It was Rabindra Sangeet that helped an unlikely meeting among us, not in person though. In fact I never met Anisur Rahman, a great disciple of Rabindranath Tagore. I owe a great deal to Shabnam Ferdousi’s documentary “Bhubon Bhora Sur”, aired on Desh TV probably in 2009, for our totally unexpected meeting.
The protagonist of that documentary, a man of 75 years of age at that time, drew my full attention when he broke into “Olympian Laughter” just after saying that he deserves to be 27 at the beginning of the interview. I was glued to the screen immediately after the first song he sang - Ogo Pothero Sathi, Nomi Barongbar (Oh companion of my journey, I salute thee). The voice completely enchanted me. Actually, I did not hear anything like that sincere voice from any Bangladeshi singer except that of great Kalim Sharafi.
I was immersed in his rendition of Rabindra Sangeet, so much that I almost forgot about his other identities, like he was an economist, who had a doctorate degree on economic disparity on two wings of Pakistan, a very good student-friendly teacher at Dhaka University, a remarkably sensible member of the first planning commission of Bangladesh, a Harvard scholar who has made significant contributions in economics as a discipline. Some of those were mentioned in the documentary though.
For me, it was all about music and the love of a disciple of Rabindranath to the great poet and musician. A disciple who, I felt, uttered every word of the poet considering them as the Truth.
I started searching his books and found some but at that time I was more interested in his identity as Rabindra Sangeet singer rather than his other roles. So I started reading “Asimer Spondo (Vibrations of the Infinite)”.
I was awe-struck when I came across sentences like, if I paraphrase here, never try to sing a song; rather, just feel the music; music is vibrating in everything of the world, just feel that and let that music enter you through every side and flow out through your consciousness.
Elaborating on his art of singing, he said, never try to sing through your voice, the songs will be like a dead leaf. Instead, feel the music in your abdomen and render that feeling; try to sing from there.
Dwelling on intertwined nature of music and words of Rabindra Sangeet and human emotions, he, in the documentary Bhubon Bhora Sur, while analysing “Ami choncholo Hey, Ami Sudurero Piyasi”, elaborated how the rhythm of the music fades into the faraway when the corresponding words are “Ogo Sudur Bipulo Sudur, Tumi Je Bajao Byakulo Bansuri”. It was truly a revealing experience for me hearing him explaining the intricacies. It was an epiphanic moment.
Maybe most, if not all, of the singers and musicians feel music that way but I did not see many explaining this with such a grand authority over the art.
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Anisur Rahman was born in 1933 and passed away last week. His father Hafizur Rahman was among the first batch of students of the Economics Department at Dhaka University in 1921. Anisur Rahman aspired to study at the English Department but his father wanted him to follow in his footsteps. Maybe ultimately the decision was proved to be right, otherwise Bangladesh would not have seen such a sensitive and creative economist and a student-friendly scholarly teacher.
But Anisur Rahman was by no means a person who would pass his days in reading only. He was an all-rounder, excelling in studies, cultural activities and sports. He was also elected as the vice-president of Fazlul Haque Hall unit of East Pakistan Students’ Union. But that did not lead him towards politics. Instead, he dedicated himself to becoming a Rabindra Sangeet singer.
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When this sincere disciple of Rabindranath Tagore thought about economics, he was an utterly different person, in the sense that he did not have any allegiance to any particular approach or school of thought or his academic training he received as student. Instead, he himself carved out an approach - “self-assured growth” or people’s self-development through an essay in 1968, where he talked about people’s direct involvement with development activities. The approach sounds like Participatory Action Research (PAR), which had not come into the intellectual horizon then.
According to him, “A central concept in people’s self-development is the primacy of human dignity.” Despite considering Amartya Sen’s concepts of “entitlement” and “capability” as very good approaches, he used to talk about “liberation of people’s creative energy” in the field of economics. Thinking along such a people-centric and democratic track was not so sudden for him.
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After completing his BA and MA in Economics at Dhaka University, Anisur Rahman went to Harvard for his PhD. His doctoral thesis was on the economic disparity between the two wings of Pakistan. The thesis title was “Regional Allocation of investment”. “Our Debt to Four Professors”, a book by S Nazrul Islam states, “The prevailing theory at that time, shared by the Harvard Advisory Group (HAG), was that the economy of West Pakistan was more productive and so more investment directed to West Pakistan will yield higher growth and will even benefit East Pakistan more through spillover effects…. Anis, however, had the insightful observation that, even if the productivity of capital in East Pakistan was lower, the savings rate in East Pakistan was higher, once the economic surplus extracted and transferred from East Pakistan was taken into account. He, therefore, reached the idea that in a dynamic setting and given sufficient time, more investment in East Pakistan will yield a higher growth rate for Pakistan as a whole.”
His going against the current was also nothing new. As a pro-people economist, he spoke about people’s self-assured development, by which he meant, “a nation is prepared to dispense with external assistance rather than to submit to donors’ dictates.”
Recalling his days as a member of Bangladesh’s first planning commission, this “most emotionally involved member”, in the words of Rehman Sobhan, said during that time he learnt two great lessons. “One was the utter inadequacy of our professional training as economists to suggest a viable path for the country’s development. The other was that the best promise for development lay with the initiatives of the ordinary people.”
According to him, the reasoning and calculations which the economists had learnt inevitably ended up with a huge resource deficit which could only be met, if at all, by massive foreign assistance. This implied some surrender, at least, of a country’s autonomy as a sovereign nation; the country's economic structure also gets locked into a large import-dependence; this along with the debt burden would perpetuate the overall continued dependence on foreign assistance; the country’s indigenous knowledge, skills and culture would be humiliated in the hands of the alien knowledge and culture embodied in foreign expertise and resources coming in on such a scale; and a beggar mentality rather than a spirit of dignified hard work would dominate the psychology of the society. “As economists we were trained mainly in this kind of deficit and dependent ‘development’ planning. We had not learnt how to plan the mobilisation of the human energy of the people, to develop with what we have, not with what we do not have.”
All his colleagues from the planning commission identified him as an “idealist” when he proposed that all the ministers, MPs and top government employees, except the prime minister, would have to ride bicycles to prove to the people that they are sincere in their speeches about austerity measures. He was also the first to be disillusioned by the policies of the government that time.
This idealist had a strong spine as well. That is why he could leave teaching at Dhaka University in the mid 1960’s when the authorities did not allow him to go for higher studies as he turned down an offer to be the chair of the Economics Department superseding Abu Mahmood; that is why he could take a stand against promotion of an associate professor to professorship as the person was particularly ill-qualified.
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This proponent of the “self-assured development” approach in economics had achieved such a quality in his music. That is why despite being an outcast for his singing style, Anisur Rahman could say he would have sung Rabindrana Sangeet following “legato music” had Tagore himself not talked about “gorane kore gawa”, adoption of a flowing style in rendition of music.
* Shameem Reza works at Prothom Alo. He can be reached at [email protected]