Listen to the call

While editing the anthology of Great English short stories, Christopher Isherwood defined Great Short Stories as such “There are plenty of excellent stories which are just stories…… you can retell such a story to your friends and it will lose little in retelling, provided that you remember all the important details and get them in the right order. But you can never adequately retell in other words a story which is part of a world, because, in such a story every sentence does something to help create the sound of the characters’ voice, the smell of the atmosphere, the feel of the setting.” No wonder, I would borrow the similar words from Isherwood to define the greatness of many of the songs of legendary late Dr. Bhupen Hazarika.
It will not be an overstatement that to appreciate Assam in totality from the forties to the late nineties of the last century, one need not go far beyond the songs of Dr. Hazarika (sans a handful of  songs which shows that even Dr. Hazarika had some human flaws) . His songs had an inherent message for the society, yearning to embrace humanity and universal brotherhood. A genius of Dr Hazarika’s stature is a rarity. An ardent fan of Bhupenda,  Arup Bhattacharjee of Digboi has rightly mentioned at the facebook that "we are indeed fortunate to proclaim to our future generation that we lived together with a legend." The emotional outpouring of the people of Assam at the aftermath of Bhupenda’s demise is understandable. For a person like me who don’t understand the finer points of music, it’s the lyrics, the mesmerizing words of the songs of Bhupen Hazarika, which attract me much. Whenever I listen to the song “ Etukura alasua megh bhahee jaai” ( A soft piece of cloud floats around), my memories go back to the childhood days in my ancestral village where we used to see the vast stretch of the blue autumn sky meeting the earth at the far horizon with occasional soft cloud floating around. During monsoon, the same sky wears the look of a weird creation of an unmindful painter and all of a sudden starts pouring heavily with a whistling sound as composed by Hazarika “ Hoo hoo Dhumuha aheeleo”. I have never come across a better portraying of the intense moments of a couple engrossed in love than Hazarika’s song “Paridhibihin sangammukhi nirmal duti oouth, kampan kator”( a pair of unbounded  lips at the verge of confluence ,  begging each other).
Like the rest of the country, we also convened a “ Shradhyanjali” programme at Digboi Club. Coming back, I was sitting at the front verandah of my home recollecting the speeches. Today all of us talk of building memorials for Bhupeda, preserving his songs for our future generation and  for Bharat Ratna. Such emotional outpour of the Assamese people makes me rather worried. During the Assam agitation, similar emotional eruption only saw our society becoming further fragmented. While trying to impose Assamese language, we lost out our tribal brethren who considered it to be yet another invasion into their culture and languages.  The emotion generated at the demise of Dr. Hazarika will also pass out faster and no memorials will keep him alive for our future generations until and unless we don’t learn how to preserve us, our culture and literature. It will be a test of character for each of us to help our English educated future generation, who can see only a tiny portion of the smoke covered city sky, to help correlate to the world of Bhupenda and his songs. Its true that time is a great leveller and change is the essence of life. Today  Shakespeare fails to enthuse the new generation of British Kids the way it did once. Within a century, Tagore has lost much of his relevance in our nearby Bengal. In Assam, Dr. Bhupen Hazarika  and his songs may even fade much faster than Tagore and Shakespeare. History is the testimony of our amnesic attitude towards the noble sons and daughters of the past.
I remember one program we hosted  at our Digboi Club amongst our children. They were shown a picture and asked to write a story out of it. While going through their stories, I was saddened to find most of them imagined themselves to be in far away land like Chicago, Scotland, Canada or Miami and never Assam or India. The children are not to be blamed for this. There is very little space for their native land in  the rhymes they sing at the kindergarten or in  the books they read in their adolescence. Many of us still suffer from the colonial hangover and always ready to prostrate before anything from the west. Our culture, our history, our values and ethos are missing to a large extent in the curriculum of our English educated students. While our children continue to miss the advantages of being educated in their mother tongue, the need of the hour is to INDIANIZE the English education imparted to our children.  The emergence of many promising Indian authors in English language is indeed a positive aspect, yet we failed to carry on the reverberations created by the Amar Chitra Katha series from the visionary Late Anant Pai.  We need many more Enid Blytons and Mark Twains in India for our young generation. The child literature will have to play the most important role in building the destiny of our 5000 year old civilization and this great country. If we fail to  awaken the pride for our country in the hearts of the millions of youngsters, this nation will continue to miss legends like Dr Bhupen Hazarika and only produce commoners to fill the BPO centres.
Dear Chetan Bhagat and Co, are you listening to the call!

Kamaljit, Barauni, 17th Nov,2011

You can contact Kamaljit at kamaljitmedhi1975@gmail.com