Gagan Harkara

rdf:langString Gagan Harkara

rdf:langString Gaganchandra Dam

rdf:langString Gaganchandra Dam

rdf:langString right

rdf:langString Gaganchandra Dam

rdf:langString গগনচন্দ্র দাম

rdf:langString

rdf:langString composer

rdf:langString Poet

rdf:langString postman

rdf:langString He is lost to me and I seek him wandering from land to land.

rdf:langString I am listless for that moonrise of beauty,

rdf:langString Where shall I meet him, the Man of my Heart?

rdf:langString in gladness of heart.

rdf:langString which I long to see in the fullness of vision

rdf:langString which is to light my life,

rdf:langString — "Ami Kothay Pabo Tare", Gagan Harkara

rdf:langString In the same village I came into touch with some Baul singers. I had known them by their names, occasionally seen them singing and begging in the street, and so passed them by, vaguely classifying them in my mind under the general name of Vairagis, or ascetics. The time came when I had occasion to meet with some members of the same body and talk to them about spiritual matters. The first Baul song, which I chanced to hear with any attention, profoundly stirred my mind. Its words are so simple that it makes me hesitate to render them in a foreign tongue, and set them forward for critical observation. Besides, the best part of a song is missed when the tune is absent; for thereby its movement and its colour are lost, and it becomes like a butterfly whose wings have been plucked. The first line may be translated thus: 'Where shall I meet him, the Man of my Heart?' This phrase, 'the Man of my Heart,' is not peculiar to this song, but is usual with the Baul sect. It means that, for me, the supreme truth of all existence is in the revelation of the Infinite in my own humanity. 'The Man of my Heart,' to the Baul, is like a divine instrument perfectly tuned. He gives expression to infinite truth in the music of life. And the longing for the truth which is in us, which we have not yet realised, breaks out in the "Ami Kothay Pabo Tare". The name of the poet who wrote this song was Gagan. He was almost illiterate; and the ideas he received from his Baul teacher found no distraction from the self-consciousness of the modern age. He was a village postman, earning about ten shillings a month, and he died before he had completed his teens. The sentiment, to which he gave such intensity of expression, is common to most of the songs of his sect. And it is a sect, almost exclusively confined to that lower floor of society, where the light of modern education hardly finds an entrance, while wealth and respectability shun its utter indigence. In the song I have translated above, the longing of the singer to realize the infinite in his own personality is expressed. This has to be done daily by its perfect expression in life, in love. For the personal expression of life, in its perfection, is love; just as the personal expression of truth in its perfection is beauty.

rdf:langString Gaganchandra Dam (Bengali: গগনচন্দ্র দাম; 1845–1910), mostly known as Gagan Harkara (Bengali: গগন হরকরা), was a Bengali Baul poet after the tune of whose famous song "Ami Kothay Pabo Tare" (কোথায় পাবো তারে) Rabindranath Tagore composed "Amar Shonar Bangla", the national anthem of Bangladesh. In 1975 Bangladeshi pundit Ashraf Al Minar claimed that Rabindranath Tagore copied Gagan Harkara's works.

rdf:langString Gaganchandra Dam