Times of India: Kolkata: Wednesday, 23 September
2015.
A controversy
has erupted over the national anthem once again and many Bengalis are bristling
with rage over what they hold is a slight to Rabindranath Tagore and an attempt
to distort history. At the centre of this storm is a mention in the India
government's official portal that "the national anthem of India
Jana-gana-mana, composed originally in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore, was
adopted in its Hindi version by the Constituent Assembly as the National Anthem
of India on 24 January, 1950"
(http://india.gov.in/india-glance/national-symbols).
Two young men
from Kolkata have filed separate applications under the RTI with the Prime
Minister's Office (PMO) seeking clarifications. "I wanted to know in my
application about the identity of the person who wrote the Hindi version,"
said techie Anirban Saha. Agnivo Lahiri, who filed another RTI on Tuesday, has
requested for documentary evidence of the song written by Tagore being
translated into Hindi. "Tagore wrote this song or hymn in Sanskritised
Bengali and its first paragraph was adopted as the national anthem. The lyrics
remain the same as they are. So where is the question of translation?" asked
Lahiri, who is the editorial head of the digital team of a knowledge management
company.
The trigger
for the two RTIs and the controversy is an article in a news portal on a
forthcoming film by Srijit Mukherji. The film has the last four stanzas of Jana-gana-mana
(the first stanza is the national anthem) written by Tagore in 1911 as its
soundscape and sound track. The article in a news portal is actually about the
film's promotional video titled 'Bharato Bhagya Bidhata'. The article lists the
"official Hindi version" of the national anthem and goes on to
mention the 'complete Bengali lyrics' (the five stanzas). The article has an
embedded link to the government web portal.
By late
Tuesday morning, Facebook was full of disapprovals and condemnations of the
'Hindi version' angle by angry readers, two of them going to the extent of
promptly filing RTIs. Many took to Twitter to vent their ire.
Tagore
scholars assert that the national anthem is what Tagore wrote and there is no
question of there being a Hindi version. "The song was written in Bengali
but with many Tatsama (Sanskrit) words. This original version was what was
adopted by the Constituent Assembly as the national anthem. The use of Sanskrit
words by Tagore makes it sound like a Hindi song or hymn. To say it was
translated into Hindi or the national anthem is the Hindi version of the
original song is pure rubbish," said Tagore expert Sankha Ghosh.
"Tagore
thought and wrote this landmark song in Bengali just as Bankim Chandra wrote
his Vande Mataram in Bengali. Both use Tatsama words and hence they sound like
Hindi. Both Hindi and Bengali have been derived from Sanskrit, hence such
similarities are expected," said Tagore scholar and former Visva Bharati
faculty Amitrasudan Bhattacharya.
Filmmaker
Srijit Mukherjee on Tuesday re-tweeted a comment by Agnivo Lahiri that there is
no Bengali or Hindi version of Tagore's song, but just the original version.
"I agree our national anthem is not the 'Hindi version' of what Tagore
wrote. It is the original version as written by Tagore. But the first stanza
transforms itself very well into Hindi and the Constitution makers, in their
wisdom, must have thus adopted the first stanza as the national anthem. The
remaining four stanzas have many typical Bengali words which would not have
transformed themselves into Hindi at all," he said.
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