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MUSIC:
TAGORE'S SONGS
Hounds
Of Music
With Visvabharati’s
copyright on Tagore ending next year and the Centre refusing to throw
in its weight, the poet’s music may be finally unshackled
By
Labonita Ghosh
In
the summer of 1964, Debabrata Biswas, the Rabindrasangeet sensation of
the 1960s, received a terse letter from the Visvabharati Music Board (VMB)
as he was leaving home to record an album. The board is the controlling
authority of the 2,600-odd songs written by Rabindranath Tagore, most
of which were set to music by him. It informed Biswas that he would not
be allowed to record two of the songs submitted by him on the scratch
tape. Reason: excessive melodrama and unnecessary interludes had made
the songs “jarring and distorted”. Over the years, he was practically
banned from singing even though the public couldn’t have enough of
him. Finally, in 1971, Biswas gave up the fight, announcing that he would
stop recording altogether. “It was not pride,” he later wrote
in a touching tell-all called Bratyajaner Ruddha Sangeet (The Outsider’s
Suppressed Music), “it was just self-respect.”
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| Without
copyright, will Tagore's works be ennobled or distorted? |
If Biswas
were alive today, he would have celebrated December 2001. For that’s
when Visvabharati—the university set up by Tagore in Santiniketan,
and the possessive preserver of his legacy—will lose its 60-year
copyright over everything created by the poet. When Vice-Chancellor Dilip
Kumar Sinha wrote to the Union Human Resources Development Ministry recently,
it refused to stretch the term again by amending the Copyright Act. In
1991 the Centre had buckled under pressure from Visvabharati by extending
the copyright period from 50 years to 60. Now Sinha and other officials
are fuming. “I will put Tagore on the Net,” says the vice-chancellor.
“He may as well become free for all.” However, the hottest debate
on the matter is about the future of Tagore’s songs for which
vmb cannot wield the baton after next year. Without Visvabharati, will
this vast bank be enriched or will it be denigrated?
Indeed, it
would be difficult to challenge Tagore’s virtuosity, or even improve
upon it. A lyricist and composer since his boyhood, he borrowed from several
genres and welded them into new creations. His sources of inspiration
ranged from the western classical to Irish, Scottish and German folk songs,
church music, military bands, opera and closer home, Indian ragas, kirtans
and Baul songs. “A Tagore is born only once in several centuries,”
says Pradeep Banerjee, honorary secretary of vmb. “We can’t
allow him to be sold on the streets.”
While Visvabharati’s
reasons for a watertight copyright may be justified, it is the university’s
over-policing that irks artistes. Many modern-day Tagore singers—and
even some musician members of the board—feel that with Visvabharati’s
firewalling out of the way, they can freely dig into Tagore’s repertoire
and come up with innovative ways of presenting his songs. But mostly,
they are relieved to get the watchdog off their back.
Instances
of the board acting as the self-appointed cultural nanny, as far as Tagore
is concerned, are innumerable. When Bollywood producer Partho Ghosh decided
to use some Tagore songs in his film Yugpurush, he had no idea about the
kind of trouble he would run into. Within weeks of the film’s release,
vmb slapped a lawsuit on Ghosh. He had to pay Rs 9 lakh in fines. Painter
M.F. Husain tripped up on a song in his multi-starrer Gaja Gamini. The
music board finally made him drop it. Filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh was luckier.
In his National Award-winning Asukh, there were some lines from a Tagore
poem that Visvabharati insisted had been read incorrectly. Ghosh had to
re-dub.
VMB catches
about a dozen copyright offenders each year and earns a substantial amount
in fines. Insiders say this amount is not much below the university’s
income from Tagore’s musical royalty of Rs 10 lakh a year (the royalty
income from books was Rs 2.70 crore last year). However, the
board’s accounts, audited separately, are not shown in the university’s
report. Nor is a transparent statement available to the public on whether
the disputes are settled mostly out of court, and, if so, who fixes the
amounts in compensation and on what basis.
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Relics
of old empires exist everywhere. Why can't the Mani Shankar Aiyars of
India let them be? asks INDIA TODAY Senior Editor Ravi Shankar in
