Rabīndrasaṅgīt (Rabindra Sangeet) is a genre of Bengali song created by Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur (Tagore, 1861–1941), the poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. He wrote both the words and the tunes of more than two thousand songs. The genre, which includes India’s national anthem, is at the heart of Bengali musical life. It draws on Hindustani rāgas, Bāul and kīrtan, and Western music, and the poetry matters as much as the melody.

Śrī Śāntidēb Ghōṣ is a well-known name among singers and students of Rabīndrasaṅgīt. He taught at Śāntiniketan, learned many of the songs directly from Gurudēb and his grand-nephew Dinēndranāth, and wrote extensively about them. Rabīndrasaṅgīt Bicitrā, first published by Ānanda Publishers in July 1954, collects essays written at the urging of readers and magazine editors. A scanned copy of this 264-page book is available online.

This review focuses on Rabīndrasaṅgīt, and on what the book says about it. I look at how these songs were composed, learned and sung, and what a student of any tradition can take from the book.

The book itself is wider than the songs. Its seventeen essays and a closing index of first lines, the Nirdēśikā, cover Gurudēb’s thoughts on music; Western and Hindustani influence on Bengali life and on his songs; the speech-like and dramatic songs of his early musical plays; the structure of his songs; the influence of Bengali song, rāga-rāgiṇī, village culture, Bāul and ṭhumrī; the listener’s view of Rabīndrasaṅgīt; a personal memoir of Gurudēb; and the growth of his dance-dramas, with a separate essay on Tapatī. Since this article is about Rabīndrasaṅgīt, I leave the dance-dramas aside except where they bear on the songs. Please note that the essays are mentioned here only in broad strokes. This is an overview and not a meticulous, chapter-by-chapter study.

The first essay lets Gurudēb speak for himself. He recalls the Hindustani training given at home by Viṣṇu Cakravartī, and argues that in Bengal music has always sat beside the word and never apart from it, finding his proof in kīrtan. Another essay sketches the background. From the later eighteenth century, Hindustani ustāds came to Bengal at the invitation of wealthy patrons, with centres at Bishnupur, Kṛṣṇanagar, Bardhamān and Calcutta, where Sourīndramohan Ṭhākur and the court of Nawab Wājid Ālī Śāh at Metiābruj were especially active. This is the soil from which Rabīndrasaṅgīt grew.

A chapter pairing Gurudēb with Paṇḍit Viṣṇunārāyaṇ Bhātkhaṇḍe will interest anyone who knows the Carnatic mēḷakartā scheme. Ghōṣ credits Bhātkhaṇḍe with replacing the old system of six rāgas and thirty-six rāgiṇīs by ten thāṭs, and with drawing attention to sandhiprakāś rāgas, those sung at the junction of day and night. Ghōṣ sees this as an answer to a challenge Gurudēb set musicologists in his 1881 lecture, to explain why particular rāgas evoke particular feelings, such as Pūrvī evening and Bhairav dawn.

Two essays on Gurudēb’s first musical drama, Vālmīki-Pratibhā (1881), show a young composer testing the limits of rāga. Gurudēb felt that rāga music could not follow changing, flowing emotion as poetry does, so he set dialogue in a speech-like style. He drew on Hindustani rāgas and even an English tune, and he let the tune imitate the feeling: sobs (“u, u”) are written into a song in Gaurī, and laughter (“hā hā”) into songs in Pīlu and Kānaḍā, while the dacoits’ joyful songs use Khambāj and Iman Kalyāṇ. He also argued that tāla may quicken or slow with the emotion, and need not be held steady throughout. A Carnatic reader will see how consciously melody and sāhitya were shaped together.

For a Carnatic student, the most useful essay may be on kali-bibhāg, the division of a song into stanzas. Ghōṣ shows that Hindustani dhrupad usually has four sections (sthāyī, antarā, sañcārī, ābhoga), while khayāl, ṭappā and ṭhumrī have two, as do Bengali folk song and kīrtan. The largest number of Gurudēb’s songs follow the four-section dhrupad plan, but he also devised new arrangements, such as a five-section song in Bhīmpalaśrī and ektāl, with two antarās. One naturally thinks of pallavi, anupallavi and caraṇa, and notices how each tradition decides how a melody returns.

The Bāul essay takes us to Śilāidaha, where Gurudēb recalls a Bāul singing “Kōthāy pābō tārē, āmār manēr mānuṣ jē rē” to the ektārā. It records his own statement that he took Bāul tunes into many songs, and that in others Bāul melody met rāga without his planning it. The ṭhumrī essay offers notated examples and early authorities. Both show how folk and light-classical currents run beneath the classical ones in Rabīndrasaṅgīt.

The most practical pages describe how the songs were taught. In his memoir of Gurudēb and the essay Rabīndrasaṅgīt Samīkṣā, Ghōṣ recalls group classes at Śāntiniketan, Gurudēb or Dinēndranāth singing and the students repeating, and marks for the tune and tāla written on paper as an aid to memory. Once, to make learning easier, Gurudēb wrote out the songs of a dance-drama in order in a notebook for him. This is close to the guru–śiṣya method known in the South. Singers from outside Bengal, such as the Maharashtrian scholar Bhīmarāo Śāstrī, learned and taught the songs. Ghōṣ also notes that early recording artists often sang to their own tunes, until Gurudēb required that singers learn the tune correctly first.

I found the discussion of who may sing what especially interesting. Many songs voice a woman’s feeling, yet are sung by men, as in Carnatic padams. Ghōṣ argues that what matters is whether the song’s feeling is expressed faithfully, and recalls Gurudēb himself singing a Rādhā’s song of separation with deep emotion even in old age.

The book ends with the Nirdēśikā, an index of every song and poem mentioned, added in the second edition. This article touches only a fraction of the book, and I request scholars and fellow musicians to offer their comments and further insights.