A few minutes into our conversation, both Sahana Bajpaie and I chuckle. For two decades now, Bajpaie’s work as a singer and academic has centred around the musical compositions of Rabindranath Tagore—one of the foremost Bards of the Bengali language. Since the release of her first album out of Dhaka in 2007, Bajpaie’s renditions of Rabindrasangeet have afforded an entire generation of Bengalis the aural vocabulary to reimagine Tagore’s lyrics set to a contemporary soundscape. The irony, hence, of speaking about Tagore’s music in English, as Bengalis ourselves, is not lost on either of us.
For Bengalis, an engagement with Tagore’s literary oeuvre has been one of the keys to understanding and experiencing their own culture. Over an 80-year-long literary career, Tagore brought an elegant simplicity to the Bengali language that conveyed complex and abstract emotions with the utmost brevity and panache. He produced a literary corpus so vast and potent in terms of creative possibilities that it continues to shape the cultural polity of Bengal even today. Be it in the form of musicians like Debojyoti Mishra and Samantak Sinha who reinterpreted Tagore’s music with Indian classical and Western rock rhythms for the Bengali soap Gaaner Oparey (2011-2012), or filmmakers like the late Rituparno Ghosh, whose penultimate film Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish explored the queer potentials of one Tagore’s most widely-loved dramaturgical works, there have been countless artistic paeans to the Bard.
For her part, Bajpaie grew up in Santiniketan, West Bengal, where she received her first lesson in music from her late father, who also gifted her a portable radio on her first birthday. While studying in Patha Bhavan, a school founded by Tagore, Bajpaie vividly recalls singing Rabindrasangeet communally every day since the age of five. “Unlike many young Bengalis outside of Santiniketan, Tagore’s music was not something acquired for me. It was an inheritance, an intimate part of my selfhood,” muses Bajpaie. She is currently speaking to me from Santiniketan, where she is holidaying after obtaining her PhD from King’s College London. Her doctoral thesis examines an almost century-long history of performance associated with Tagore’s songs: how the genre evolved from being the cultural currency of the elite to being reclaimed by musicians hoping to give Tagore’s work wider social access. Despite his status as the first Nobel laureate from Asia, Bajpaie informs me of the dearth of research on Tagore’s music in Anglophone academia—making her thesis the first of its kind.
As the afternoon London sun floods my room after a week of rainy gloom, I tell Bajpaie about spending the past few days listening to her rendition of ‘Oi Je Jhorer Meghe’ (trans. Those Storm-Bearing Clouds). I recount how I was struck by the freshness with which it replaced the traditional custom of playing Tagore’s songs to a harmonium with a soundscape that replicated the erratic rhythm of falling rain through an esraj and cymbals. “What you call newness was a natural expression of how the song had always resonated in my head. It was a response to the wide variety of things I had grown up listening to and barely a musical revolution to me,” Bajpaie smiles.
Released almost two decades ago, Bajpaie’s first album, Notun Kore Pabo Bole (trans. The Promise of Finding Newness), comprised ten songs. Via instruments like guitars, cymbals and flutes, the album revitalised and lent a sensorial joy to a genre that had become increasingly confined to an older and elite Bengali demographic. I ask her if she remembers anything specific about the reception to her work back then. “When Notun Kore Pabo Bole released, we got the late Mita Haque and Rezwana Chowdhury Banya, two living stalwarts of the genre, to listen to our music. They both liked it,” the singer-songwriter says, the pride in her voice unmistakable.
It is a pride that is well-earned. Through her thesis—and her music by extension—Bajpaie attempts to understand the evolution of Rabindrasangeet by tracing the history of its performance in upper-class, upper-caste circles and its role in shaping major social and resistant movements in the subcontinent. “Working on this thesis only reaffirmed my belief that music as an art form is deeply political and plays a crucial role in shaping social and political life. What you perform, where you perform and how you perform goes a long way in speaking about the socio-political conditions of a given cultural moment,” explains Bajpaie.
For Bajpaie, the performance of art has also never been separate from its visceral experience in the personal sphere. I briefly mention her parents, both of whom she has been mourning for the past four years while completing her doctoral work. “Tagore always helps with grief,” says Bajpaie, her tone strangely distant. She admits to falling back on sections of Prarthana and Prem from Geetabitan (a book comprising all 2,232 songs written by Tagore) to process her agony. “You never heal from grief, as Tagore himself makes it evident,” she says referring to the poet’s own life. From losing his sister-in-law to suicide to the untimely death of his own children in their adolescent years, Tagore’s life was marked by a series of shattering and deeply testing encounters with death. Much of his music, hence, is haunted by questions of mortality and navigating loss. “His music has that rare quality, which few others have,” Bajpaie points out. “It does not heal your grief but it does make your healing journey magical.”
On the eve of Bengali New Year, and especially during a time when the world is awash in tides of war-time strife and violence, what is the one thing from the Bard’s immense literary output that brings Sahana Bajpaie succour? Without pause, she quotes the first line of one of Tagore’s devotional hymns: “Ami bahu basanay praan-poney chai, banchito kore bachale more” (trans. By denying me a few of the thousand things my heart desires, you truly have spared my life at large). She sang the song on her second album and considers this particular line to be her life’s mantra. “Sometimes we are denied things we desire the most, but in the end, it all turns out for the best. Through these years of journeying through loss and grief, I have come to value the immensity of this statement,” says Bajpaie. In that moment, I feel the breadth of her warm smile transcend the wireless bridge of our conversation and flood the depths of my room. Not unlike her music in the past.
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