Mary King has argued that: ‘Music and the singing of songs is a universal feature of nonviolent struggles, binding participants together, enlivening, unburdening, helping to find a collective response to apprehension or fear, and sometimes contributing to the making of decisions.’
Gene Sharp, similarly, writes:
Under appropriate conditions, singing may constitute a method of nonviolent protest – for example, singing while an unwanted speech is being made, singing national or religious songs and hymns, rival vocal programmes to compete with boycotted ones organised by the opponent, singing while engaged in a march, civil disobedience, or some other act of opposition, singing songs of social and political satire and protest. He mentions how, in 1901, Finns had sung patriotic songs with great fervour, drowning out pro-Tsarist propaganda being preached from church pulpits.
Gandhi was always aware of the power of music and song, deploying it routinely in his ashram. He saw also that it was useful in crowd control, stating: ‘Music means rhythm, order. Its effect is electrical. It immediately soothes. I have seen, in European countries, a resourceful superintendent of police controlling the mischievous tendencies of mobs by starting a popular song.’ Nationalist volunteers – he continued – could achieve the same effect by leading the singing of nationalist songs during demonstrations. Many collections of nationalist songs and poems that could be set to music were published in response to this need. Generally considered ‘seditious’ by the government, they were often banned – with copies being retained in the archives, where they can be viewed to this day.
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The Maharashtra State Archives in Bombay, for example, holds booklets of patriotic songs and poems in Gujarati that date from this time. They were commonly priced at an affordable one anna. One by Jadulal Narandas of Nadiad was titled Asahkar Vina (the Lute of Noncooperation), another was published by the Ganesh Printing Press in Ahmedabad titled Vada-Sinorno Raja ke Rakshas Yane Julamathi Prajani Luntayeli Laj (The Demon-King of Vadasinor or the honour of the Subjects Robbed through Oppression), and another by Prabhudas Lallubhjai Thakkar of Chhapra in Kheda District titled Laganma Khadina Gito (Marriage Songs on Khadi). Jadulal Narandas also published a book of poems titled Swadesh Kavya (Poems of Self-Rule).
Asahkar Vina and another pamphlet by Narandas were subsequently banned by the British and the author issued with a warning. The Bharuch Khadi Committee in Gujarat employed a blind poet and musician called Hansraj Harakhji Amreliwala – who was from Amreli in Kathiawad – to travel around singing songs that advocated the boycott of foreign cloth and the use instead of khadi. He was known for his melodious voice and ability to attract a crowd. He published a booklet of his songs titled Kavya Triveni (Poems of the Triveni – the confluence of the three sacred rivers of the Ganges, Jumna and mythical Saraswati). These were also banned.
Songs such as these – which were published in all parts of India in regional languages – were on many nationalist themes. They spoke of British oppression; they lauded Gandhi and Mother India; they endorsed swadeshi, spinning on charkha, the wearing of khadi, the national flag, nationalist education, uplifting untouchables, jail-going; they advocated sobriety and a moral lifestyle, and the boycott of the British and their machinery of government. Shahid Amin has written of the ‘melodious Gandhi bhajans’ that were performed to village audiences by high-caste Congress activists in Gorakhpur District, in UP in early 1921.
For Bihar, Singh has described how nationalist meetings generally started with the singing of such songs. They emphasised the way that India was being ruined under imperial rule. The British were condemned for destroying Indian culture – their government was irreligious, demonic, treacherous, and responsible for a decline in the moral character of the Indian people. They were accused of ruling by dividing Hindus and Muslims. British institutions such as their schools and courts were seen to crush people’s souls, supress noble ideas, instigate evil passions and divide society. Courts were places of falsehood, deceit, treachery, dishonesty and meanness. The British were shown as perpetrating jalim, or atrocity, with Jallianwala Bagh being cited as proof of this. One song was titled ‘Oppression of Dyer’, and it recounted how the blood of children and women was on his hands and how he had ‘spoilt the honour of dear and devoted wives’.
The subject of British oppression was the theme of a Gujarati song: Digdarshan, or ‘A Revelation’, by Hansraj Amreliwala. In this, he declared how his tongue was ashamed to describe the atrocities committed by the British in Punjab, in 1919. Those ‘lordly asses brayed and spat on the brave women of the sacred soil’. The British divided Hindu and Muslim brothers and derided their unity. The people of India had:
…to break this state of dependence, otherwise it is better to die. How can you still swallow the poisonous pill of slavery? It was better if mother had given us poison instead of giving us milk. That power has drugged us to sleep by means of foreign cloth. That power has sucked our blood to its heart’s content and further added insult to injury. Your pulse is still throbbing, so rise with a new life! By good luck, a saint [Gandhi] has come to you; behold! And shake off your lethargy.
In another song, he declared that they were living in a dark age in which corruption and vice flourished, to which the only answer was to fight for swaraj. Similarly, Prabhudas Thakkar exclaimed in his Laganma Khadina Gito:
Look O sister, how deceitful is Government; It has arrested the heroes of India…. It increases the army for the sake of protection and strikes India with India’s arms.
The most popular nationalist song in Andhra dealt with the same theme. Makoddi Telladoratnamu by Garimella Satyanaryan had verses that deplored that despite abundant harvests the people lacked food to fill their stomachs, how they were forbidden by law to speak out against oppression, how young people were stopped from entering their schools if they wore a Gandhi cap, how herds of pregnant cows were slaughtered, how they should go to jail to win freedom, how the white people had committed many oppressions – such as killing Mappila rebels by suffocating them in rail wagons – and so on. In response to all this, the ‘God’ Gandhi and Bharat Mata had performed great tapasya (penances), and in response the goddess Dharma (religion) had appeared and said that all their desires would be fulfilled. This had put great fear in the hearts of doras (white people). Each of the thirteen verses ended with a chorus:
We don’t want this White Lord’s rule; God We don’t want this White Lord’s rule. Pouncing on our lives, Violating our modesty We don’t want this White Lord’s rule; God We don’t want this White Lord’s rule.
Some songs depicted British rule as being on the edge of collapse, so that the people of India had nothing to lose and much to gain by rebelling. Gandhi was taken as the inspiration in this respect. In the words of a nationalist song from Andhra:
Everything filled with Gandhi – this whole world filled with Gandhi Disobeying – the Government laws Calling all – with blessing hand Here is swarajya – here is freedom Come, come, here – (he) called all generously.
Others lauded Gandhi, conferring on him divine powers. Several songs from Andhra thus depicted Gandhi as a divinity who had come to save India. We shall examine these in the next chapter. There were songs that advocated swadeshi and khadi production and wearing. In one of his Gujarati songs, title Chavi, or ‘Key’, Prabhudas Thakkar exclaimed: ‘Put on khadi, O my sister. The spinning wheel will be the destruction of those who disgraced lakhs at Jallianwala; so says Gandhiji.’ The song goes on to allege that cow fat was mixed with foreign cloth and bones with foreign sugar, polluting the bodies of the Indian people. In similar vein, Hansraj Amreliwala intoned:
Why do you besiege the Mother and suck her very life blood by putting on foreign clothes? Why do you caress the poisonous and ungrateful enemy of the Mother by co-operating with him? Guru Gandhiji has been telling us that swaraj is contained in swadeshi only, He has put on a loin cloth and is going through the forest of difficulty.
In Digdarshan, or ‘A Revelation’, Amreliwala proclaimed that wearing foreign cloth was like trampling ‘on the breast of the Mother’ – e.g. Mother India, or Bharat Mata. It was like taking the side of Dushasan (an antagonist of the virtuous Pandavas of the Mahabharata). It maintained the grip of ‘that brutal foreign power that tramples on the head of Bharat and puts out the light of Islam’ – a power that humiliated Punjab by committing atrocities in Amritsar.
Set alongside these songs with a strongly Hindu content, there were ones that were designed to appeal to Muslim Khilafatist sentiments. These could be composed by Hindus such as Jadulal Narandas, one of whose Gujarati songs went:
Oh Ruler of Medina [e.g. the Prophet Muhammad] for God’s sake help us; See what sorts of oppression they are practicing upon us. May the Khilafat remain intact until the day of judgement!
Poetry and song was extremely important in South Asian Muslim culture, and pro-Khilafat songs and poems composed by Muslims became a striking feature of the movement. These tended to be subtler in sentiment than the average run of nationalist songs composed by Hindus. The musha’ira or poetic recitation was central to elite Muslim culture, while the masses sang Islamic devotional songs at festivals and shrines. Minault has written of how poetry and song provided a means of communication between the Muslim elites and masses. It spoke to people’s emotions in a way that political speeches by themselves could not. Popular poetic imagery of unrequited love and the conviviality of the assembly of believers was adapted for the political cause, with laments for a devastated garden and an end to the easy conviviality of a vanished time of Islamic rule, now replaced by a foreign oppressor.
In such songs and poems, the patriot thirsted for freedom, but was instead imprisoned in a cage. Some prominent Khilafat leaders such as Muhammad Ali, Hasrat Mohani, and others wrote powerful verse that they published in their newspapers. Often, their poems were ambiguous, so that they avoided censorship. For example, a poem in the Zamindar, which was the mouthpiece of Muslim activism in Punjab, went:
The garden is restless to hear the song ‘God is one’ The time to set the nightingale free from his cage has come.
Readers would have been clear that this meant freeing India from the British cage, but it was not stated as such, and thus could hardly be branded seditious by the British. The past glories of Islam were invoked in a way that suggested present decline into an abject subjugation. Muhammad Ali wrote poetry under the penname of Jauhar. He mainly wrote in jail when he had the leisure to do so. Being in prison, the imagery of the bird in the cage longing for the garden of freedom appears frequently in his compositions.
Hasrat Mohani edited Urdue-Mu‘alla from Aligarh. He was renowned more for his poetry than prose. Much of it dealt with matters of love, but he also composed political verse. For example:
The custom of tyranny successful, how long will it last? Love of country in a stupor, how long will it last? How long will the chains of deception hold fast? The stymied anger of people, how long will it last? What tyrannies in the name of laws are passed. This veiled force, how long will it last? The riches of India in foreign hands are clasped. These numberless riches, how long will they last? There was no covert imagery here – the message was direct.
Forms of popular religious recital were appropriated by nationalists to convey a nationalist message. Religious songs and hymns – known as bhajans, kirtans, and qawwali – were sung during rites of worship, religious festivals and in processions. In the words of Murali, they expressed the ‘aspirations, perceptions and world-view’ of the masses. Hindu devotional songs were often sung in Andhra in radhotsawas – processions bearing an image of a deity on a wooden cart (radha, or elsewhere in India, a rath) – that was dragged along as participants sang their hymns of praise. During noncooperation, this was given a nationalist content, with participants interlacing religious and nationalist songs.
Pictures of Gandhi and other nationalist leaders were carried on the wooden cart along with the image of the deities. It soon became a requirement for all such processions to incorporate images of Gandhi. A nationalist from Guntur noticed in June 1921 that if it was omitted, the people ‘become angry and refuse to drag the radha’. Smaller processions that carried hand-held images of deities were known as prabha (meaning ‘greatness’ or ‘glory’).
Nationalist bhajan kirtan prabha became a major feature of the movement in Andhra. They would start in one village, with rallies being held as they passed through other villages. The number of participants swelled as they went. When the AICC session was held at Vijaywada in Andhra in March-April 1921, it was estimated that some 200,000 people came from different parts of the province in many such groups. They sang bhajans and kirtans as they went along, holding meetings in each village on their way to propagate swaraj. Although such processions were ostensibly in honour of Hindu deities, they were sufficiently incorporative to include nationalist politicians such as Gandhi and the Ali brothers. They were not seen as communally divisive, being popular celebrations in which people of all classes and religions participated.
In Gujarat and Bombay, early-morning processions – mainly of women – wound through towns and cities singing religious-cum-nationalist songs, both Hindu and Islamic. Previously such pre-dawn processions – known as prabhat pheris – had featured only religious hymns, now a nationalist content was injected into them. In Medinipur in Bengal, purely religious songs were sung to maintain solidarity when officials came to collect tax or distrain property in lieu of tax. One official reported that he felt so intimidated by the strength of feeling expressed in such a performance that he left the villages without taking the intended action.
This excerpt from David Hardiman’s ‘Noncooperation in India’ has been published with permission from Westland Books.