical music includes khayal, thumri, tappa and a host of traditional songs that go with marriage and childbirth in Uttar Pradesh; from the devotional to the risqué; from the traditional to fusion. A supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi verbally attacked her as she prepared to sing at a temple gathering in San Francisco recently. Mudgal had opposed Mr Modi’s candidature with other democratic artists. She was later deleted from a concert planned by an FM Radio in Delhi to celebrate the World Music Day last week.

It is not known if Mr Modi has an ear for music, but in January this year he reportedly released CDs containing songs celebrating Savarkar, a hero among the more virulent variants of Hindu revivalists. Savarkar is also idolised by those that see Mahatma Gandhi’s killer, a Savarkar acolyte as a patriot. Some Savarkar fans stand accused of bombing the Samjhauta Express though they should have tarried as he was the original proponent of the two-nation theory. Jinnah only followed a lead.

Mudgal is not alone in being punished for her music. Popular playback star Kishore Kumar was shunned for opposing Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. The revered Chilean singer Víctor Jara, a close friend of Pablo Neruda, was brutally killed by Pinochet.

And how many artists suffered during Zia-ul-Haq’s religious regime? I remember interviewing the late singer Malika Pukhraj for a newspaper in Dubai. She had stressed that Hindustani khayal could not be named Pakistani khayal simply because there were two countries claiming a common musical legacy.

She also felt that Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni Sa, the sargam of Indian music with its Sanskrit roots, could not be sung in the Urdu alphabet. “You can’t have sargam as Alif Bey Pey Tey,” she had said. Zia banned her for this and more.

“In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing, about the dark times,” wrote Bertolt Brecht.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi
By arrangement with Dawn