Tagore was a prolific composer with 2,230
songs to his credit. His songs are known as rabindrasangit ("Tagore
Song"), which merges fluidly into his literature, most of which—poems or
parts of novels, stories, or plays alike—were lyricised. Influenced by
the thumri style
of Hindustani music, they ran the entire
gamut of human emotion, ranging from his early dirge-like Brahmo devotional
hymns to quasi-erotic compositions.[97] They emulated the tonal color of
classical ragas to varying extents. Some songs
mimicked a given raga's melody and rhythm faithfully; others newly blended
elements of different ragas.[98] Yet about nine-tenths of his work was
not bhanga gaan, the body of tunes revamped with "fresh
value" from select Western, Hindustani, Bengali folk and other regional
flavours "external" to Tagore's own ancestral culture.[27]Scholars have attempted to gauge the
emotive force and range of Hindustani ragas:
the pathos of the purabi
raga reminded Tagore of the evening tears of a lonely widow,
while kanara was the confused realization of a nocturnal
wanderer who had lost his way. In bhupali he seemed to hear a
voice in the wind saying 'stop and come hither'.Paraj conveyed to
him the deep slumber that overtook one at night's end.[27]
Tagore influenced sitar maestro Vilayat Khan and sarodiyas Buddhadev
Dasgupta and Amjad Ali Khan.[98] His songs are widely popular and
undergird the Bengali ethos to an extent perhaps rivalling Shakespeare's impact
on the English-speaking world.[citation needed][who?] It is said that his songs are the
outcome of five centuries of Bengali literary churning and communal yearning.[citation needed] Dhan Gopal Mukerji has said that these
songs transcend the mundane to the aesthetic and express all ranges and
categories of human emotion. The poet gave voice to all—big or small, rich or
poor. The poor Ganges boatman and the rich landlord air their emotions in them.
They birthed a distinctive school of music whose practitioners can be fiercely
traditional: novel interpretations have drawn severe censure in both West
Bengal and Bangladesh.[citation needed]
For Bengalis, the songs' appeal, stemming
from the combination of emotive strength and beauty described as surpassing
even Tagore's poetry, was such that the Modern Review observed
that "[t]here is in Bengal no cultured home where Rabindranath's songs are
not sung or at least attempted to be sung ... Even illiterate villagers sing
his songs".A. H. Fox Strangways of The Observer introduced non-Bengalis to rabindrasangit in The
Music of Hindostan, calling it a "vehicle of a personality ... [that]
go behind this or that system of music to that beauty of sound which all
systems put out their hands to seize."[101]
In 1971, Amar Shonar Bangla became the national
anthem of Bangladesh. It was written—ironically—to protest the 1905 Partition
of Bengal along
communal lines: lopping Muslim-majority East Bengal from Hindu-dominated West
Bengal was to avert a regional bloodbath. Tagore saw the partition as a ploy to
upend the independence
movement,
and he aimed to rekindle Bengali unity and tar communalism. Jana Gana Mana was written in shadhu-bhasha,
a Sanskritised register of Bengali, and is the first of five stanzas of a
Brahmo hymn that Tagore composed. It was first sung in 1911 at a Calcutta
session of the Indian National
Congress[102] and was adopted in 1950 by the
Constituent Assembly of the Republic of India as its national anthem.
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