Guest post by Prasanta Chakravarty

I want to tell you about a song.  A song and a singer that few will call political. I want to talk about a song called Daya Karo (Have Mercy) sung by Mousumi Bhowmik, which appears originally in her album Ami Ghor Bahir Kori/ In and Out of My Room (2001).

Though she would routinely perform in certain public events and campus fests in Kolkata, Bhowmik has always been a peripheral figure in the popular imagination on Bangla singers who appear in the last couple of decades. She does not qualify as a mainstream modern popular singer. It is an equally barbed proposition to accommodate her within a new group of singers who would tilt the popular musical scenario in Kolkata and its suburbs by some straight talking, angst ridden compositions and solo performances throughout the nineties. Some of these singers have of late plunged into active politics and one of them has even become a Member of Parliament.

Such a stature has eluded Bhowmik, not so much owing to her gender (since there are a few women minstrels who also ride successfully the activist-poetic waves), but because she has kept herself away from a particular mode of busy activism, myth-mongering and spreading nuggets of wisdom: things that we often associate with the rubric of political music. Her preoccupation has rather been on archiving music from various parts of Eastern India and Bangladesh and composing her own songs, quietly and painstakingly. A certain meticulousness and patience marks her attitude toward her own craft.  In fact, Bhowmik’s first album, which appeared as a cassette in the early 1990s, was hastily done, with limited circulation and with the added headache of getting into an extremely uneven deal with the recording company. But it is curious that she has always had a group of assiduous acolytes, a motley assemblage not looking for made-easy existential questions in her songs but discovering a certain relatedness and crazy fullness of living that harbours a much larger, lurking disruptive potential within. There is a long term investment that one would make in Bhowmick, the fruits of which may now bear results, I would argue, in the changing, unfolding political firmament of Bengal.

There is an uncharted terrain of political involvement in times of unexpected shifts and change, the quotient of which is difficult to quantify but which coalesce at certain moments with piercing sharpness. This kind of political involvement eludes the logic of calculated arithmetic, of set rules and structures. These build up a certain proliferating jouissance—of immersing in life itself. But these are not merely about spontaneous excess or violence. Such kinds of investments grow over a period of time, quietly and then attain a certain critical combustibility. The richness and radical undecidability of these manoeuvres lie in the fact that such obligations and contributions are difficult to pigeonhole and use. They resist the preferential. As a principle, such commitments shun opinions and ideologies, but would be invested in shaping a situation, movement or a location with some maturing newness and a yearning utopia.

Of course, from time to time Bhowmik unveils some pronounced political utterances from her repertoire. She has sung quite poignantly about the experience of partition (Jessore Road), the politics of language and minority politics (Shonkha-Loghu), of urban destitutes (Foot-Path er Meye), artisanal displacement/employment (Pujor Chhuti) and more generally has reflected upon the wastage and betrayal involved in instrumental political mobilization (Ananyo, Shopno Dekhbo Bole). Looked carefully, one would notice that even these rather social explorations about public life and its travails are halting and retiring, with no prescriptive lyrical panacea. But behind the various disappointments and acknowledgement of the limitations of her milieu, there is often an unmistakable aching that is yet to fructify. What is the nature of this quest? How does this underside of tranquility hide and nurture a terrible mutinous overture?

Daya Karo is sung as a hymn, apparently a quiescent genre. As the opening bars fade, we hear Bhowmik’s abounding tone seeking daya, for an appalling drought is underway:

‘Have mercy, in this drought—my entire body turns to cinders.’

I wish to mark ‘this’ here, which brings her subject right into the ongoing, the present. The drought is underway. It is in progress and hence, is partial. It is a moment when objects and activities from the past may be configured in a distinctive and heretofore unfamiliar constellation, as an image, a figura. For Bhowmik then, the time of drought manifests a knowledge uniquely available to a specific present moment that will then pass. It is precious because it is generated by and includes the desires, needs, and contexts of the present and so can be lost if not given expression now. It is also precious because although a condition, drought conveys a knowledge that is in some fundamental sense rigorous and particular. The dangers and dreams of the encounter with the one who allows mercy is stark and matches the wasted fallowness and of a drought like situation that has befallen.

But befallen whom? The economy of her next move is crucial:

‘Have mercy—this city, body, time—all turn to cinders.’

The austere and barren idea of turning into residue, into ashen normality, is now given a material dimension. First the city: presumably she is talking abut her own city—Kolkata, but that could be an every-city too.  The city is fetid and wasted, dry with little possibilities in its present state of things. The idea of a hymn and private devotional prayer—genres which usually turn back onto the intimacy of the self  is astutely given a public-political vent by relating the material decay of the body with the lack of will and political vacuity in imagining the city-space. The parched body—its dreariness, is now coterminous with the story of the city. Is this the story of Kolkata for the past few decades? Yes, one would think—because of the incursion of the third crucial component into the picture: time. Time is self consuming now; perhaps the deprivation and squalor ignites that kind of pathos and vexation for both the body and the city. The draught ridden ambience pushes the unfolding moment towards dark non-existence: cinder.

And then the first sign of anticipation: rain is invoked, a merciful downpour that may mitigate the parched climes of the ongoing turpitude, the ghosts of failed promises that the city is trying to exorcise and the body trying to re-imagine.  The rain is also anticipatory of a parallel movement in the song, the obverse of mercy—the first inklings of the cosmic catastrophes that actually shape everyday activities in the city and the physical dealings of the body. The hermeneutics of such a code may be grasped by the initiated.

And then a revaluation of the body, now as an enclosed room—which is blind and fastened. The air is still. Suffocating. But it is not just the body now that is closed to options—but the addition of soul/mind.

At this point appears a quick digressive image that situates the room further: A Picasso canvas hangs on the damp walls. A radical new relationship with a precious relic, a dislocated culture bearing object—a facsimile possibly, of a Picasso, which is put into sharp relief with the turn of the qualifier—damp. This marks once again the steady, gradual sense of wastage. But dampness in the time of drought? Is it the effect of the downpour then? Surely, the merciful, catastrophic rain is a counter-force to fetid sogginess, a corrective power. No, Bhowmik could easily deploy a logic of supplmentarity rather: clamminess of the canvas on the wall, which has been freshly erected by the way, is merely a condition of leftover wastage, adding to the musty suffocation that the drought begets in the first place.

In fact, this idea of bruise (khawto) and infection are quite central to Bhowmik’s thinking. In a different song titled Khawto—she reflects again how these times are infected and how we continually live in a state of denial. By invoking denial, she reminds us of our ambiguous and callous relationship with our times, the many missed promissory and revolutionary commitments to the city space invoked in the past few decades. She stirs us by unearthing the folds of everyday, not by emotional and rhetorical flourish—typical of what goes by political music in both progressive and nationalist circles.

And now that we are at the perfect centre of this architecture of a song, that she unleashes a storm in order to dismantle that edifice permanently. A transforming deluge is called forth, an eruption of a stomping tempest, almost as a fateful arche rite in order to destroy the existing order of things:

‘O tempestuous eruption /Hammer and destroy every standing thing now’

On the face of it such an idea of a tremendous cosmic trembling and quaking may remind us of numerous subjective, quasi-religious incantations, across cultures—say, in case of the much cited Dies Irae, for instance:

Day of wrath! O day of mourning!
See fulfilled the prophets’ warning,
Heaven and earth in ashes burning.

But this day of judgement is not a day of purification. Such as idea of mercy is not salvific in Bhowmik. No wondrous incarnations here. There is no suppliant groaning with guilt. But a detached and historicized invocation of the elements which are always with us, within us. The catastrophic potentialities now need to be summoned and unleashed. The political implications are tremendous, if one can read and direct the hermeneutic signs properly in Bhowmik’s city, her every city.

But wait: just when we thought that the song has reached a crescendo, there is a counter movement, which incidentally also acts as a coda:

‘Mercy on my weary being/ These daily amorous games/Mercy—this good living, loving, playing the do-gooder / I love no more.’

Worth tracking are the three distinct, but related ideas here: first, an unambiguous rejection of what goes by the name of love (bhalo-basha)—a habit, an urge to be loved and exchanging reciprocities that would naturally follow such an urge. This habit of loving/being loved is curiously connected with two divergent social impetuses that we usually act out with some purpose. This kind of love can only be supported by two modes of aspirations. On one hand, the idea of well-being (bhalo-thaka) and human flourishing—an aspiration for good life, which is intricately related to a sense of habituated ease. On the other, of righteous do-gooding (bhalo-kawra) and moments of left-liberal political correctness. These attributes are merely transactional and hence ethically dubious and socially vacuous. There must be something more to relationships, events and the everyday, something that nurtures self-reflexivity and which can only happen once the deluge has inundated and destroyed the routinized and the paltry.

And for such a new and tangential beginning to emerge, which was always potential—the singing persona of Bhowmik needs a clearing. She needs to stand outside of her self, as it were. And certainly outside of the musty and stinking metropolis of the past few decades that Kolkata has become. And so the song concludes, fades away actually:

“Just for once, for one moment, I will stand outside, in the clearing,

Just for once….”

We do not know what such a clearing could possibly bestow. More churning and blitz? Torpor? Or, will it help offer that much necessary objectivity, a detachment from too much loving one’s city that blights our vision? Whatever it might be, there is certainly a leap involved here, a risky leap that stands outside of the mundane, habituated and hypnotized existence that Bhowmik’s city has led itself to in the past decades.

One single song—and I have not even tried to talk about the tonal and musical aspects of it—cannot possibly have tenable sociological or historical implications. Nor can there be any one to one correspondence between songs and urban transformations. But musical deployment in politics and war is as old as uncivilization. And right now in the Kolkata soundscape, one notices a curious and vengeful return of sentimental nationalist numbers and reverential slogans as an antidote to its other: the intrumentalized use of progressive music and strategic deploying of Tagore and the usual internationalist slogans of mass politics that we had been witnessing for so many years. Such populist kitsch will proliferate, no doubt.

It is in this context that I thought of reading this one song closely: in order to think aloud how might certain reflexive political and social positions emerge over a period of time—quietly and radically through the idea of the minima. The minimal seeks a fecund reading. It shuns safe and crass liberal reformism, dangerous nostalgic sagas of the soil and card-carrying radicalism alike. There are quite a few more such numbers and compositions that have sedimented themselves over a period of time in urban Bengal in the last two decades. I have tried to deal with one today. But such varieties of minimal music need to be studied more systematically—both as cultural artefacts and the effect that they might generate on the collective. For they hit the stray listener unbeknownst, and work over the collective over a period of time. The sharp twang of the minima can summon a deluge, quell it temporarily and yet keep the embers burning—quietly. The effects could be lethal, residual and seriously adversarial.

Daya Karo

Mercy—in this drought, my entire body turns to cinders

Mercy—this city, body, time, all turn to cinders

Have mercy—O rain, O rain pour on!

This parched body, in the midst of this city

Mercy—O rain!

Mercy—blinded, closed are my body, my soul

So, have mercy on this still, stagnant, slammed door

No free wind darts no-more here

Mercy—this fence, wall

That Picasso hanging on the wall

The canvas damp and musty

Mercy—O tempestuous eruptions

Hammer and destroy every standing thing now

Have mercy on my weary being

These daily amorous games

Mercy—this good living, loving, playing the do-gooder

I love no more.

Mercy—just for once, for one single moment

I will stand outside, in the clearing,

For once…let me just stand outside…for once

Prasanta Chakravarty is Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi.