SILENCE is the language of the spirit: Music is the
language of the soul; nay, it is the easiest and the best medium for contacting
the master-soul, God. That is the reason why the most primitive as well as the
most profound seeker has been a singer. For song, like silence, opens a window,
looking out on the ocean of wisdom and wonder.
Rabindranath, the singer, is hence warmly welcomed
in a hamlet as in a town or academy. His songs are understood with the
arrow-like directness of love, though they embody and express mostly the
abstruse truths of the Upanishads. The latter are akin to the silent scout
signaling of the human spirit to the Spirit Divine, intelligible only to the
initiated. But the Poet’s songs have thawed the ice of abstraction and made a
conduit for the limpid light which, as it flows, fills the pots and pitchers of
one and all with the waters of life.
It has been, therefore, a long-cherished desire of
a very large majority of people both in India–the epitome of the East–and in
the West that, somehow, they should be enabled to hear the Poet’s songs in the
very tunes to which they were set by him. Hitherto, it is true, they have had
access to the meaning of his songs through translations in most of the world’s
widely-spoken languages. But they have always missed, so at least they have
felt, the soul or spirit of the song, which has found its adequate habitation
only in its melody. For, Indian music rests almost wholly on melody.
At long last, this desire of theirs has now been
fulfilled. A French musician, Monsieur A. Danielou who has been living in
Benares for several years and studying Indian music from authentic sources and
singers, has succeeded in transplanting the original melody of a selection of
Rabindranath’s songs even in their Hindi as well as their English versions. For
this purpose he has invented, rather adapted, not only a suitable system of
notation but also an instrument, which is an unique improvement on the
harmonium. The improvement effected is so startling that it has changed the
caste of the harmonium, considered by not a few as a harijan among
musical instruments; it has given to it the dignity of a vina and so the position of a Brahmin in
the temple of Saraswati!
In the field of a musical rendering of Rabindranath’s songs in translation, several ‘translations-in-tune’ have been made in the past. Soon after the English translation of Gitanjali was published, it is said that a priest of a certain church in Calcutta used some of the poems therein as hymns in the Sunday Service, these being sung in the Western style. Later on, a sheaf of the Poet’s songs in translation were rendered in this manner also on the Continent of Europe and in the U.S.A. Then came a Dutch musician essay in rendering the original tunes of the Bengali songs of the Poet, though in the notation of the West. The uniqueness of Monsieur Danielou’s achievement consists in rendering, as said above, the songs in the original Bengali tune and text together with their Hindi and English poetical versions, the tune of the latter too, being true to the original, and executing them from a common system of notation, to the accompaniment of a musical instrument which can reproduce all the nuances of the original tune to the minutest detail, with the subtlety, smoothness, and soul-stirring, vision-conjuring vitality of a vina. So great has been the success of the experiment in question, that Paul Robeson, the famous singer of the U.S.A., has rendered two of the Poet’s songs, as reduced in Monsieur Danielou’s system of notation, to the delight of thousands.
It is true that, particularly to the ears of a Westerner, the original Bengali tunes of the Poet’s songs sound rather weird. But as these get used to them they will be able to enter into the mind of the Poet, as reflected in his words, better. And in due course they will be brought into touch with the song of the Spirit of India itself, just as the people in the West, through their gradual familiarity with Indian art, have now a comparatively better insight into, and evaluation of the latter, and, consequently, of the ethos of Aryavarta.
Monsieur Danielou has put in one more plank in the
cultural bridge which connects East and West and binds both the hemispheres
into the unity of humanity, on the one hand, and the university of Light, on
the other.