Tag: Mahalaya

A Durga Puja Like No Other: R.G. Kar Protests Cast Shadow over Festivities in Kolkata

On Mahalaya morning, in place of the usual festive sounds, the air resonated with slogans: “We want the destruction of oppressive forces; this is our festival pledge.”

Kolkata: West Bengal’s grandest festival began this year amid an unusual atmosphere of protest. As Bengalis followed the age-old tradition of listening to Birendra Krishna Bhadra’s Mahishashur Mardini recitation on Mahalaya morning, thousands also gathered along the Ganges to float diyas, demanding justice for the R.G. Kar victim.

In place of the usual festive sounds, the air resonated with slogans: “We want the destruction of oppressive forces; this is our festival pledge.” A front-page article by the doctor’s mother on the highest circulated daily in the state, Ananda Bazar Patrika set the sombre mood marked by grief and protest.

Meanwhile, hours after chief minister Mamata Banerjee marked the beginning of the Durga Puja festivities, doctors with stethoscopes around their necks walked in a mega procession on Wednesday (October 2), joined by thousands of citizens including former Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Jawhar Sircar, who resigned in protest against the state government’s inaction in the R.G. Kar rape and murder case.

“Our movement is not just for justice in the R.G. Kar case but also against the anarchy plaguing the healthcare system across the state. We demand an end to the threat-culture,” said Dr. Asfakulla Naiya, a leader of the ongoing movement of junior doctors.

Also read: The R.G. Kar Protests Conquered Fear. But Have They Done Much Else?

Despite multiple calls by chief minister Banerjee to participate in the festivities, a large section of the society remains defiant. The festival, traditionally a time of joy and celebration, has become a battleground for political expression and censorship with numerous community Durga Pujas in West Bengal reportedly facing backlash for their criticism of the state administration and refusing the state grant.

“There is a mass awakening against injustice. The BJP-led central government’s attempts to postpone the R.G. Kar case in the Supreme Court only show who they are trying to protect. We will not give up,” said Debjani Dasgupta, a protester, criticising the Union government.

The junior doctors at R.G. Kar Hospital also unveiled a sculpture, titled “Cry of the Hour,” near the principal’s office. Created by artist Asit Sain, the statue depicts a weeping woman, symbolising the victim’s immense pain and suffering in her final moments. While the image of the victim’s father embracing the sculpture has deeply moved many, it has also sparked controversy.

TMC leader Kunal Ghosh criticised the statue, claiming it violates Supreme Court guidelines regarding the identification of victims.

“The installation of this statue in the name of Tilottama is against the spirit of the Supreme Court pronouncement. No responsible person can do that. Not even in the name of art. There will be protests, demands for justice. But the statue with the girl’s face of pain is not right. There are guidelines in the country called Nigrahita’s pictures, idols,” Ghosh wrote on X.

The artist and junior doctors, however, emphasised that the sculpture is symbolic and does not reveal the victim’s identity.

“When I heard about the horrific incident at R.G. Kar, I was deeply shaken. The face of that young woman kept haunting me. So, I started working on a sculpture. Once the sculpture was complete, I contacted a few junior doctors, including Kinjal, and offered to give it to them. There was no question of any remuneration or honorarium. It’s a creation of my imagination. I am part of the movement for justice,” said Sain.

Also read: August Deaths and an Andolan Sublime: The Left is Right, Again

Political analyst, Vishwanath Chakraborty underlined that the TMC’s attempts to “suppress these protests” have only “fueled the fire”.

 “While it’s true that the number of protesters has diminished since the night of August 14, it’s also true that people have been continuously demonstrating for nearly two months. The ruling party’s attempts to suppress these protests have only fueled the fire. We haven’t seen such a large-scale anti-government movement in the state for decades,” Chakraborty said.

Graffiti has adorned the city’s streets, and in some neighbourhoods, celebratory drums and dhunuchi dance have become symbols of defiance. At least two Durga Puja organisers had made a bold statement by displaying replicas of the human spine as a mark of protest. However, under pressure from the ruling establishment, these installations were forced to be removed. 

The house of the deceased doctor, once a place of Puja celebration, now stands desolate, with protesters demanding justice right outside, screaming, “We want justice for the girl from our neighbourhood.”

Translated from the Bengali original by Aparna Bhattacharya. 

In Photos: Behind-The-Scenes at Lal Qila’s Dussehra Mela

A team of workers toils tirelessly in the background, preparing the grounds for a spectacle that thousands will soon enjoy.

As the calendar flips to October, the air in Delhi begins to carry the scent of festive excitement. The anticipation for the iconic Dussehra mela at Lal Qila builds with every passing day. 

Preparations for the grand Dussehra mela at Lal Qila, Delhi, are underway, as workers transform the grounds into a space for celebration.

 

But before the grand enactments of Ram’s triumph can grace the stage, a team of workers toils tirelessly in the background, preparing the grounds for a spectacle that thousands will soon enjoy. Their labor is the unseen force behind the grandeur that unfolds under the night sky, year after year.

A dedicated crew member works meticulously on the stage where the Raamleela will soon unfold.

Ensuring the safety of the massive crowd is of paramount concern. Every structure – from the towering effigies to the stages and swings – is meticulously checked and re-checked.

Workers ready their machines and tools.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pawan carefully measures a cloth piece to tie the wooden logs for a stable structure.

“All workers here are trained and skilled for this. We don’t take chances,” says Pawan Kumar. These multiple layers of safety checks ensure that the festival grounds remain safe for the thousands of families who come to witness the story of Ramayana

The metal pillars for the swings are prepared by workers.

For the workers behind the spectacle, this season brings not only pride but also economic relief. “During this time, we earn enough to support our families through the rest of the year. My skill in bamboo craft is what keeps me coming back every year. My team and I have been making the effigies of Ravana, Meghnath and Kumbhkaran for many years now,” says Vinod. 

Vinod, an expert bamboo craftsman, delicately carves Ravana’s crown, carefully halving the bamboo to shape the demon king’s headpiece.

 

 

A skilled team of bamboo craftsmen works tirelessly to construct the effigies.

The skeletal bamboo structures of Ravana, Meghnath and Kumbhkaran.

A worker cuts bamboo to make the effigies.

 

For him and others, this is a crucial time when they can afford to buy Diwali presents for their families and experience a sense of financial ease. 

Despite the hard work, the workers find immense satisfaction in their contribution to this iconic festival. “All this hard work pays off when we see the people enjoying themselves. When we see the grandeur of the mela, it’s not just the decorations but the joy on people’s faces that makes it worth it. It’s the people’s trust in us that gives us even more happiness,” shares Devendra, one of the many hands bringing this massive celebration to life.

Devendra ties bamboo poles together with strong threads, weaving the foundation for the towering figures.

A painter brings colour to metal sheets, adding a vibrant touch to the swings that will soon be a favourite attraction at the mela.

Workers making stage ready for the Ram Leela theatre

Quintals of fabric await their turn to be stitched and transformed into the stunning decorations that will adorn the grand Pandal.

Parts of swings lie in wait, ready to be assembled and enjoyed by the crowds that will soon fill the festival grounds.

With the final touches being put in place, the Dussehra Mela at Lal Qila is all set to open its gates on October 3 for the public, ready to offer a magnificent experience while honouring the efforts of those who remain behind the curtain.

Shivansh Srivastava is a photojournalist based in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India. His work primarily focuses on human rights, gender issues, societal dynamics, climate change and environment.

Eight Decades Later, the Original Mahalaya Still Unites Bengalis in Communion

Many attempts have been made to modernise the Mahalaya, but Bengalis still retain their love for the first one recorded for Akashvani in 1932.

Note: This article, first published on October 14, 2015, is being republished on October 7, 2019 on the occasion of this year’s Durga Puja.

It is the rarest of the rare; a radio programme on an operatic scale to usher in the staging of the world’s largest installation art show on streets, in parks, in community halls and in homes that began in 1932 and after 83 years remains the defining sound scape to declare the start of Devi Paksha and the Durga Puja for all Bengalis everywhere. The Akashvani (All India Radio) version of the Devi Mahatmya or Chandi Path, verses to the Glory of the Goddess, that wafts out of homes across West Bengal before day break every year is a serendipitous combination of the ancient and the modern, of orchestra, chorus and Sanskrit chants, declamation in easy to follow Bengali and of course Rabindrasangeet is probably the longest running such programme for radio anywhere in the world.

Remakes of the story of Mahishasura Mardini, or the “Mahalaya” programme as it is popularly and universally known to all Bengalis, have bombed with the audience and the Bengali remains hungry for the original opera on radio, for age cannot wither nor custom stale its infinite appeal. The men who made it – Birendra Krishna Bhadra, Bani Kumar, Pankaj Mallick, Jogesh Basu, Raichand Boral – were all radio artistes, some more famous than others. In combination, they have become legendary.

The two hour and 15 minutes long Mahalaya programme is now and perhaps forever associated with the voice of Birendra Krishna Bhadra, whose ‘Ya Devi’ enters the soul and releases the spirit of frenetic celebration engulfing every inhabitant of Kolkata which is transformed for the period of the Pujas into a vast carnival space. Programme Director Nripendranath Majumdar, now almost forgotten, was the man who made it all happen.

When television tried to recreate the magic with the evergreen showman of Bengali cinema, Uttam Kumar, trying his best to outdo Birendra Krishna Bhadra, the programme failed. Out of curiosity people watched, but most turned on the radio to imbibe the ineffable that was captured by Bhadra and his partners in creation. As they do now, eight decades later, listening to it while they contemplate the day to come.

The original programme was “the outcome of the most productive adda” according to Jawhar Sircar, a Bengali and CEO of Prasar Bharati; it was meant to boost the popularity of radio and of course rake in the cash, as every radio came with a licence and a steep fee.

As always, there was controversy around the programme. The time of the programme – at 4 a.m. — was hotly debated as conservatives felt the broadcast should begin only after Devi Paksha began in the morning, rather than before Pitri Paksha formally ended with the annual obeisance to the spirit of the ancestors (all men) at dawn. Today, the programme continues to be broadcast from four in the morning, for which millions of Bengalis set their alarms and wake up to re-invent the spirit of Durga Puja celebrations. For several years after it began in 1932, the programme was broadcast on the sixth day of the Devi Paksha, rather than on first. The orthodox disapproved the chanting of the Chandi Path by the non Brahmin Birendra Krishna Bhadra. Their disapproval was dumped by popular approval.

The story of the music that accompanies the chants, the songs and the declamations ought to figure in secular folklore. The musicians were of all faiths. While the Hindus guessed more or less accurately when to blow the conch shells and bang the cymbals to add an authentic touch, the up country violinists were apparently unable to tell the difference between Sanskrit and Bengali and so played on, deviating from the score. As the programme settled into place as the harbinger of the Durga Puja season, the minor glitches were ironed out.

The Mahalaya programme was a live performance till 1966 and those who participated and those who helped to produce it retain the fondest memories of waking up soon after midnight, getting dressed in dhotis and white saris with red borders, being picked up and then plunging into a performance that stirred them and the soul of Bengal. There was enough incense and flowers to make the occasion believably real. There was only one year when it was not broadcast live during the first three decades; that was in 1946, when Kolkata was made unsafe by the unprecedented scale of communal violence. After 1966, it is a recorded programme that goes on air and galvanises the Bengali into celebration.

It is astonishing that repetition has not staled its infinite appeal. After Akashvani inexplicably sold the copyright, Mahishasura Mardini has been released on tape, on CD and is now available on YouTube and other websites. It was on the approved list of music that was played at traffic signals in 2011, when Mamata Banerjee swept into power in West Bengal. It acquired political significance that it has succeeded in casting off, because the victory of Mamata Banerjee was, in the overactive imagination of many, the triumph of Shakti or the feminine spirit over the ungodliness of the Marxists.

It is the most commonly heard music blaring from crackling loudspeakers at the thousands of puja pandals at appropriate and inappropriate times. It is at once street music and transcendental sound, because every Bengali ear tunes in every time it is played. It has figured in political theatre with Mamata Banerjee inaugurating Pujas in Kolkata with her incorrect chants, only because it is so popular. And, of course, it has figured in cinema and serial, in mostly symbolic ways as the triumph of hope over despair, good over evil. Devi Mahatmya as rendered by Birendra Krishna and his associates has endured intact over time. Akashvani has changed its signature tune, other programmes like Vividh Bharati have dropped off the list, but not the Mahalaya programme. This is what makes it so special. It is both fresh and familiar, a combination that makes it timeless.

The Time Machine: Durga the Demoness and the Protector

This week, the Time Machine looks at the mythology surrounding Durga and traditions of goddess worship.

This week, the Time Machine looks at the mythology surrounding Durga and traditions of goddess worship.

Credit: PTI

Generations of children in Kolkata have grown up watching Durga vanquish Mahishasura on Doordarshan, early in the morning, every Mahalaya – complete with the sonorous chanting and ridiculously bad visual effects. It’s all part of getting into the ‘pujo feel’.

Consequently, the mythology is all too familiar and almost set in stone. Mahishasura – a shape shifting demon – engages in some tapasya, asking the divine Brahma for powers of invincibility, specifically that he will never suffer defeat at the hands of a man. He starts out looking fairly austere, with rosary and a dreadlocked bun atop his head.

Meanwhile in heaven, a bunch of rather timorous looking Vedic devas, Indra, et al, quake in their sandals, so to speak. The demon’s trance will not be broken. Even when they send an apsara down to earth to tempt him out of his tapasya, the apsara’s powers of seduction fail entirely. Mahishashura bats not an eyelid, such is his concentration.

Eventually, Brahma grants his wishes (because for some reason, universe-creating omnipotent deities somehow lack the power to say no), unleashing doom on his own heavenly kind.

Gloating over his newly acquired invincibility, Mahishasura passes by a sage’s hut. He steals and drinks amrita (an elixir for immortality) from the sage, disguised as a woman.

Having been fooled thus, the fuming sage curses him. He guffaws heartily and says he’s invincible, so joke’s on the sage. Unflinchingly, the sage curses him again, “Because you tricked me with the disguise of a woman, your defeat will come at the hands of a woman.”

The demon doubles over with laughter – a woman! That’s rich. Unperturbed, he gets a makeover, shorn of austerity, gilded crown and silken robes; he then gathers his asuras and goes to conquer heaven.

The devas are overwhelmed easily. They can be seen fleeing the scene, holding on to their wigs. The cowering refugee devas gather at the sage’s hut, which was clearly the rendezvous point, for the trinity, Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma arrive. What is to be done about Mahishasura? More thumb twiddling ensues. They all mull and the sage tells them the answer is simple – you must have a woman defeat the invincible demon, because the devil lies in the detail. He is invincible only for men.

This notion pleases them. Heavenly light in the form of bad CGI can be seen pouring out of their beings – and Durga, their saviour is created. To her, each of her creators lends an aspect in the form of a weapon. She now has an arsenal to defeat Mahishasura with, and of course, she does.

Roughly this version of events is what first appears in the Devimahatmya (which is part of the Markandeya Purana), estimated to have been written between 400-600 CE. There exists a narrative that the defeat of Mahishasura at the hands of Durga, is a story oppression – it is the story of the defeat of a tribal god to a Vedic deity, fair of skin and tame. However, Durga doesn’t find mention in the Vedas, which were composed and recorded much earlier (c. 1500-600BCE). In fact, the eastern regions lay largely outside the ambit of Vedic influence as late as the Gupta period (c. 320-550 CE).

B.C. Majumdar in 1906 wrote, “I need hardly point out that neither the Vedas nor the old Vedic literature knew the name of this mighty goddess,” and continues to demonstrate that one stray mention was an interpolation.

Credit: PTI

Durga’s behaviour and characteristics are decidedly un-Vedic. She, like several other gods and goddesses, got unwittingly co-opted into the ever expanding Brahmanical pantheon, as Kunal Chakraborty said in 2001.  Tithi Bhattacharya writes:

“Hindu texts that mention Durga before this process [of integration] began, such as the Mahabharata and the Harivamsa, have a very different picture of Durga than the one that we are familiar with. She is described as a fearless virgin, hunting and living in mountains (Vindhya or the Himalayas), craggy terrains, and caves. Her companions are ghosts and wild beasts, and she is dressed in peacock feathers. Her diet, consisting mostly of meat and alcohol, is not very Brahminic either.”

Chakraborty suggests that her appearance in the Devimahatmya, “with the help of myths and epithets… subtly connected her with a Sanskritic tradition”. A clearly non-Vedic deity is given space in Brahmanical texts by her manifestation as a form of Shakti, the Vedic notion of divine energy (which in the texts of the Vedic period, is usually represented in the form of a female consort).

Traditions of goddess worship were diverse before their appropriation into the Brahmanical fold. The nature of religion was changing, and Brahmanical orthodoxy was being challenged by Bhakti cults. In the eastern parts of the sub-continent, there existed a proliferation of Shakti cults, which interacted and integrated local practices. June McDaniel records the various folk beliefs and traditions from various parts of present-day West Bengal, in an attempt to tie them to the extensive mythology surrounding Durga, as she is seen today. McDaniel writes:

“Durga grew to this lofty status over time. She absorbed many traits from the gods and goddesses around her. As the gods all gave her weapons to kill the demon in her puranic origin myth, on a subtler level village deities gave her many qualities that were later incorporated into her stories.”

Several forms of the goddess were represented as “black” with multiple limbs, like Jayadurga or Shulini Durga, both of whom emphasise the war-like aspects of the deity. Sometimes, she is an agricultural deity and a fertility goddess, in the form of Shakhambhari, the provider. In other instances, she is the forest goddess – Vana Durga – who is often worshipped outside in a makeshift shrine, usually under a sheora tree. Interestingly, sheora trees are infamous in local folklore – they are the trees that petnis (a certain category of female ghost) are thought to reside in. There might have been a connection between Vana Durga and the enduring petni myth with regard to their association with the sheora tree. N. M. Chaudhari’s work on the cult of Vana Durga shows that in some stories, she is referred to as Jatapaharini,  a demoness who kills babies. In other stories still, Vana Durga is said to be the mother of danavs (demons).

The clever thing about the process of assimilation was that these frightening aspects of local folk deities were absorbed (and sometimes obscured) and interpreted as a version of a primal deity. For the goddesses, this was usually Shakti. Consequently, we have deities combining both the gentler, tamer Vedic aspects and the fierce tribal aspects.  Once subsumed under the umbrella of Brahmanism, the once fiercely independent and rather terrifying female deities – worshipped and adored largely by women in villages – become subordinate to essentially male power. The Brahmanical Durga is created combining the power of the devas, all men. Her power and magnificence may be awesome, but like Eve was made out of Adam’s rib, Durga was cast as a creation of men.

The Art of Not Living with Dissent and its Discontents

Standing up for Bharat Mata even as we kill reason, sense, and one of her flood plains.

Standing up for Bharat Mata even as we kill reason, sense, and one of her flood plains

Prime Minister Narendra Mod with Art of Living founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar during the opening day of the three-day long World Culture Festival on the banks of the Yamuna in New Delhi on Friday. Credit: PTI

Prime Minister Narendra Mod with Art of Living founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar during the opening day of the three-day long World Culture Festival on the banks of the Yamuna in New Delhi on Friday. Credit: PTI

Crude is going down the tubes, but snake oil is clearly still very good business if it can fund a circus as monstrous as the one pitching its scabrous tent on the floodplains of the Yamuna between Delhi and Noida.

After establishing that it had no legal sanction, that it has ravaged the local ecosystem and will inflict sustained damage on the environment, the National Green Tribunal in its wisdom let the ‘World Culture Festival’ continue.

The NGT found that every agency that should have stepped in abdicated its responsibility. That was the art of skiving. But the tribunal would not issue a “prohibitory order” because the petitioner came to it late, because there was a fait accompli and because this was “capable of restoration and restitution”. This is the art of giving. Real estate sharks, strip miners, illegal quarries will all exult, but policemen can also take heart: if they stumble upon a rape in progress, they can argue that the victim should have come to them before it started, it’s already a fact accomplished, and a slap on the rapist’s knuckles and wallet later, without unreasonably interrupting him now, should be restitution enough. This is the art of swiving. Consent is unnecessary.

G.V. Desani! Thou shouldst be living at this hour. Where is Hindustaaniwalla Hatterr when you need him?   Only “the personal disciple of their illustrious greybeards the Sages of Calcutta, Rangoon (now resident in India), Madras, Bombay, and the right Honourable the Sage of Delhi, the wholly Worshipful of Mogalsarai-Varanasi, and his naked Holiness Number One, the Sage of All India himself” could do justice to what we now see and are about to see, but Hatterr, sadly, acted immediately on his final beej mantra, to flee from quacks and charlatans like the plague.   His avatar will not be among the 35 lakhs expected at the World Culture Festival, which will in the main be Hindu, kitsch and chaos. None of them, as they trample avidly over what is left of the flood-plain, will have much time for Walt Kelly’s reminder on April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

For us, as the chief minister of Himachal Pradesh has reminded us, the enemy is Pakistan, though our prime minister drops in there for tea. It is now seditious for students to yell ‘Pakistan Zindabad‘, and they can land up in jail if a stool pigeon coos into a ministerial ear that they have. In 1964, when I entered college, two years after China had done its schoolmasterly bit with the Indian Army, Marxist students chanted “Amader Chairman Chairman Mao” – Chairman Mao is our Chairman – and when all of us shouted “Amar nam tomar nam Viet Nam” we presumably denied our Indianness, but even then, when the state was so much more fragile than it should be now, it took all this in its stride, as any mature democracy would. But Pakistan stays the auld enemy, inveterate in its hostility, implacable in its hate, diabolical in its use of terrorism as state policy, which of course no other nation does and India, tauba tauba, would never dream of doing.

Emulating Pakistan

The hyperventilating anchor whose programme every evening is in every way like online pornography, which no one will admit to watching, reminds us of the cost the nation has had to bear, of the lives lost. Which of course is true, but as the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation told the Supreme Court this Wednesday, stray dogs have killed more people in that metropolis than terrorists have.

If Pakistan is the enemy, it is disconcerting how much like the old Pakistan the new India is becoming. We are increasingly them, not in empathy but in emulation. The spirit of reasoned dissent, without which democracy withers, is being snuffed out, as unpatriotic. The nation has been raised to the pantheon. The religion of the greatest number is the greatest good.  Faith is conflated with race, race with nationality. The government is ridden by decrepit sadhus and swayamsevak zealots, an unholy alliance of the knackered and the knickered.

The army is now the touchstone on which patriotism is tested, the symbol and the saviour of the nation. Even the judiciary is not immune to this infection: the sermon with which the Delhi high court granted bail to Kanhaiya Kumar astonishingly told “all concerned that they are enjoying this freedom only because our borders are guarded by our armed and paramilitary forces”. Our forces, the judge reminded us, were on the Siachen Glacier and in the Rann of Kutch, which of course is where they should be, and, she might add now, on the Yamuna outside Delhi, where they should not, slaves for a godperson.

Pakistan has been there, done that, and been done because it did it, though its army would refuse to be free labour for any pir or shaikh, and is better at burning bridges than building them. Pakistan too must see India as the enemy because now, as we become more like them, Pakistan is becoming more like we used to be. As the Washington Post noted in an article on March 9, “so far this year, Sharif and his party have defied Islamic scholars by unblocking access to YouTube, pushing to end child marriage, enacting a landmark domestic violence bill, and overseeing the execution of a man who had become a symbol of the hatred that religion can spawn here.” (And let us note that, unlike Afzal Guru and Yakub Memon, who were hung to pander to majoritarian bloodlust, Mumtaz Qadri was executed in the teeth of popular opposition, with the government knowing there would be a price to pay.)  The paper attributes this change to “Sharif’s ambitious economic agenda”, which means that, unlike the frenemy with whom he takes the occasional cup o’ kindness, Pakistan’s prime minister understands that modernity cannot coexist with bigotry and obscurantism.

Or with the fevered nationalism which is the stock in trade of so many of our ministers, the erudite minister for HRD among them. (She did quote Shakespeare to Sitaram Yechury. Fair is foul and foul is fair, she said, and nothing could be more apt, because those were the words of the witches in Macbeth.) It would seem from her tirades in Parliament against JNU, its students and their ilk, that for her the nation is protean, shifting shapes between Bharat Mata, Ma Durga and India that is Bharat. To see virtue in Mahishasura is as treacherous as hoping Pakistan remains zinda. But every Bengali Hindu who has grown up with the Mahalaya could remind the minister that the Devi is worshipped as sarvabhutesu, that she is matri, tushti, buddhi, chetana and, of course, Shakti, but also kshuda, trishna, vritti, chhaya, even bhranti. If the speeches of Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid were bhranti, they also shook with kshuda and trishna, all forms of the Devi. Ya Devi, the Mahatmaya intones, sarvabhutesu smriti-rupena samsthita, which must please the minister, but if the nation is the Devi, her forms embrace Irom and Soni and Ishrat as well.

Dangerous worship

It’s extraordinary how little things have changed over a hundred years. In 1896, Rabindranath Tagore introduced Vande Mataram to the Congress at its 12th session in Calcutta (with Rahmatullah Sayani presiding!). Twenty years later, deeply worried that a violent nationalism which conflated the nation with the goddess and patriotism with religion, was leading India into a vortex, he wrote his darkly prophetic novel Ghare Baire, usually translated as ‘The Home and the World’.   The central figure of Bimala, who has fallen under the spell of Vande Mataram, says at the height of her infatuation, “I want an image of the nation that I will call Ma, Devi, Durga, before whom I will offer sacrifices in a deluge of blood”. Her husband, Nikilesh, through whom Tagore spoke, tells his wife, “I am prepared to accept my country as the best there is, but what I worship is much greater than the nation. To worship the nation is to bring about its destruction”. A century later, that still says it all.

Vande Mataram is our national song, now being lifted to a catechism, odd in a secular democracy. Again, we are the enemy and they are us. Across the border, the alternative anthem is “Hum dekhenge”, the marvellously subversive ghazal of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a Marxist like Kanhaiya Kumar, jailed by military dictators and then sent into exile. It uses Islamic phraseology to proclaim the end of autocracy and misrule, including the line Sab buth jab uthwaye jayenge, the first words of which strangely echo the sarvabhuteshu of the Mahatmaya, though here the buth are the false idols – Ayub, Yahya and Zia – who will be driven from the Kaaba.   It was dangerous to recite Faiz in Zia’s time: it was treacherous and anti-national. It was also dangerous to wear the sari, which was unIslamic and identified with the enemy. In 1985, with Zia at the zenith of his power, Iqbal Bano staged one of the most remarkable protests there has ever been. In the Lahore Stadium, before an audience that was estimated at close to 50,000, she appeared in a black sari and sang “Hum dekhenge”, electrifying her audience, which started to shout “Inquilab Zindabad” as she sang. That performance, which has passed into legend, made the song iconic. It is impossible to hear it without being moved by the courage of the singer, the anger of the poet and the response of the crowd.

If Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has invited anyone from Pakistan to perform at his jamboree, it would be a small saving grace if he or she, or anyone, sang Faiz’s immortal song when the powers that now rule India’s destiny are in the audience. The double Sri prefix should not be a licence only to kill a flood-plain.