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Journalism of Courage
In 1926, in one of his public addresses in Ahmedabad, Mahatma Gandhi said, “To know music is to transfer it to life. The prevalent discord of today is an indication of our sad plight. There can be no swaraj where there is no harmony, no music”.
While the profundity and technique of Indian classical music – Hindustani and Carnatic – did not find much affection from the father of the nation, who called it “a prerogative of the few, either the barter of prostitutes or high-class religious devotees”, at the same time, he identified the power music could wield as an important mechanism of communication during the freedom struggle. It could reach out to people the way not many other means could – music could bring them together in a congregation, be uplifting in a way to allow them to stay on the path to his dream – freedom of the nation.
After his tour of the Khilafat Movement in 1920, he’d written in Young India – the weekly founded by Lala Lajpat Rai, that “our great stumbling block is that we have neglected music. Music means rhythm, order, it immediately soothes”.
By the time Gandhi returned to India from South Africa and set up the Satyagraha Ashram in Kochrab, Gujarat, in 1915, and which later moved to Sabarmati in 1917, Gandhi was clear that music was something that could bring people together. He identified that music moved him and felt that it could move others too.
The root of Gandhi’s interest in music went back to his childhood, where growing up in a Vaishnav home, he’d hear his mother sing bhajans and was in awe of the Ramayana, and how a devotee of Ram would recite the dohas (couplets) and chawpais (quatrains) musically at their home.
Once in the UK, Gandhi also attempted to learn the violin as well as dance, to ape the ways of an ‘English gentleman’ but he dropped out of the lessons soon. In his autobiography, Gandhi writes, “The violin I can learn to play when I return. I am here as a student. I should acquire but one asset: learning”. Interestingly violin didn’t count as learning.
Distinct from spinning, a simple yet strong ritual with meaning, a sense of community and pride that presented the idea of swadeshi effortlessly and efficiently, adapting music in a way that it united people and became a tool of sonic politics, was complex. There were different regions with different music, and castes that practiced different forms of the artform besides music perceived differently by those who performed it and those who heard it.
But the idea of prayer, which came from Gandhi’s childhood and then by being close to the practices of hymn singing in the Christian community in the UK and later in South Africa, was also like spinning to him and stayed. The rhythmic order in both appealed to him and both would become significant in the freedom movement.
Once in South Africa, where Gandhi bought about 100 acres of land to attempt his first experiments with communal living and manual labour, he decided to use the idea of prayer to put out the message of spirituality and oneness among people.
He carefully drafted a list of hymns – including one of his favourites Lead, Kindly Light, and Abide with Me besides bhajans from Hindi and Gujarati – and figured that men, women and children singing together did not just allow a sense of community and consonance, it also projected homogeneity of a certain kind despite coming from different communities.
Gandhi understood in South Africa, first in Phoenix and later in Tolstoy Farm, that music could bind and instill nationalism and pride not just in the people themselves, who’d also get discipline, routine, and a sense of spirituality from it, but also represent the unison to the outsiders.
Prayer services, a tradition that began in the South African settlements, found a resonance in the Sabarmati Ashram, and later in the entire freedom movement. The Ashram Bhajnavali, comprising about 250 pieces, was created with some shlokas and ‘Bapu’s bhajans’ that included 15th-century bhakti poet Narsinh Mehta’s “Vaishnava jana toh, taine kahiye, peed parayi jaane hai (Call those people, the Vaishnavas, who feel the pain of others)” and Tulsidas’s famed Ramdhun – “Ishwar allah tero naam, sabko sanmati de bhagwaan (Iswar and Allah are your names, bless everyone with this wisdom)” – which was composed by noted musician and founder of Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, Pt Vishnu Digambar Paluskar.
Gandhi also brought in Narayan Moreshwar Khare, Paluskar’s disciple to lead the prayers at the ashram so that the songs were taught and then sung properly. The bhajnavali later went on to include passages from the Quran, shabads from Guru Granth Sahab and poetry by Bulleshah, Meera, and Kabir.
But the composition of these lyrics was always a vehicle for deeper spirituality; it was never more significant than the prayer itself. Classical music as high art did not appeal to Gandhi, at least initially. It needed to be devotional and simple to appeal to him and the masses. “Art can never be an end in itself,” he wrote in a letter in 1926.
This is why he chose bhajans – they could be easily hummed, sung, and remembered and were likely to appeal to the average common man as well as the elites who listened to classical music. The message was usually unadorned, basic, and could find a connection easily. And Paluskar fit into this mould easily.
Paluskar, though steeped in the classical arts, found himself increasingly tilted towards the devotional. While teaching classical music had included this in his repertoire. It could have been a personal choice after he lost many of his children. And this devotional space, for Gandhi, was to become the idiom to unite a nation. Music was necessary but it could not be entertaining or out of line.
The coming up of the gramophone and radio broadcasts also helped in music being identified as a significant weapon.
So when the time came, Gandhi was clear about its use in political and patriotic spaces, concluding that music had the power to rally people together. While the songs were a significant part of the Dandi Yatra, they became the leitmotif of the prabhat pheris – musical processions at dawn – where small groups roamed the streets singing patriotic songs and prayers, which the British government considered seditious.
When asked to dissuade people, Gandhi said in 1931 that he did not find anything objectionable in them as they didn’t disturb peace. He felt that it summoned people “to the call of duty”, which was Swaraj at this point. But the content was strictly regulated by Gandhi, who saw music more “for an orderly life and cleansing the mind of anger,” as mentioned by historian Lakshmi Subramaniam in her book ‘Singing Gandhi’s India’ (Roli Books).
There were some singing voices that appealed to Gandhi more than the others. Vocalist MS Subbulakshmi was one of them. He was impressed with the way she sang the Ramdhun, a voice so immersed in the content of the piece that it could move many. Subbulakshmi would also often sing to raise money for the Kasturba Fund.
In the second half of the 1940s, inundated with the communal violence and bloodshed of the Partition, Gandhi found more alleviation in music while attempting to put a lid on the communal tensions. There were regular prayer meetings where he’d usually explain the message in the piece that had been sung. He wrote, “Music has given me peace… it has tranquilised my mind when I was greatly agitated over something. It has helped me to overcome anger.”
A few weeks after the Partition, he asked Subbulakshmi to record Meera’s famed bhajan Hari tum haro jan ki peer (Oh Lord, take away the pain from mankind). Sadashivam, Subbulakshmi’s husband wrote a letter to Gandhi, saying that his wife did not know the piece properly and wouldn’t want to sing a half-baked rendition and that a noted singer should sing it. Gandhi wrote back saying that he’d rather have MS say the words than someone else singing it.
The song was recorded at All India Radio (AIR) studios in Chennai, on the night of October 1, 1947, and completed at 2 am on October 2. The recording was airlifted to Delhi, where it was played to Gandhi on his 78th birthday, October 2, 1947.
Four months later, on January 30, 1948, when Gandhi passed away, AIR’s announcement of his death was followed by Subbulakshmi’s rendition of the bhajan, Hari tum haro.
