Blue Skies and Silver Clouds:

Autumn Hope in Prabhat Samgiita’s Seasonal Songs

Ayesha A. Irani

While I was growing up, a velvety voice often floated through my home. It was Placido Domingo singing “Autumn Leaves,” a family favorite, originally composed in French by Joseph Kosma. “The falling leaves,” went the song we knew so well, “drift by the window,”

1. Autumn leaves of red and gold

 

1. I see your lips, the summer kisses

 

The sun-burned hands I used to hold

1. Since you went away the days grow long

 

1. And soon I’ll hear old winter’s song

 

1. But I miss you most of all my darling

 

When autumn leaves start to fall.

It is ironic that I used to listen to this song in Bombay, where I grew up. Balmy Bombay nestled by the Arabian Sea. A city which laid claim to but two seasons: an endless summer punctuated by the monsoons. The few trees that grew there never shed their leaves. They were permanently green, dusty from urban blight perhaps, but still green. It was only when I moved to North America in my thirties that I witnessed the full cycle of the seasons from spring’s bursting buds to autumn’s turning leaves.

Today, here in Boston, fall is back again! Leaf-peepers like me travel to Vermont to witness forests of burnished gold. And now, and again, that song winds its way across the Atlantic from my one-time Bombay home to my Boston apartment. As I write, I hear it again on YouTube, perhaps more fittingly this time in the golden voice of American singer and jazz pianist, Nat King Cole. Maple leaves of red and gold actually dance by my study window as I write.

Yet, growing up, it was mostly Prabhat Samgiita that I listened to. The author, Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar, among other lyrical themes, composed songs for every season. Here in Boston, as though in homage to every passing season, I sing at least one of those seasonal songs I learnt all those years ago in Bombay. Here is one (song 124) that I sang just the other day, on a splendid autumn morning:

“Autumn Leaves” has an unmistakable air of nostalgia for a human lover and the melancholy that accompanies her loss. Sarkar’s song is instead filled with hope. Where Kosma sees falling leaves, all that fades and perishes, Sarkar sees blue skies and silver clouds, and the fragrant breezes of sharat that lull the earth into a golden dream. By the toil of buds, birds, bees, and humans, the agrarian cycle has finally borne fruit in autumn. The harvest is here, with its bright colors, and humans connected to the soil rejoice. In Boston, it is apple-picking time, time to harvest squash and pumpkins, time for the sweetest of corn. This was the time when native Americans would stock up their larders for winter months with apple sauce, fruit leather, hardy winter squash, and dried grain. The autumnal air is filled not only with the scent of ripeness but with the cadence of “your melodies,” God’s songs that control the very flow of the seasons. The present song reminds us that all autumnal rhythms have but one purpose: they serve to make us dance towards the divine. Suffusing Prabhat Samgiita then is an inexorable optimism, an optimism that stems from the pervasive experience of the divine for the singer of these songs. The changing of the seasons is nature’s irrevocable law. At its most stormy, when “old winter’s song” is heard, nature perhaps holds the greatest promise of divine tangibility, and at its clockwork best, it holds the solace of cosmic order.

Recently, I was struck by the words of a wise monk of the Ananda Marga, who had spent a lifetime on the path. His words touched me. Discussing his struggles, he candidly shared with a virtual gathering on how he deepened his spiritual practices. “You see,” he said, “I feel like I am 51% monk and 49% romantic. And as a romantic I also wanted to experience love. So, I once sent a silent prayer to my guru, my master, about how I might experience this romantic side of myself while still remaining committed to my life as a monk.” His earnest spiritual plea was instantly rewarded by an epiphanic moment wherein he was able to experience a taste of divine love. That little taste has kept him going.

Every one of the 5019 songs of Prabhat Samgiita present us with this opportunity, an opportunity to taste godly love. They are created to guide the romantic inside each of us—monk, nun, or householder— to the supreme, the ultimate goal of human life. The ecopoetics of Prabhat Samgiita are designed to awaken a sensorial appreciation of divine presence, both in the natural world and the inner world. In our song, it is through the autumnal landscape of the ripened heart that the seeker experiences the golden dream of love’s true fulfillment, the golden light that engulfs the mind steeped in the sublime.

Come learn this and other songs of Prabháta Samgiita, come to be inspired by its beautiful language, and come to translate it into your mother-tongues at the Humanities and Arts Faculty of the Neohumanist College of Asheville. Currently, we have two projects that are running: first, sessions on how to sing Prabhát Samgiit, with an explanation of proper pronunciation, grammar, and the literary value of the songs; second, translating Prabhát Samgiit into world languages. Anyone who would like to translate Prabhát Samgiit into their mother-tongue may join our team of translators.”
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Ayesha Irani is the lead faculty member of the Liberating Humanities and Arts discipline for the Neohumanist College of Asheville