I was woke decades before the term was coined. My default worldview is liberal. I have a resting detached face.
I was called a “pseudo secularist/communist” to my face in 1992 by many in the right-wing universe in Delhi.
Once K R Malkani, a journalist, historian and leading light of what is now broadly called the Hindutva world, whom I knew very well, said in reply to a question in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, “Oh, you are one of those?”
“One of what?” I asked fully aware what his drift was.
“You know, pseudo-secularist,” Malkani said with an amiable smile.
“By that logic, you are a right-wing fundamentalist,” I replied.
We knew each other enough to understand that it was not a serious exchange. We both laughed.
I offer this as a backdrop to how I view the pretty silly debate over the replacement of ‘Abide with me’, a hymn that Gandhi liked and which has been traditionally played as part of the Beating Retreat ceremony after the celebration of India’s Republic Day on January 26. The hymn has been replaced by an enduring Hindi song ‘Aye Mere Watan ke Logon’, sung by Lata Mangeshkar. It was written by Kavi Pradeep and composed by C. Ramchandra.
Some on the left-liberal/woke side of the ideological debate view the forsaking of ‘Abide with Me’ with ‘Aye Mere Watan ke Logon’ as yet another illustration of the rise of Hindu nationalism. That is rather silly.
Let me remind them that the song was written by Pradeep specially to commemorate the memory of Indian soldiers who died in the 1962 Sino-Indian war. It was first performed by Lata Mangeshkar on January 26, 1963, to an audience that consisted of India’s President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
After the performance, as Mangeshkar was being introduced to Nehru, he said he was moved to tears by the song. The well-known film critic and writer Subhash K. Jha wrote an interesting story about the song based on an interview with Mangeshkar for the National Herald newspaper on August 15, 2018. Incidentally, the National Herald is the Indian National Congress Party's mouthpiece.
The idea that ‘Aye Mere Watan ke Logon’ heralds a specious kind of nationalism in the current times is absurd.
A song that has been famously chronicled as having moved Nehru to tears has suddenly become a symbol of the current right-wing nationalism. It is embarrassing. If there are those in the woke crowd who hold this view—and I suspect many do—they need to breathe well, eat a couple of vada paus and brush up their knowledge of history.
Read Subhash K Jha’s interview with Lata Mangeshkar on the subject here in the National Herald, a paper founded by Nehru in 1938.
