Moving with the Song: Loss and Longing in the Migrations of Bengal

Moushumi Bhowmik

 
Dehotori dilam chhari
O guru, tomari naame

I have set sail my body
O master, in your name I sail my boat
  
The image of the journey repeatedly returns to the folk repertoire of Bengal; it is a metaphor for life and seeking. There are songs about the boatman ferrying his passengers from shore to shore, or rowing alone; there are songs about waiting for the boat. Songs about the cart-driver, who goes past the house but does not stop; or the buffalo herder who pitches his camp by the riverside, plays the flute in the evening, stays for a few days and then leaves again. There are songs about the daughter leaving her natal home after marriage, like a bird that has learned to fly. Songs about people, moving in groups from one place to another and the lonely seeker setting out in the dark of the night for love. There are also songs of the minstrels, peddlers of love and poetry, for whom the road itself is home.

In my work of the past several years I have concerned myself with such songs; travelling, as the singer-songwriter that I am, through music, rowing and navigating along the way, picking songs from my road and the riverbed.

This paper is about journeys through music and about the idea of the journey as it finds expression in the folk music of Bengal. It is about moving with the song and moving for the song.

Crossings

Bengal as a geographical and political entity comprises the state of West Bengal in eastern India and the country of Bangladesh. They were one whole once, but got broken into two with India’s Partition in 1947, the year also of the country’s independence from British colonial rule and the birth of Pakistan. However, folklore, music and language can hardly remain confined within state boundaries and they are bound to flow over from one side to the other. So, this Bengal that I have been travelling through is both a fragmented space and a mental construct. The history of this land is a history of departures and arrivals—a series of migrations in and out of a space, as a result of which the space continuously forms and re-forms itself. So its people are faced with the question of where and what home is and they are touched over and over by pains of separation and longing, by what in Bengali we call biraha. The word is hard to translate; it is a bit like Eva Hoffman’s tesknota, ‘that adds to nostalgia the tonalities of sadness and longing’.[1]

 
Partition was a time of mistrust and hatred and there were communal riots between Hindus and Muslims and killings on both sides of the border. The east of Bengal was carved out as East Pakistan (what in 1971 became Bangladesh), because the Muslims were in the majority on that side and Partition was carried out on the basis of the religion of the majority. Partition was therefore a time of large-scale migrations across the borders, more though from the east to the west. Those who made these crossings took their songs and stories with them; they would now try to make homes in new lands, sometimes even far from Bengal. In the 1950s Professor Alain Danielou, a French musicologist who taught at the Banaras Hindu University, recorded a refugee from East Bengal by the name of Haripada Debnath in Benaras, for an album compiled and edited by Alan Lomax for the World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series.[2] Debnath plucked on his four-string lute, the dotara, and sang a song about crossings: ‘Monmajhi tor shadher tori baite jaano na. O heart, you do not know how to row your boat’.

 
In the films of the Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak these songs from a lost home have an almost archetypal presence, filling the air with nostalgia and longing.[3] Ghatak’s Titash Ekti Nodir Naam starts with ‘Ore noukar upor Ganga bojhai. . . Look how the River rides on the boat.’ It is a riddle of a composition by the poet Lalon Fokir.[4]

Ore noukar upor Ganga bojhai
Tara shuknay beye jaay
Tomar ajob leelay!

Look how the River rides on the boat,
While the boat swims in the shore.
O how strange your ways!

 
Life does indeed seem like a puzzle! Tangled up in political decisions, economic crises, social change, religious movements, natural calamities and personal histories, most of it is beyond our control. States are named and re-named; barbed-wire fences run across rice fields. And we are caught in an endless cycle of comings and goings, seeking and making homes wherever we are.

But this ‘home’ itself is an indefinable entity. What is the home that we leave behind, what is the home we are seeking and what is this home where we live? This multiplicity of meaning finds beautiful expression in the songs of the mystic poets of Bengal, where the body itself is seen as the home, housing the mind, yet that mind is like a caged bird waiting for the moment of release. And when that bird leaves, the house becomes empty.

Posha pakhi uriye jabe, sajani,
Ekdin, bhabi nai mone.

I did not know, my dear, that the bird
I had kept, would one day fly away.
 
There is a form of folk song in Bengal called the agomoni; they are about the coming ‘home’ of the goddess Durga in autumn, when the sky is cleared of rainclouds, the fields are green and everything looks beautiful. Durga is the lion-riding, ten-handed goddess who had slain the buffalo-demon Asura in the battle of the gods with the demons, but she is not just this symbol of power, protector of all things good. She has other names and roles too, such as Gouri or Uma.[5] Gouri is our home-grown girl, daughter of Menaka and Giriraj, married to the anarchic Shiva who lives in the Kailash Mountains, has four children (each of them gods in their own right). When Gouri comes ‘home’ to see her parents, it is the time of the annual Durga Puja festival in Bengal. But Gouri (or Durga) can stay for four days only, at the end of which she must return ‘home’ to her husband.  So, these songs of celebration are tinged with sadness, because Gouri’s arrival itself signals her departure. It is as if while she is present you can feel her absence and you are touched by an impending biraha.

Aaro kichhu duray jaay
Ma-er paane phiraa chaay
Kande Gouri dharani lutaaye
Gouri, desh-e  jaay.

She goes a little further
Turns back to look at her mother
Gouri falls on the earth and weeps,
She goes ‘home’
 

‘Gouri desh-e jaay, she goes home.’ Although literally ‘desh’ is one’s country, nation, homeland or village, I have translated the word as ‘home’. Perhaps this is another one of those words, which cannot really be translated; it has too many layers to it. But so has the word ‘home’.

With ‘desh’ in my heart

Of course, sometimes ‘desh’ must be interpreted as our sentimental attachment with the homeland. Bengal had experienced uprooting and a search for new homelands once in 1947. Then in 1971 there was Bangladesh’s War of Liberation when there were more broken homes, more displacements of people and more migrations. The refugees from 71 were camped along the entire stretch of Joshor Road, an old British road that connects the city of Calcutta (or Kolkata) in the west with Joshor in the east. The Bengali ethnomusicologist Deben Bhattacharya, who spent most of his working life in Paris, had gone around these refugee camps and recorded songs that people sang even in those times of utter distress.[6]

In his famous poem ‘September on Jessore Road’, Allen Ginsberg graphically documented that time:

 
Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road–long bamboo huts
No place to shit but sand channel ruts
Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go . . .

 
The Bangladeshi filmmaker Tareque Masud had asked me in 1998 to write a song for his documentary on the 1971 Liberation War, Muktir Kotha (Words Of freedom), based on  Ginsberg’s ‘September’.[7] So I composed and recorded my song ‘Joshor Road’. Once Tareque’s film was released in 1999,[8] my song travelled with it, awakening memories of 1971 in the hearts of people scattered all over the world, who had directly or indirectly experienced the Muktijuddho (Liberation War) or had inherited its memories and fears from older generations. Thus the song brought together a fragmented people, creating a sense of an imagined community belonging to an imagined homeland. And, I found myself becoming a part of that imagination. On 24 November 2004, someone called Abu Md. False Arif from Windsor, Ontario, Canada wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Star, a newspaper in Dhaka.

‘My father has advised me to stop thinking that I will be going back to my land. And he has asked me to start to believe that Canada is my final home. I am now in the Leddy Library, one of the two libraries in University of Windsor. It is my regular habit to read all the national newspapers of Bangladesh from their internet editions. Technology is one of the best friends of humankind. I am listening [to] Moushumi Bhowmik’s “Jessore Road” from thousands of miles away. And I am thinking about the canal beside our house. I am thinking about my first love…Bangladesh.

I was wondering why I am doing this. As an obedient son, soon I will be giving up my Bangladeshi passport and will become a proud Canadian. My national anthem will be “O Canada”. I will be known as official minority in multicultural Canada. My house will be in Richmond Hill . . .’

 
From the ‘west’

But migration is not only about wars, displacement and pain; it is also about creating new homes.

When the Sufis of western and central Asia (practitioners of Sufism, which is a mystical tradition within Islam that extols love and devotion as the means of seeking the Truth) started to come to Bengal from the 13th century onwards,[9] they brought with them tales from distant lands, yet-unheard-of names from uncharted geographies and songs in unknown tunes. Slowly these names and tales and melodies mingled with the soil of the land, enriching it. In the hundreds of years that these tunes and tales have had on this land, they have got naturalised into new forms of song and narration. That is how, for example, the form jari has come into being. Jari is the singing, in a narrative style, of tales from the Karbalah-cycle and other Islamic folklore. It has similarities with the ballad but is longer and more complex. There is a leader who sings the main lines and the chorus or dohar backs him up.[10] The form retains something of the older traditions of the kirtan (community-based Hindu devotional singing) and kobigan (song debates), into which is built in influences from the ‘west’.

On one of our field trips to a small town called Faridpur in the west of Bangladesh, we (sound recordist Sukanta Majumdar and I) recorded local folk singers Nuru Pagla, Ibrahim Boyati, Harun and Rafique, in the house of a local trader-cum-singer, Sadek Ali, where they had gathered one morning for music. Far from the land of Kabah, Karbalah or Mecca-Medina, they sang stories of Hanifa, Kulsum and Joynal, as if they were home-grown people, members of their families. Zainul Abedin becomes Joynal in Nuru Pagla’s Sahidnamar Jari; Harun, Rafique, Salamat, Ibrahim, Sadek Ali, Sayeed and Sanjay join him in the chorus.

The blind and extremely powerful singer, Ibrahim Boyati, who is something of a mystic himself, sang for us the kahini or narrative of Wazkuruni during this same session.[11]

Being uninitiated in the field and coming from an urban and non-religious background, I was unable at first to understand the context of the song, or make out the identity of the protagonist of Ibrahim’s tale. But Ibrahim’s singing had a magical impact on me. Later, after some exploration, I pieced together a story: Wazkuruni probably was Awais Quarni in the Islamic world of West and Central Asia. But in his narration our singer Ibrahim even called him ‘Wajja’, like some term of endearment. This Wazkuruni was a madman, whom the Prophet had never met but whose self-effacing, almost masochistic love for Him won him a special place in the Prophet’s world. At the time of His death, Muhammad left His robe for this devotee. Some scholars of Sufism believe that Awais Quarni was an actual historical character and one of the earliest Sufis. They say that in leaving him His robe, the Prophet actually gave His approval to Wazkuruni’s path of devotion through love, which is the Sufi’s way.[12] This however is only one version of the story and in oral traditions there are as many tales as there are perspectives and interpretations. Thus, songs and stories change according to time and space. Moreover, new myths, stories and songs get created in new homelands.

New mythology

In Sylhet, the ‘frontier’ state of Bengal where the Sufis came and stopped and stayed from the 13th century onwards, is the shrine of Hazrat Shah Jalal.[13]

I first met the singer Abdul Hamid Jalali at the shrine of Shah Jalal in the winter of 2004. In the fading evening light we stood on the bank of the pond inside the shrine and Hamid told me the sad tale of the poisoning of the holy fish about a year ago. Here was a myth that had been created around this shrine. Hamid told me how the Sufi saint had given his blessings to the gojar fish and promised them protection. ‘The fish were born here, and they lived and died in the pond. The dead were buried in the grounds of the shrine. But one morning the fish were all found dead and a bottle of poison was found in the pond.’ After a couple of months there was a bomb blast in the shrine during urs or the congregation of devotees, which included people from near and far. There was another blast a few months later—people were killed and injured in each of these attacks. Hamid showed me the holes in the ground. Who killed the devotees, who killed the fish, who had tried to kill the Sylheti British High Commissioner during his visit to the shrine?[14] Hamid spoke in hushed tones, as if there was conspiracy somewhere. Indeed, this was no way to be in a holy shrine, it should not be a place of fear.

Later that evening Abdul Hamid invited me to his house and his family and friends, led by him, filled my soul with music. In the style of qawwali or Sufi devotional music, they sang a lament for the fish:

Jhanke ure akash jure dekhte ki sundar,
 Jalaler Jalali koitar . . .

They fly in flocks, beautiful pigeons in the sky
They are Jalal’s own pigeons

 
In this song he asks the pigeons that crowd the dome of the shrine, the ‘Jalali’ pigeons as they are called, to go and report to the Sufi saint what has become of his world.

Here is a many-layered song, sung on the one hand in praise of a migration that occurred many centuries ago, a migration that brought Islam to the land of Bengal. At the same time, it is a song that expresses anger and grief at the state of the state, when people have to live in fear of fundamentalist attacks. This fear results in further migrations to distant lands, in search of safety. Finally, it is in the person of Abdul Hamid (and singers like him), that another kind of migration is enacted. Hamid’s travels to, for example, the East End of London—the land of migrants—with songs from home, result in the mixing of memory with desire in the hearts of those who left their land, perhaps never to return again.[15]

City within the city

Migrations out of Bengal have been taking place over several centuries and from the late twentieth century this has been the major feature of life in some areas of Bengal, Sylhet among them.[16]

Turan Mian owns a music store on Hanbury Street in east London. On his shelves he keeps audio tapes from Sylhet, like the ones I had seen in shops there, near the mosque of Shah Jalal. About his customers he says that there are many who survive in foreign lands simply by clinging to such artefacts from home as language and music. So they try to replicate their shops and road-signs from back home in this land to which they have migrated,  and name their restaurants Kolapata—the banana leaf of communal eating and rituals—or Balaka, a chevron of cranes. They buy audiotapes of Kala Mian, Mamata Bala or Kajol Dewan. They try to create their own city within another larger and alienating city. They need their ‘local’ music concerts, such as the nightlong soirees of rural Bangladesh, to which they bring in singers from home such as Abdul Hamid of Shah Jalal’s shrine, Kala Mian, Momotaj and others. At these concerts the singers sing palla gaan, bichar gaan and bichchhed gaan, far removed from the exotic ‘world music’ festivals on the South Bank.

In my mind, the story of Bengal gets tangled up with stories of other communities. I think of posters in the Turkish shops on London’s Green Lanes, announcing performances for the community by their own musicians; imagine the sounds of reggae coming out of the huge amplifiers placed on the pavement outside Seven Sisters Tube on Sundays; or Bollywood songs that waft in the air of Green Street.

I remember my first job in a newspaper office on Esplanade in downtown Calcutta–The Statesman. This was an old newspaper, and when I worked there in the 80s, it still retained a sense of being English-speaking and ‘native’ at the same time. On the ground floor of the Statesman office were rooms for the packers, who came mostly from the state of Orissa. Then there were the dining hall waiters from Uttar Pradesh and peons from Bihar, all uniformed. The Anglo-Indians were mostly telephone operators and office secretaries and the middle-class Bengalis were accountants or compositors and proofreaders, while the brown sahibs were assistant editors and editors. Somewhere in the middle of all of this some of us, fresh university graduates, copyedited and wrote headings, not quite fitting into any of these slots. When we entered our workplace through the backdoor for night shifts, there would often be music coming out of one of those ground floor rooms —mostly the Tulsidasi Ramayan  and other folk forms from eastern and northern India. The bosses did not seem to mind, or maybe they could not hear, while our colleagues from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh created a soundscape of their village home. The following soundtrack was one of the earliest compositions of Sukanta Majumdar, with extracts from a CD I had from Beat of India and his own ambience recordings.

When I think back now, I realise that it is not only when we cross several oceans to go to another land from where there is seemingly no return that we carry our songs and stories with us. We carry them on our smaller trips too; because it is not so much the physical distance from ‘home’ but our fear of losing what we had known as ‘home’ in an unfamiliar space, that makes us cling to our sounds and memories of sounds, to our songs and poetry. Because a song has the power to trigger memories, intensify feelings of alienation and awaken in us a longing to return ‘home’. Also, a song can create a moment that becomes like ‘home’ in its warmth and comfort, a moment of celebration and ‘return’.

Surodhonir kinaray sonar nupur ranga paay,
Gopo nagori go, sundara Gouranga jaay.

On Surodhoni’s banks he dances, anklets around his tender feet.
O people of this land, see the Beautiful Gouranga go.
 

At a home concert in Sylhet in April 2006, Ruhi Thakur, a master of melody and passion, was singing this song, which celebrates the ecstasy of Gouranga or Sri Chaitanya, the fifteenth century Hindu reformer saint who preached the path of love and devotion (bhakti) as a means of reaching god. Gouranga had renounced home and worldly comfort to go out in search for the Truth, taking with him his songs of love. People followed him, entranced.[17] As Ruhi Thakur sang, the urban middle class audience that had gathered for this concert started to clap and dance and rejoice in the song.[18] I was in that crowd too, swaying to the music, touched by the love that was in the air. We all seemed to be able to connect with the song; it had created for us a moment of ‘return’ to our folk roots. It had also created a moment of renunciation, when we could leave our everyday life and join those dancing on Surodhuni’s shores.[19]

Such mythological migrations are woven into the fabric of the Bengali folk song and in singing them we sing not only the myths but also our everyday lives and about our desires and dreams. Chaitanya becomes our wish to leave home for some greater Truth, Krishna is the love we seek, Fatema is our grief for the children we have lost in our battles, Radha is our love-sick heart.

Nothing remains except. . .

While migration can evoke a sense of irrecoverable loss and a longing to return, as well as arouse hopes for new beginnings, sometimes migrations can also produce a strange blankness of the mind, such as it has done for the tea gardens workers in Srimangal, a place near Sylhet in Bangladesh. These people were brought into this land as indentured labour more than a century ago, perhaps from Orissa in India or maybe from the Chhotanagpur plateau of Bihar, also in India. But these details, which we know from research, do not have much bearing on the tea worker’s day-to-day life. All that Ranjit and Tamseng—men who work as labourers in the Fenlay Company’s Rajghat Tea Garden—know is that they are ‘Uriya’, yet who the ‘Uriya’ (people of Orissa) actually might be, they do not know. Ranjit and Tamseng do not know where their forefathers came from. They have no real name for their language, so they call it ‘jongli bhasha’ or ‘untamed- speak’, while the official language of the land where they live is a certain dialect of Bengali.  What is most interesting is that despite this loss of memory, it is this language of ‘home’, of song and dance and ritual, that these people have held on to, like precious things from a time and space beyond the reach of even their minds. The ravages of war and history and economic exploitation have erased all tracks back home for them.

On 27 December 2004, I had recorded some songs in Rajghat Tea Garden that Ranjit and Tamseng sang for me. One was about the daughter’s departure from her natal home at the time of marriage:

Ghara ke pushal moyna
Uri uri jaay re. . .

I had a moyna bird in my cage,
Now it goes flying. . .
 

I feel that this daughter of Ranjit and Tamseng’s song is like their forefathers; raised and nurtured in one home and sent off to another, thus becoming the eternal pardeshi or outsider.

Parapar

In my own life as a singer and songwriter, I have experienced the migration of the song over and over again, so I write and sing about separation and the longing to return. When we perform Mayani, a Sylheti separation song, in ‘Parapar’—a band based in London, comprising four British musicians and myself—I try to sing with the passion I have heard so often on the road. My voice is shadowed by the cello, while the guitar plays a kind of Blues and the drums and bass keep us in time.  Many migrations and memories come together in this song; the moment of meeting is transient, it is only in our seeking that we can find permanence. We have to move on.

 

 
 
NOTES

[1] Hoffman, Eva, Lost in Translation (London: Vintage, 1989), p.4

[2] Haripada Debnath (variant spelling Devanatha) was recorded by Danielou for other albums too and also by the Bengali ethnomusicologist based in Paris, Deben Bhattacharya. Listen to his tracks on Music Atlas Bengal: UNESCO 3C064-17840/1972, EMI Odeon, , recorded by Danielou; the CD sampler with Deben Bhattacharya’s book Mirror in the Sky: Songs of the Bauls of Bengal (Prescott, Arizona: Hohm Press, 1999) and Bhattacharya recorded and compiled Echoes from Bangladesh, Fremeaux, 1999. 

[3] I am referring mainly to Ranen Roychowdhury’s songs in Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, Subarnarekha, Komal Gandhar.

[4] Lalon Fokir, also known as Lalon Shah (c.1777-1890), was one of the most brilliant poet-singer-philosophers of the oral tradition of Bengal. His was also the voice of the dissenter that spoke in codes and metaphors against the injustices and hypocrisies of society. Although in his lifetime Bengal had not yet been partitioned, there are Lalon followers and cults to be found now on both sides of the border.

[5] In their Introduction to Bengali Religious Lyrics: Sakta (London: OUP, 1923), selectors and translators Edward J. Thompson and Marshall Spenser wrote, ‘About this worship [of Durga and Kali] a vast jungle of ritual has grown up, and scholars will probably always be occupied with the effort to disentangle this or that brake of ritual and to identify its original root. Parvati, the daughter of Himalaya,; Uma, the gracious and (as Sati) self-immolating wife; Kali, the terrible; Durga”the unapproachable”, less terrible than Kali—these are all manifestations of one goddess. Siva’s consort Kali and Durga may be originally goddesses of the savage tribes whom the Aryans found lurking in inaccessible forests; Parvati may be a mountain deity.’

[6] The Deben Bhattacharya Collection: Echoes from Bangladesh, 2 vols., Vincennes: Fremeaux, 1999.

[7] In September 1971, the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg visited India and went to see the refugee camps on Joshor Road with the Bengali poet Sunil Gangopadhyay. And then he wrote ‘September on Jessore Road’, which he sang and recorded with Bob Dylan, among others.

[8] Although an adaptation of ‘September on Jessore Road’, my song had a perspective different from Ginsberg’s. The American poet was the outsider in his poem, shocked by what he saw in 1971. Masud’s film and the song I wrote for it became the living experience of Joshor Road from within. An album containing the song was released in 2000 by Times Music, Bombay; it was called Akhono Galpo Lekho

[9] See Eaton, Richard M., The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204-1760 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993)

[10] See Dunham, Mary Frances, Jarigan: Muslim Epic Songs of Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1997)

[11] Ibrahim Boyati lives in Bhashan Char, Faridpur. He and others who follow the Sufi way of life and face many hardships in an environment of increasing intolerance in present-day Bangladesh, sing of love as a way of worship and prayer. Sound recordist Sukanta Majumdar made a 40-minute long recording of this narrative in the house of Sheikh Sadeq Ali, another folk singer of Faridpur in the morning of 22 January 2006.

[12] Such as Professor Afzal Khan of Ambedkar University, Aurangabad, Maharastra and Dr Raziuddin Aqil of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata were discussing at a conference on the convergence of Bhakti and Sufism at the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Calcutta held in February 2006

[13] Eaton, Richard M., op cit

[14] There have been a series of blasts such as in Tangail, Khulna, Dhaka and other places in Bangladesh, as part of a systematic attack on secular forces, non-Muslims as well as on practitioners of mystical Islam, from the late 1990s onwards

[15] In 2006 I went once more to Sylhet and this time Hamid showed me hundreds of fish swimming in the pond. ‘They have come back,’ he said. So the myth has grown; this singer and songwriter added that he has written a new song to celebrate this return (rebirth perhaps?).

[16] This journey from Sylhet to the East End of London has been a subject of great interest for both academic scholars  as well as  novelists, journalists, travel writers and others. See Katy Gardner’s Global Migrants Local Lives: Travel and Transformation in Rural Bangladesh (Oxford: OUP, 1995), Tarquin Hall’s Salaam Brick Lane (London: John Murray, 2005) among other things.

[17] See Dimock, Edward C. Jr., The Place of the Hidden Moon : Erotic Mysticism in the Vaisnava-Sahajiya Cult of Bengal (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press; Reprint edition 1989); Dimock, Edward C. Jr and Levertov, Denise, In Praise of Krishna : Songs from the Bengali (University Of Chicago Press; Phoenix ed edition, 1981); Dimock, Edward C. Jr and Stewart, Tony K. eds, Caitanya Caritamrta of Krsnadasa Kaviraja : A Translation and Commentary (Harvard Oriental Series), (Harvard Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, 2000)

[18] Field recording session on 20 April 2006 at the house of Ambarish Dutta, former theatre activist, in Sylhet town

[19] Ruhi Thakur passed away a year after this recording.