When singing Tagore is made out to be treason

Over the past few years, the Bengali-speaking community has been subject to conscious “othering” and the harsh hand of the State in Assam, beit the D-voters issue, or National Register of Citizens exclusions or the labelling of anyone and everyone speaking Bengali as Bangladeshi.

- Joydeep Biswas

The latest such instance is the row over singing Rabindra Sangeet, songs written and set to music by Rabindranath Tagore. In joy and grief, hope and despair, love and hate, Bengalis, including those living in Assam’s Barak Valley, find emotional resonance in Tagore's songs. Forcing the Bengali to sever links with an oeuvre of more than 2,500 songs, or even one particular song is tantamount to snatching its cultural right.

On October 27, an octogenarian Bengali Congress leader hummed two lines from Tagore’s “Amaar sonar Bangla, ami tomay bhalo-basi’ (My golden Bengal, thee I love) at a party meeting in Karimganj of Barak Valley in south Assam. This innocuous act in a close-door meeting quickly assumed a political dimension. The reason cited was that the song was adopted by Bangladesh as its national anthem. So, the BJP’s Karimganj unit claimed singing even a line from the song amounts to treason against the Indian State. A local unit’s reaction was amplified by chief minister (CM) Himanta Biswa Sarma.