Article by S Gopalakrishnan-Some thoughts related to the cremations of Manna Dey and K. Raghvan sahapedia.org/manna-dey-may-1-1919-october-24-2013/ The importance of locating the site of one’s end: It was Pablo Neruda who asked, ‘Where do the birds go to die?’ in his fascinating poem ‘Through a Closed Mouth the Flies Enter’. It is a fact that mostly, at least in an urbanscape, we do not come across the carcass of a bird unless an electric wire has caused it premature death. While all living beings feel the apprehension of harm, according to Sigmund Freud, ‘thanatophobia’—the anxiety over death—is a human predicament. No non-human beings have ‘live’ or creative expressions about death, whereas mankind has innumerable expressions on the subject of death and on after-lives. That is why man cannot simply be cremated unnoticed, the way Neruda’s bird disappears to an unseen sky on an unknown day. This reference to a Heideggerian position of ‘nobody can take one’s death away from one’ is prompted by the coincidence in the last week of debates over the cremation of two major musicians, one the legendary playback singer Manna Dey, and the other K. Raghavan, a renowned music composer who dominated the Malayalam cinema industry like a colossus for more than five decades. Manna Dey, who sang in almost all India’s languages, had chosen the garden city of Bengaluru for his life after retirement, and moved there over two decades ago after spending many years in Mumbai. Unlike many other Bollywood superstars who own huge farm houses in the city, Dey had no house of his own. He spent his last years at his daughter’s house. He kept to himself and rarely appeared in public. In the case of K. Raghavan, the artiste returned to his hometown Thalassery in northern Kerala, where he lived for three decades till he passed away at the age of 99. Neither of them was an unsung hero, as almost all honours and recognitions came to them during their lifetime. While Manna Dey sang more than 3500 songs, K. Raghavan had composed a little over 700. The Chief Minister of West Bengal raised a high-octave alarm at the negligence of the Karnataka government, saying that Manna Dey had not been given a befitting adieu. Mamata Banerjee said she had requested his family to bring his body by special flight so that it could lie in state in Kolkata for at least 24 hours for the public to pay their respects before the last rites were performed in Bangalore as desired by the family. “But this again did not happen,” she said. For last summer the Chief Minister had flown to Bengaluru to present the ailing artiste the Vishesh Sangeet Mahasamman award on behalf of the West Bengal government. But is there anyone to clarify a simple doubt: what prevented Smt Banerjee from arranging a special flight for herself to fly down to pay the state’s last respects to the musician who sang 2524 songs in Bangla? One should not forget that he sang just five songs in Kannada, the garden city’s language. Things were different in the case of K. Raghavan. Thousands mourned his demise. There was an unending flow of people from northern Kerala to his humble home in Thalassery. However, even before his cremation there was heated discussion in Kerala on the almost total absence, among those paying homage, of people from the world of cinema. Had he settled in central Kerala or in Thiruvananthapuram the scene would certainly have been different. Though it was claimed that pre-scheduled business in the film industry had prevented artistes travelling to the northern tip of the state, the argument had no serious takers. K. Raghavan’s decision to lead his retired life far from the madding crowd led to the Chief Minister too being absent from the funeral. He did not, like the other Chief Minister, have to fly from Kolkata to Bangalore, yet even then his visit did not happen. When Heidegger said that ‘death is that possibility which is the absolute impossibility of “dasein” (existence)’, perhaps he had not thought of the possibility of the existent selecting the spot of her or his death in order to enable the living world to define its own space afterwards. “What song does the rain repeat? Where do the birds go to die? And why are the leaves green?” (Neruda) : S. Gopalakrishnan
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 03:01:18 +0000
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