Bonding with the Lord by Jyotirmaya Tripathy;Uwe Skoda;

Author:Jyotirmaya Tripathy;Uwe Skoda;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

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CONTEMPORARY BANGLA SONGS ON JAGANNATH: A HERMENEUTIC FOR BHAKTI AND COMMUNITY OF BHAKTAS

Sreejit Datta

Introduction

The fact that most search results for the keyword ‘Jagannath bhajan’ return Odia songs and/or music videos—except for a mere two to three Bangla and Hindi songs and music videos—on both YouTube and Google, gives one considerable ground to think that the phrase exclusively implies an Odia subgenre of the ‘bhajan’, which is the most well-known Indic genre of devotional music. ‘Indic genre’ means that bhajan refers to a specific form of Hindu/Jain/Buddhist/Sikh devotional music. The word ‘bhajan’ itself is a generic term, used across several modern Indo-Aryan languages like Punjabi, Bengali, Odia, Gujarati, Hindi, etc. because it encapsulates various subcategories of Indic devotional music, such as kirtan, shabad and agomoni and several others which have locally flourished all over the Indian Subcontinent but not in complete isolation from each other. The word is derived from Sanskrit word ‘bhajana’ which is a noun denoting actions such as worshipping, chanting and singing praises to some form of the Divinity or other. This array of connotations of the word has been retained in the various modern Indo-Aryan languages, with only slight alterations in the pronunciation of the word across such languages; although in most cases bhajan would denote the contracted sense that is ‘devotional music’ when it is uttered in our contemporary popular contexts.

The scenario of devotional music in the Bangla language has undergone a sea change both in terms of quality and quantity in the last two decades. With the advent of digital technology in music production and dissemination a decade earlier (the first compact disc or CD player was launched in India in the year 1989 [Vasuki 1989]) in the Indian market and with the digital techniques starting to replace the previous analogue techniques in a wholesale manner for both producers and consumers of music in the country from around the year 2000, the quantity of Bangla devotional music has seen a sharp rise in its volume. However, in terms of quality, the songs, barring a few exceptions here and there, have failed to make any lasting impact in the minds of music connoisseurs/critics and the general audience alike. The same observations apply to Bangla songs devoted to Jagannath, which constitute a subset of the vast corpus of Bangla devotional music.

This shift in music production as well as dissemination techniques help us distinguish two (almost) clearly-defined periods in considering the songs composed on Jagannath-bhakti. It is rather difficult to associate these songs, which provide some form of expression to the devotional fervour of many Bengali supplicants (and even the non-Bengali ones on certain occasions), to any one particular sect or, as is frequently called, ‘cult’. As such, unlike in Odisha, there has been a conspicuous absence of a ‘Jagannath cult’ in Bengal despite the strong devotional fervour displayed by an average Bengali devotee of Jagannath. The chief reason for this is the blurring away of rigid sectarian identities (like Shaivite, Shakta or Vaishnavite) in the Bengali Hindu

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