India’s enduring patriotic songs: When music becomes the nation’s memory

Picture this scene from the 1957 classic Pyaasa: Guru Dutt’s character Vijay, drunk and dejected, wanders through the narrow lanes of a red-light district.

The mood suddenly shifts from personal despair to sharp social critique through Sahir Ludhianvi’s powerful words “Jinhe naaz hain Hind par wo kahan hain” (Where are those who were proud of India?). The song contrasts the newly independent nation’s grand promises with harsh realities like prostitution and poverty.

It’s a piece of writing imbued with a sense of patriotism that is introspective. Instead, it survived merely as social commentary. Why? What separates such songs from those that become lasting patriotic anthems?

The missing elements

A year later, Sahir’s lyrics were tried again in Phir Subah Hogi (1958). Raj Kapoor walks through Bombay’s streets singing about how the rich have grabbed all the buildings while the poor sleep on pavements: “Jitni bhi buildingein thi, sethon ne baant li hain/ footpath Bombay ke hain aashiyan hamara/Chino-Arab hamara, Hindustan hamara/ rehne ko ghar nahi hain, saara jahan hamara” (All the buildings have been divided up among the rich merchants, the pavements of Bombay are our home. China and Arab are ours, India is ours, we don’t have a house to live in, all the world is ours).

The song took a dig at India’s grand international ambitions (referencing China and Arab nations) while people at home lacked basic shelter. It was a potshot at Nehruvian India’s worldview and illusions of development.

Sahir’s comment on unequal living conditions could also be seen as a spillover of his links to the left-leaning Progressive Writers Association (PWA). But its political messaging was ironic in the sense that even the socialist thrust of the governing Congress then wasn’t leftward enough for the political left of the time to embrace. 

Only three years earlier, in the Avadi session of the party in 1955, Congress adopted the attainment of a “socialistic pattern of society” as one of its goals, and its imprint was visible in how Nehru directed the second five-year plan (1956-61). The reference to “Chino-Arab” in the song was seen as a subtle dig at the lofty ideals of anti-colonial solidarity of Asian and African countries which India embraced at the Bandung Conference of 1955. Such attempts at internationalism were juxtaposed against the realities of poverty and deprivation back home in India. There is also a view that the song’s lead line “Chino-Arab” is a cheeky take on Allama Iqbal’s use of the expression in his poem “Taraane-e-Milli”.

The two missing elements in these specimens of introspective patriotism, however, were: a strong sense of belonging and an unalloyed sense of a national community. That partly explains why they were received as political statements rather than expressions of the overarching national purpose and its ethos. 

It wasn’t the critical tone of these songs that dimmed their patriotic appeal; their undoing could be found in the pre-conditions of socio-economic scrutiny set for loving and taking pride as citizens of the national territory. A deeper connection could be placed only in a pull beyond the demands of their everyday life. This entailed an unconditional acceptance, warts and all.

Unconditional belonging, shared sacrifice

In many ways, this appeal was rooted in seeing oneself as part of the imagined community – to borrow a phrase from political thinker Benedict Anderson – which forms the broader terms of nationalist engagement. The social and political register of the material conditions of life weren’t a useful frame for grasping what went into the making of the national identity and its themes. Its starting point could be seen in the common ground of some sense of belonging, or what Roger Scruton would have called a “shared public realm of mutual loyalty”.

With this premise, it was even willing to look at its flaws, challenges, and anxieties – even confront its misery. In Jagriti (1954), for instance, the early years after Independence saw Kavi Pradeep alerting the post-Independence generation of Indians to the dangers that lay ahead for the country in the emerging world order: “Hum laye hain toofan se kashti nikal ke, iss desh ko rakhna mere bachon sambhal ke” (We have navigated the boat out of the storm, my children, take care of the country). 

But, the most enduring patriotic songs drew on another vital constituent of the national being: a sense of territoriality, its defence, and the crisis of the security of land and people.

The other markers of national community may be abstract – historical, cultural, linguistic, or ethnic – but it is in the sense of territoriality that it gets a concrete form. No wonder that territorial defence and threats to its security are the most potent unifiers, and infuse the strongest sense of nationhood in patriotic songs. The bruised national morale following India's defeat in the 1962 Indo-China War, the casualties suffered and sacrifices made by the armed forces in the war, found its catharsis in two of the most iconic patriotic numbers. Within a few months after India was inflicted with humiliation, the sense of loss was accompanied by the need to honour those who perished in the fight to defend borders. In what has endured as the most lasting non-film track in the country’s memory, in early 1963 Kavi Pradeep’s “Aae mere watan ke logon, jara aankh mein bhar lo paani, jo shaheed hue hain, unki jara yaad karo qurbani” (O, the people of my country, with moist eyes, remember the sacrifices of the martyrs)  evoked the urgency of territorial defence, through the sacrifices made by forces on the Indo-China border.

A year later, the war film Haqeeqat (1964) saw Kaifi Azmi’s poignant farewell note from fallen soldiers to the country, urging compatriots to carry on defending the nation: “Kar chale hum fida jaan-o-tan saathiyon, ab tumhare hawale watan saathiyon” (We have sacrificed our lives and bodies; now the country is entrusted to you, my friends).

Kaifi’s song has endured as one of the most lingering lyrical statements of the nation’s territorial defence. The same year saw Dilip Kumar in Leader (1964) enacting Shakeel Badayuni’s lyrical call for protecting the newly won freedom from foreign ploys and deception, an oblique reference to the cost of trusting China: “Ek dhoka kha chuke hain, aur kha sakte nahi, apni azadi ko hum hargiz mita sakte nahi” (We have been deceived once; we can’t afford another deception/We can’t let our freedom be erased).

Besides the theme of national defence, the infusion of development goals as a patriotic project also found its way earlier in the decade. As India entered the 1960s, Ram Mukherjee’s Hum Hindustani (1960) reflected on the Nehruvian project of industrialisation for keeping pace with a rapidly changing world. Prem Dhawan’s popular lyrics for the song have a visual collage of the country’s landscape marked by dams, power grids, heavy machinery, roads, and modern transportation. The song “Chhodo kal ki baatein, kal ki baat purani, naye daur mein likhenge milkar nayi kahani, hum Hindustani” (Leave the past behind; let go of old stories. In the new age, we will together write new stories – we are Indians) could easily be the theme song of Nehruvian India’s model of economic nationalism.

By the mid-1960s, the foodgrain crisis and the subsequent national response of the green revolution saw farmers sharing space with the soldier as symbols of the national cause – expressed in the then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s evocative phrase “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan”. A year after Shastri’s death, Manoj Kumar’s Upkar (1967) was pitched as a tribute to the late PM’s clarion call, and the film registered the return of the farmer in the country’s economic imagination. In some ways, it was a periodic modification of priorities seen in the Nehruvian project of industry-led modernisation. Gulshan Bawra’s song for the film marked this, extolling the soil and soil-tiller: “Mere desh ki dharti sona ugle, ugle heere-moti” (My country’s soil yields gold; it yields pearls and diamonds). 

In later decades, however, the theme of territorial defence returned to patriotic lyrics as dangers posed by cross-border terrorism threatened the nation-state and its sovereignty. Mani Ratnam’s Roja (1992), set against the backdrop of terror-inflicted Jammu and Kashmir, in its Hindi version had P K Mishra’s lyrics evoking the love and glory for the country: “Bharat humko jaan se pyara hai/sabse nyara gulistan hamara hai” (India is dearer to us than life itself; ours is the most unique garden).

But, the clear call for vigilance against the danger posed by cross-border terror and the call for a sense of urgency in defending the country came later in the decade.

In Sarfarosh (1999), Israr Ansari’s words clearly alert the citizens to the national security crisis brought by cross-border terror, and call for firm territorial defence: “Zindagi maut na ban jaye, sambhalo yaaro / kho raha chain-o-aman, mushkil mein hai watan” (Let life not turn into death; beware, my friends/The country is losing peace and is facing crisis). This form of alertness to external threats, from state as well as non-state actors in a proxy war, has continued to be a staple theme of patriotic numbers for more than three decades now.

In a different frame, as discussed earlier, there has been limited appeal of songs steeped in the self-righteousness of civic nationalism. Of late, there have been attempts to infuse some form of constitutional patriotism – to use Jürgen Habermas’ phrase – in popular music, mostly politically charged and an extension of agitation and protest mobilisation. They haven’t made much headway in the patriotic playlist because of a number of reasons. But, one reason could be found in a severe limitation that is inherent in the idea of constitutionality as a unifier. “It does not provide the kind of political identity that nationality provides. In particular, it does not explain why the boundaries of the political community should fall here rather than there; nor does it give you any sense of the historical identity of the community – the links that bind present-day politics to decisions made and actions performed in the past,” remarks political theorist David Miller.

That may perhaps explain why one form of patriotic invocation endures in the national playlist for long, and the other has to be viewed as mere social notes on the life of the nation.

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