Music alone shall live

In school there was a Round Song, which went like this: All things shall perish from under the sky. Music alone shall live, never shall die.

A Round can be described as a musical composition with a limited canon in which multiple voices take up the same melody while starting it at different times and yet managing to achieve a perfectly harmonious blend.

With Republic Day and Sarvodaya Day occurring in January, one cannot help but speculate about what Mahatma Gandhi might have thought about the lines of the above Rounder. He would probably have added one word, which would be religious music never shall die. For Gandhi, the art form that appealed the most was music with a religious bent to it.

While the Mahatma was deeply invested in the religion that he was born into, his heart was of a secular nature, which wished to take the good and the best from all the religions of the world. He observed, “Though I am a Hindu, or even because I am a devout Hindu, I have no difficulty in appreciating the hymns of other religions.”

Hence it is no surprise that he was drawn to Christian music, and his interest in it continued till the end of his life. This is why, on commemorative occasions for the Mahatma, hymns like Abide with
Me, Lead Kindly Light, and Nearer My God to Thee, regularly figure.

While a prisoner at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, Gandhi requested for a Christian hymnbook. He later wrote to a Quaker friend that whenever he was in “the midst of a raging fire,” he often fell back on humming the hymn, Rock of Ages. He also wrote elsewhere, “Having had intimate contact with many Christians, I came to appreciate some of the hymns even as a youngster.” This thought will likely resonate with many Indians who were exposed to these hymns taught in Christian institutions and learnt to appreciate them, as they sang them on several occasions.

Gandhi elaborated that among the Christian hymns, Lead Kindly Light, written by Cardinal John Henry Newman in 1833, held the greatest appeal, especially these lines from the first stanza, Keep Thou my Feet/I do not ask to see/The distant scene/One step enough for me.

The one step enough for me almost became a mantra for the Mahatma. He suggested to those around him to also meditate on the words of this hymn, which Gandhians who try to emulate his philosophy follow to this day. 

The hymn assumed a special space in the Ashram’s prayers, with Hindu, Muslim, and Christian supporters of the independence movement singing the hymn either in English or in the Gujarati translation, Premal Jyoti (the Light of Love), every Friday evening, “the day of Jesus’ crucifixion,” as explained by Gandhi. From 1916, until a month before his passing, the Mahatma referred regularly to Lead Kindly Light in his writings. This hymn appears around 70 times in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.

It’s clear that Newman’s hymn played a definitive role in the philosophical underpinnings of the Satyagraha movement while revealing Gandhi’s commitment to religious pluralism.

Gandhi had other favourite hymns that were from Kabir, Tulsidas, Surdas, Tagore, and verses from the Gita and the Upanishads. He revealed that nothing elated him so much as “the music of the Gita or the Ramayana by Tulsidas.” Among his special favourites, of course, were Narsinh Mehta’s Vaishnava Janato Tene Kahiye Je and Raghupathi Raghava Rajaram, both of which were sung daily at Gandhi’s prayer meetings and reverberate in Gandhian Ashrams even today.

In the last few years, the controversy over “Ishwar Allah,” not being part of the original Ram Dhun, keeps raising its hydra head, but Gandhi had a purpose in opting for this version, keeping in mind the idea of a secular India that had space for people of all religions.

In the past few years, another of Gandhi’s favourite hymns, Abide with Me, has been axed from the Beating the Retreat ceremony on account of its link with India’s colonial past. If that be the case, why not remove the colonial anachronisms like gubernatorial posts and all the cruel, archaic British laws related to sedition, cleverly packaged with unpronounceable names, especially for states south of the Vindhyas?

But at the heart of all this pettiness is probably the awareness that both Abide With Me and the idea of Gandhi will abide and “never shall die.”

(The author is an independent writer)