Gohinganger Nayia- MUSIC &LYric Jasim Uddin Singer: Abdul Hadi www.jasimuddin.org video

Jasim Uddin writes: In these swift-measure songs the tunes themselves are universally easy to understand. Because the words are predominant, a foreigner who does not know the language cannot enjoy them for very long at a stretch; but the tunes can be adopted go from country to country. In the long measured songs, on the other hand, the cadences are half-curved, long-curved, rounded, quarter-curved and full-curved. Where European tunes run in straight lines the tunes of East Bengal flow in curve's. The tune, not the words, is the main thing, and so those long-measure songs can be understood by a foreigner; only he has to train his ear to their simple cadences. One thins is worth remarking here. I have heard these songs sung to European audiences by our best singers, and although the audience liked them in a way, they could not enjoy them with full understanding. And yet when a European gave his own rendering of them, though he left our something that a Bengali ear would want, the European audience responded with full enthusiasm. In the same way, it is easier for me to enjoy songs, a European ear might find the rendering of which imperfect. Just as literature has to be slightly changed in translation, and only then it will yield its beauty to the foreign reader, so it appears tunes may be translated into foreign idiom. One thins is worth remarking here. I have heard these songs sung to European audiences by our best singers, and although the audience liked them in a way, they could not enjoy them with full understanding. And yet when a European gave his own rendering of them, though he left our something that a Bengali ear would want, the European audience responded with full enthusiasm. In the same way, it is easier for me to enjoy songs, a European ear might find the rendering of which imperfect. Just as literature has to be slightly changed in translation, and only then it will yield its beauty to the foreign reader, so it appears tunes may be translated into foreign idiom. Beutiful East Bengal, in song they invoke their God Our country of East Bengal is very beautiful. So many poets-many makers of tunes, are lying under the shade of the trees, under the roofs of the farmers' broken-down cottages, in the depth of the forest, in the shadowy corners of the jute fields, in a thousand moods and a thousand postures to paint the hopes and aspirations, the sorrows and the happiness of the land. There is not a single village where there is not a poet-not a single little community without its singer; and their songs pour forth incessantly as the bird-music echoes in the breeze. East Bengal is a country of rivers. Like tendrils of a creeper, or like the ornaments hanging on a woman's limbs, the sweeping curves and half curves and straight lines of innumerable Rivers have traced a network over fields. The rivers like beloved neighbours stretch our their rippling throats and sing the accomplishment to our country songs. The songs of the countryside are the voice of the river. Who is he, the unknown, unvisible maker of the village tunes, stroking the rivers with his soft-fingered wavy-hands as a player strokes the strings of an instrument, creating the many-coloured songs of Bengal in the batiali tunes. There is no village where the river is not .within two miles. For more than six months of the year the floods are out, and, in the rainy. season there is no work to be done. The cultivators fill up their leisure with an endless variety of folk-songs, and singing parities tour by boat from village to village. In this season number of people take to their boats and ferry goods from place to place, from one country to another. Far away from kith and kin they sail their boats down the swift wild waterways; before them are the everlasting waves, above them is the vast limitless sky. Subconsciously they are filled with the mystery of the eternal, and a thousand questions rise in their minds. The everlasting waters become the a path of life, and the small boat is the man's own life as he floats on his endless journey. As the river changes, so do the tunes change that rise to his lips. Here he is launching his boat with a song