Lata’s Gone But . . . Aayega Aanewala

(2nd of two pieces on Lata Mageshkar, 28 September 1929 – 6 February 2022)

The nation will take its time to come to grips with the phenomenon that was Lata Mangeshkar.  One article or social media post after another has rehearsed the facts and occasional exaggerations that point to her astounding popularity.  As I noted in the previous post, she is sometimes credited with having sung 50,000 songs, and that too in as many as 36 languages; accolades were heaped upon her, not least of them the Bharat Ratna, and the sobriquets with which she was showered include ‘Melody Queen’ and ‘Nightingale of India’.  School children of my generation grew up learning that Sarojini Naidu was the Nightingale of India, but it is surely a sign of our times that the feisty Naidu, who was a highly accomplished poet and yet led the raid at the Dharsana Salt Works during the Salt Satyagraha and made world news, has had to make way for someone who has ruled the airwaves.

Mahatma Gandhi With Mahadev Desai and Sarojini Naidu on their way to Buckingham Palace, London,
to meet the King-Emperor, 1931.

Lata monopolized the national imagination.  In time to come, as film studies becomes more established in India as a discipline and distance permits a more nuanced and critical outlook on the legacy of Lata, we will doubtless derive a better understanding of how she became supremely ascendant as a playback singer, her place in the film industry, the interplay of gender and caste in shaping the contours of her life, and the circumstances that conspired to make her the heartthrob of the nation.  Luck played a part, too:  it was rather fortuitous for Lata that, with the partition of India, the inimitable Noorjehan left for Pakistan and so created an opening for her, even if it be argued that she would nevertheless have found her footing in the industry.  When her popularity is ascribed to her ‘golden voice’, little if anything has been said:  she was not the only gifted female singer of her generation, her own sister Asha Bhosle being a case in point, as can also be said of Suraiya who as a leading actress also had the distinction of singing for herself.  One can at best refine the point and suggest that Lata’s voice was supremely expressive, or that—as Javed Akhtar has put it—her pronunciation even in Urdu was flawless or that her sur was perfect.

The nation has in most cultures been conceived as feminine and I suspect that we can begin to have a better conception of the extraordinary place of Lata in the life of the nation when we imagine how she not only embodied the nation but sang the nation.  The near conjuncture between 1947, the independence of India, and 1949 when Lata’s arrival on the national stage became inescapably clear cannot be missed.  1949 was, the film historians remind us, the breakthrough year, the annus mirabilis of her life that left everyone else reeling.  Naushad had four films that year but the one with Lata, Andaz, scored handsomely over the others, and Shankar Jaikishan made their acclaimed debut with Lata’s voice in Barsaat.  This would have been nearly enough to send everyone packing, but Lata topped it with one of the songs with which her name is indelibly linked, ‘Aayega aanewala’, from the film Mahal directed by Kamal Amrohi.  Some call it her ‘signature song’; it is surely among her best and critically important, not just because it launched her, but also owing to its place in the repertoire of songs that illustrate what I have described as singing the nation.

Still from film Andaz (1949).

‘Aayega aanewala’ will appear to many as an odd choice to understand the interface between Lata and the idea of the nation.  That honor surely belongs, most will proclaim, to ‘Ae mere vatan ke logo’, a tribute to the soldiers who died during the Sino-Indian War of 1962.  The story has been told ad nauseam of how her rendition of the song before Jawaharlal Nehru on Republic Day, 1963, sent him into tears.  But in one very important way, this song should be viewed as anomalous in the context of my argument:  it was specially written for the occasion by Kavi Pradeep and is not attached to any film. What is distinctive about the culture of the Hindi film, and Lata embodied this ethos perhaps better than any other playback singer, is that the Hindi film performs the nation itself—and nowhere more so than in the songs.  This is to say that the song bears the burden of some of the most characteristic aspects of the nation—what may be called values, norms, and mores, but also the culture’s literary tropes, reigning metaphors, and expressive devices.

Let us consider briefly two instances from the song, Aayega aanewala.  The film Mahal is commonly described as a gothic horror film, but the plot need not be understood to comprehend the force of my argument.  It is a romantic song—about longing, the anticipation with which one awaits a lover, the thumping sound of one’s heartbeat, hoping that the one who must come, will come (aayega aayega aanewala).  And then we encounter these lines: ‘bhatakhti hui jawaani manzil ko dhoondti hai /maaji bagair nayya sahil ko dhoondti hai / kya jaane dil ki kashti kab tak lage kinaare’.  ‘A restless (and desolate) youth looks for her destination’, Lata sings, ‘much as a boat without a boatman is looking for the shore; who knows when the boat, or heart, will dock at the banks of the river (kinaare)’.  The listless heart as a boat that is knocked around in the sea is a stock metaphor in Sanskrit love poetry, but the entire series of metaphors—the boatman, the boat, the river, the shore—proliferates in the bhakti literature of India and is unquestionably one of the more distinctive features of Indian literary traditions.  To be sure, Lata is neither the lyricist nor the music composer; but, as most recognize, the singer over time becomes de facto the author of the song.  What is emphatically clear is that Lata, whose command over the classical music repertoire was just as formidable, sang with full awareness of how the metaphors drew upon Indian traditions.

If Lata sang the nation, ‘Aayega aanewala’ furnishes a yet more dramatic illustration of this phenomenon, one which also points to what I have previously described as the near conjuncture of 1947 and 1949, just as it suggests that Lata’s hold over the national imaginary had to do in some measure with both the Hindi film’s own construction of the virginal purity of (Hindu) women and of the nation itself.  One of the most peculiar aspects of broadsheets or nationalist prints that circulated widely in the 1930s is the frequent depiction of martyrs as moths (parwaane) that have fallen at the feet of Bharat Mata (see image below).  Oddly enough, or perhaps not so, the song takes recourse to the same metaphor: ‘deepak bagair kaise parwaane jal rahe hain, / koi nahin chalata, aur teer chal rahe hain’ (‘How is it that moths are burning though there is no flame, / No one shoots the arrows, yet I feel the sting of their pain’).  My point is not that there is any direct correspondence between the prints and the song.  That is far from being the case, and indeed in ‘Dukhi Mata’ (fig. 1) the flame is lit but the moths have been devoured in its flame.  Yet, as we know, shaheeds (Bhagat Singh among them, recognized here in this print by his trilby) are amar (immortal): truly do they burn (jal rahe hain). This literacy device suggests the proximity of the song to the nation embodied as Bharat Mata.

Dukhi Mata (‘Sad Mother’), c. 1930. Collection: V. Lal.

As a coda, let me add a provocation, or, in terms more familiar to the Hindi film song aficionados, spice up Lata with a bit of Asha. A good portion of the urban middle class in India has shown that it has little use for the ‘Father of the Nation’.  As long as Lata, who was the undeclared Mother to the Nation, was there, India was never quite orphaned.  Now, Lata’s gone, but . . . perhaps aayega aanewala. 

First published in OPEN Magazine on February 11, 2022, as ‘Singing the Nation’, print & online.

Anyone but England: Race, Empire-Building, and Some Thoughts on the Euro Final 2020

Sunday afternoons are proverbially meant for relaxation and time with that simultaneously oddest and most ‘natural’ of social institutions called ‘the family’.  And what better way apparently to relax than to watch the Euro 2020 Final between England and Italy, both vying yesterday, July 11, for the trophy after a long drought:  Italy last won it in 1968 and England last won any major international football tournament in 1966 when it lifted the World Cup with a 4-2 defeat over Germany.  England has never owned the European Cup.  But England is nothing if it is not a football nation:  however, though it is scarcely alone in its passion, its fans are singular in having earned a notoriety all their own.  Indeed, the American journalist Bill Buford wrote in 1990 an engaging book on football hooliganism, Among the Thugs, focusing largely on English football fans from Manchester United with whom he traveled to many matches.  He found these football hooligans, whose devotion to their team rivals in intensity the religious feelings that the devout have for their faith, also shared some traits with those English who are affiliated to the white nationalist party, the National Front.  More pointedly, as he was caught in riots among these football fans in 1990 in Sardinia where the World Cup was being played, he unexpectedly found the violence to be ‘pleasurable’.  Violence, he wrote of these football fanatics, ‘is their antisocial kick, their mind-altering experience, an adrenaline-induced euphoria’ that shares ‘many of the same addictive qualities that characterize synthetically-produced drugs.’

The Year that America Unraveled

It scarcely seems possible that it was a mere thirty years ago, as the Berlin Wall came crashing down, the Soviet Union crumbled, and what Winston Churchill had famously called the ‘Iron Curtain’ was lifted from eastern Europe, that commentators in the West were jubilantly pronouncing (to use Francis Fukuyama’s phrase) “the end of history”.  The supposition was that the entire world seemed on course to accept the idea that the liberal democracies of the West, and more particularly the United States, represented the pinnacle of human achievement and that the aspirations of people everywhere could only be met through the free market. It mattered not a jot on their view that, precisely at this time, the US was cajoling nations into joining an international coalition designed to bring Saddam Hussein to heel and bomb Iraq, as American officials with pride and insouciance declared, “back into the stone age”.  Those who saw ominous signs of what unchecked American power might mean worldwide, and in the US itself, for the prospects of democracy and social justice were dismissed as some pathetic remnants of a warped communist vision that could not recognize the dawn of a new age of freedom.  “Muslim rage”, the phrase made popular by the likes of the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, was a variant on the idea that those who failed to recognize the supremacy of the free market economy and the rights-bearing individual as the apotheosis of the idea of human liberty were religious fanatics, troglodytes, or just under-developed.

Identity and Beyond: Families, Nations, and Interculturality

Part II of The Trouble with Kamala:  Identity and the Death of Politics

Those who do not recognize the manner in which identity politics dominates nearly all conversation in America understand little if anything of America.  What the nomination of Kamala Devi Harris by the Democratic party to the Vice-Presidency of the US signifies is not so much the fact that women have finally arrived on the political scene, or are on the verge of breaking the glass ceiling that has held them back, an argument that was advanced when Hillary Clinton became the party’s nominee for the President, but rather the sheer impossibility of escaping the identity question in American public life.  Let us consider her, in the first instance, as an African American as Harris has herself weighed in on these matters often, describing herself as a Black on most occasions and adverting to her pride in being African American. Her 2019 autobiography, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey is explicit on one particular detail that merits some consideration.  Her parents separated when she was around five years old, and they divorced a few years later; but her mother, who had come from India as a graduate student, was not therefore bereft of a family. Kamala’s parents had a shared political life for some years:  they participated in political demonstrations against racism, discrimination, and injustice, discussed decolonization in Africa, and declared their support for liberation movements in ‘the developing world’.  These dissenters and rebels became, Harris writes, “my mother’s people.  In a country where she had no family, they were her family—and she was theirs.  From almost the moment she arrived from India, she chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in the black community.  It was the foundation of her new American life.”  In consequence, Shyamala Gopalan raised her daughters, Kamala and Maya, as black children:  “She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as two black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”

A baby Kamala Harris with her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, and her paternal grandfather, Oscar Joseph, during a visit to Jamaica. (Courtesy of Kamala Harris)

A Country in Search of Itself: Brief Reflections on the Occasion of India’s Independence Day

Los Angeles, August 15^th

As India marks the 73^rd anniversary of its independence, it is once again an opportune moment to reflect on what remains of the legacy of the anti-colonial struggle that led to India’s deliverance from colonial rule.  The country might seem to have weightier subjects on its mind: the coronavirus continues to cut a blazing trail through much of the country, and whatever actions the state has taken to stem the transmission of the disease have evidently been woefully inadequate.  Tens of millions of people have been thrown into the ranks of the unemployed.  Many people have been cheered, and some startled and dismayed, by the bhoomi pujan conducted by the country’s Prime Minister, who is supposed to represent every citizen without distinction, at Ayodhya in consequence of the 2019 Supreme Court decision that left the path open to Hindu nationalists to raise a grand temple in honor of Rama at his alleged birth place.  That such a ceremony, which seems to be not only about building a temple to augment Hindu pride but also coronating a king, should have taken place at a time when the pandemic is exacting an immense toll says something about the priorities of the present regime.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the bhoomi pujan, Ayodhya, 5 August 2020.

Was Mohandas Gandhi a Racist?

Part II of The Desecration of a Statue:  Gandhi and Race

The desecration of Gandhi’s statue in Washington DC, it should be made clear, was no accident.  Those who vandalized Gandhi’s statue had anything but diplomacy in mind: if anything, we might say that they belong to the school of thought which holds that it is time to stop being diplomatic about Gandhi and to bare the truth about the supposed Mahatma.  A “new” narrative has been coming into shape about Gandhi over the course of the last ten years, one which is openly hostile to him and intent on exposing the venerated man for all his evils. (That it is not altogether new is not a subject that I can take up here: criticism of Gandhi in India dates back to at least the early 1920s, though it was not “race” that was in question then.) We have been told that Gandhi never fought for the working class, just as he never opposed caste; he was also, as some would have it, unspeakably cruel to his wife, neglected his own children while posing as the “Father of the Nation”, and should be held responsible for practically having handed over a large chunk of India to Muslims and therefore authoring the idea of Pakistan.  The intelligence of some of these critics can be discerned from the fact that they claim that Gandhi was also a friend of Hitler—this on the grounds that he addressed, which indeed he did, two letters to the Nazi leader which began with the salutation, “Dear Friend.”  There is not the slightest recognition here that Gandhi knew no enemies:  he recognized that he had political opponents, but the word “enemy” was not part of his vocabulary. Nor is there any understanding on their part that Gandhi was a firm believer in the idea that the spark of divinity resides in every human being: as I have written elsewhere, a man’s acts may be monstrous, but no man is a monster. This is one reason among many why he was a firm opponent of capital punishment, being of the view that it is given to no human being to take the life of another human being.  When he wrote to Hitler, he did so in the hope, not the expectation, that he might be able to make him see the desirability of abandoning the path of violence. He wrote to him for the same reason that Churchill, in a direct broadcast to the United States as late as 8 August 1939, declared that “If Herr Hitler does not make war, there will be no war.”  Gandhi may have been hopelessly naïve, but that is no crime.  British censors ensured that his letters never reached Hitler.

The Dominant and the Dominated: A Short Tribute to Albert Memmi

. . .  with an aside on Frantz Fanon and Edward Said

Albert Memmi. Source: https://www.sephardichorizons.org/Volume6/Issue3-4/Macadar.html

I read a couple of days ago of the passing of Albert Memmi, the Tunisian-born Jewish novelist, political thinker, sociologist, and essayist who exiled himself to Paris after Tunisia’s proclamation of independence in 1956.  At his death, on May 22 on the outskirts of Paris, he was just a few months shy of being 100 years old.  I found myself surprised at reading his obituary in the New York Times, if only because it has been years since anyone had ever even mentioned him; to be brutally honest, having known him of him as a writer who had been most active, as I thought, in the 1950s and 1960s, it never occurred to me that

Deconstruction of an Icon of Resistance

(concluding part of 5 parts of “Ambedkar, Religion, and Islam”)

Poster of Ambedkar outside Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, with the exhortation:  “Save the nation, Save the Constitution.”  Photo:  Vinay Lal, 23 January 2020.

As if Hinduism was not sufficiently offensive, repugnant to every person with only a modicum of moral sensibility and not altogether devoid of the notion of human dignity, India had to bear the oppressive burden of a faith that, whatever its history in other countries, further diminished the prospects of human freedom in that ancient land.  “Islam speaks of brotherhood”, and “everybody infers that Islam must be free from slavery and caste”, but, in truth, says Ambedkar, “Islam divides as inexorably as it binds” and it cannot but abide by a firm distinction between “Muslims and non-Muslims”.  The brotherhood it promises is “for Muslims only”, and for “those outside the corporation, there is nothing but contempt and enmity.” But this is far from being its only offense in this respect, since the Muslim is also enjoined, by the terms of “Muslim Canon Law”, to withdraw his cooperation from non-Muslims if he should happen to live in a country that is not governed by his brethren.  Ambedkar is quite clear on this—grist for the mill for those Hindus who have long harbored a suspicion that the Indian Muslim’s loyalty to Islam precedes his or her loyalty to India.  What Ambedkar understood by the requirement of “Muslim Canon Law” may have been very different than what is understood by those who are content to insist that many Indian Muslims would rather cheer for the visiting Pakistani cricket team than for the Indian team, but the sense that the Muslim is disinclined to live under the jurisdiction of any religion other than Islam is pervasive.  Whether the Muslim is singularly alone in having such a disposition is however a question that is seldom posed.

The Lynching of JNU

Jawaharlal Nehru University, or JNU as it is known in Delhi and beyond, has once again been in the news for the last three weeks.  Its students have been protesting not only against large hikes in hostel fees, but against other features of the draft hostel manual which imposes a dress code and sets a curfew for students.  The university and nearby residential colonies have been swarming with police, but the students have been successful in taking their demonstrations to many parts of central Delhi and the area around Parliament.  There are reliable reports, and video footage, of students, including some who are disabled, who have been beaten by the police.  Students have been lathi charged, and many have been detained.  The Delhi Police has, predictably, denied all charges of police brutality, and rests its case upon the fact that the imposition of Section 144 of the Indian Penal Code, which outlaws public assemblies of more than five people, means that the protestors are in violation of the law.

*Reterritorialization and Neo-Liberalization: “Opening Up” Kashmir

Even as much of the country has erupted with joy at the BJP’s audacious steps in abolishing the state of Jammu & Kashmir, creating two new Union Territories—little more than “Bantustans”, say some—and thereby, as is assumed to be the case, “integrating” the Kashmir Valley into the Union of India, some serious questions have arisen about the possible consequences of these changes.  Article 35(A), which was added to the Constitution through a Presidential Order on 14 May 1954, conferred on the legislature of Jammu & Kashmir the power to define “permanent residents” and the rights that accrued solely to them, among them the privilege of being able to buy land and property in Kashmir.  This provision has now been scrapped.