Hannah Liu
Listening to “Ami Banglay Gaan Gai,” the shy finger-picked notes of the sitar might stand out first. They poke out sadly and nostalgically, drowned out by singer, producer and composer Pratul Mukhopadyay. When I asked my mother for a song that had influenced her, I was surprised she referred me to such a slow and preening melody.
My mother recalls her music taste in the 1990s as very unpatriotic. As a teenager in a then-20 year old nation, Bengali music did not really interest her. NSYNC posed on her bedroom walls. Her CDs were those of Celine Dion and Shania Twain, or the closer Pritam and Lata Mangeshkar of Bollywood. She interpreted Bengali music as too sad, underproduced and heavy on the country-hugging.
“Ami Banglay Gaan Gai” is no exception to that genre. BBC Bangla currently holds the song as the sixth greatest Bengali song of all time. The list itself is overwhelmingly filled with patriotic music of the same fabric. For the non-Bengali speakers, Mukhopadyay’s magnum opus is a moving confession to his unwavering and helpless devotion to speaking, thinking and loving in the fraught language. Slow, nostalgic and nodding to the intricacies of Bangla, “Ami Banglay Gaan Gai” represented to many a reclamation of Bengali legitimacy via an exploration of the nation’s expression. It is also a retrospective on the sadness of the 1971 war for independence.
The 1971 war was fought over the Bengali ethnic group’s right to speak Bangla as an official language. The ensuing genocide of Bengali peoples by the Pakistani government fueled an outpouring of sorrow that infected film, music and literature.
The next generation, which included my mother, found refuge from national mourning within Mukopadhyay’s music. “Ami Banglay Gaan Gai” is a masterpiece for how it repackages that sadness in a soft, hammering reclamation of Bangla after a violent war that sowed doubt in that movement.
To a non-Bengali Westerner, the combination of string instruments to back the melody seem standard for “desi” music. Who would guess a sitar would be in a Bengali song? But the song notably lacks a percussive element, like the Indian tabla, to ground the listener. Mukhopadhyay and his strings hence float along in a stream of consciousness.
Throughout my reading, I have had to rely on informal translations of the song, my own fluency and my mother’s translations. There are so many nuances and instances of wordplay that are so subtle yet so powerful. Often, they have little to no equivalence in English.
The song begins with a slight switch of words that links the significance of the mother tongue to nationality. The first line, “I sing in Bangla,” and the second, “I sing songs of Bangla,” leverage “Bangla/Bengali” as a term for a language, an ethnicity, and a geographic entity.
Such switches in language have made it hard to translate, and even harder for non-Bengalis to understand. One rather crude version, and one of the only one’s available online, combines the next stanza into “I am in Bangla always.” A more fitting meaning utilizes a noun-verb switch to say, “In my dreams I find Bangla,” recalling the sentiment of having to restore or search deep within one’s heritage to preserve the language. Another one says: “I Am Myself, I Search For This Bengali Language.” My mother agrees that a combination of the two matches Makhopadhyay’s inability to untangle his perceived self from his language. “I search for who I have always been in Bangla” (Ami Amar Ami Ke Chiro Din Ei Banglai Khuje Pai). Bangla is so intertwined with the process of translating thought into spoken speech, and Mukhopadhyay illustrates that perfectly.
The rest of the song continues the same way. Each line explores how he does every action, feels every emotion and aims for every aspiration in Bangla.
Perhaps this unapologetic usage of the most complex, fabled Bengali appealed to youth like my mother. Mukhopadhyay intentionally muddles verb conjugations so that two listeners can understand them differently. A non-native may not understand it at all. English, on the other hand, is exclusive to none. The plasticity of the global Western pop bands of the age, with widely appealing branding and vague mixtures of genre, my mother says, were nothing like Mukhopadhyay’s intentional targeting. He wanted to create a Bengali-only listener’s society. Such an idea must have meant the world to a teenager as old, new and malleable as her nation.
When I asked my mother for a song that shaped her childhood the most, I expected one of the Western boy band songs or run-filled feats of iconic vocalists like Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston, who she had always talked about with me. Instead she reached for this obscure, elderly singer who she never mentioned in two decades. “I would listen to this song a lot, on the TV ads and on the CDs. He made me feel proud to be Bengali,” she recalled, “and not in a political way. In my way.”
I realized that she fiercely guarded “Ami Banglay Gaan Gai” from those she felt would not understand the Bengali plight. Guarded it in the same way the singer fenced off his tender attachment to Bangla from outsiders. And I, no matter how close I could get to speaking the tongue, could never translate her quite right.