Headlines
Tagore experts, politicians hit out at Kalyan for national anthem remarks
Kolkata, July 8
Rajasthan Governor Kalyan
Singh on Wednesday drew flak from Tagore experts, constitutional
figures, academicians and politicians for seeking an amendment in the
national anthem "Jana Gana Mana".
While Singh's Tripura
counterpart Tathagata Roy chose micro-blogging site Twitter to assert
that there was no such need, two former vice-chancellors of Rabindra
Bharati University named after the bard lashed out against the Rajasthan
governor calling him "ignorant" about both the anthem and Tagore.
Addressing
the convocation ceremony of Rajasthan University, Kalyan Singh on
Tuesday said he respected Tagore but called for dropping the word
"aadhinayak" as it signified the British empire.
Roy, a BJP
leader from West Bengal, asserted: "It has been 67 years since
independence. Why should our adhinayak be the British? I don't think it
is right to make any change in the national anthem."
Former RBU
VC Subhankar Chakraborty said: "I am shocked and ashamed at Kalyan
Singh's comments. If he had the minimum knowledge about Tagore, or the
song, he would not have uttered what he said. In the song, the people
are the adhinayaka - the king of kings.
"Such was Tagore's faith
in the people, that once when he was asked who he considered the best
king of Europe, he replied, 'the people'," Chakrabort, who has authored a
book on Tagore, told IANS.
Academician and Tagore expert Pabitra Sarkar also assailed Singh.
"His
comments smack of ignorance, lack of education. He does not know when
and in what context the song was written. Leave aside Bengali writers,
even Irish literary figure W.B. Yeats and American poet-critic Ezra
Pound have clearly stated that the song is not an eulogy to British
rulers," Sarkar, also an former vice chancellor of RBU, told IANS.
Sarkar
said Tagore in the poem spoke about the eternal Indian spirit, the
"mono adhinayaka" (the supreme inner spirit). "Had Kalyan Singh read the
remaining verses of the poem he would have desisted from making his
laughable and deplorable observations."
Both the Communist Party of India-Marxist and the Communist Party of India also assailed Kalyan Singh.
While
CPI-M leader Brinda Karat accused him of speaking like an "RSS
pracharak", D. Raja of the CPI accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of
"attempting to destroy the country's secular democratic fabric".
First
sung by a choir in 1911 in the 26th session of the Indian National
Congress at the city's Greer Park, "Jana Gana Mana" was composed and set
to tune by Tagore - the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1913- days after the British government annulled the
partition of Bengal.
Independent India's constituent assembly
adopted the first stanza of Brahmo hymn as the national anthem on Jan
24, 1950, after an intense debate that saw Bankim Chandra
Chattopadhyay's "Vande Mataram" lose out narrowly following objections,
particularly from Muslims.
However, Singh is not the first person to express misgivings about the song.
Critics
had opposed making it India's national anthem, claiming it was written
as an eulogy to King George V, as its composition coincided with the
Coronation durbar of the British emperor in New Delhi.
In 1937,
Tagore in a letter admitted that one of his pro-establishment friends
had requested him to write a paean for the emperor. "I was stunned at
that, and also angered. As a result of this catastrophic reaction, I
have declared the victory of the dispenser of India's destiny in the
Jana Gana Mana song."
"That great charioteer of human destiny
cannot, by any means, be fifth or sixth, or any George," said Tagore who
holds the unique distinction of having composed the national anthems of
two countries - India and Bangladesh.