archive: India Pays tribute to paul robeson

Ali Sardar Jafri
Ali Sardar Jafri was a poet, critic and one of the founders of the Progressive Writers Movement in India

अपने नग़्मे पे कोई नाज़ तुझे हो कि न हो
नग़मा इस बात पे नाज़ाँ है कि है फ़न तेरा
देस हैं दूर बहुत दिल तो बहुत दुर नहीं
मेरे गुलशन ही के पहलू में है गुलशन तेरा
तेरे नग़मे ने लिया देहली-ओ-शीराज़ का दिल
मॉस्को तेरा है ग़र नाता-ओ-लन्दन तेरा
अपनी पलकों से चुना ख़ूने-शहीदाने-हबश
कितने गुलज़ारों से गुलरंग है दामन तेरा
तेरी आवाज़ बिलाले-हबशी की है नवा
नूर से दिल के तिरे हर्फ़ है रौशन तेरा
बूए-गुल रह न सकी क़ैद-ए-गुलिस्ताँ में असीर
सरहदें तोड़ के सब फैल गया फ़न तेरा
कृश्न का गीत है, गोकुल की हसीं शाम है तू
आ कलेजे से लगा लें कि सियह फ़ाम है तू

You may or not take pride in your song,
The song takes pride in being sung by you, 
Our lands are far but our hearts are not, 
My garden of flowers is right next to yours
Your song has won the hearts of Delhi and of Shiraz
If London is yours, then so is Moscow
With your eyelashes, you painstakingly picked up 
Each drop of blood shed by Black martyrs
Many springs color your bosom 
Your voice carries the melodies of Black Bilal
Your words are illuminated by the light of your soul 
Like the fragrance of flowers,
Which could not be kept constrained in the garden,
Your art has broken through all boundaries and perfumed the world
You are the song of Krishna, the beautiful dusk of his town, Gokul
Let me embrace you to my heart, for you are the color of ink

Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru was the first Prime Minister of India

I am happy to know that an All-India Committee has been formed under the distinguished chairmanship of Chief Justice Chagla, to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Paul Robeson. This is an occasion which deserves celebration not only because Paul Robeson is one of the greatest artists of our generation, but also because he has represented and suffered for a cause which should be dear to all of us - the cause of human dignity.

The celebration of his birthday is, therefore, something more than a tribute to a great individual. It is also a tribute to that cause for which he has stood and suffered.

I send all my good wishes to Paul Robeson on this occasion and I trust that he will have many long years before him to enrich the world with his great art.
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Vijay Laxmi Pandit
Vijay Laxmi Pandit was a freedom fighter and former diplomat

Paul was, besides being a great artist, an even greater human being. We spoke about his coming to India some day, where he said he would like to study Indian folk songs…The last time I saw Paul he was in Harlem. He was not too well, and the emotional damage he had suffered from the way he had been treated in his own country had hurt him beyond measure. He was a great American and America had rejected and humiliated him, or tried to do so. No one can humiliate a man of the dignity, courage and faith in values that Paul possessed.

Romesh Chandra
Romesh Chandra was former president of the World Peace Council

We think today of Paul Robeson not being allowed to sing by fascist whites. Paul Robeson sang for all---not only for his own black people, but for all America, white and black and brown and red-- for that real America which today stands for the freedom of all people and stands against United States imperialism at the same time, because it knows that there is no future for the people of the United States without a world at peace and a world in freedom….Paul Robeson himself is here. He did not die. He lives on in the hearts of all the people in the United States who fight for peace, who fight against racism and racial discrimination. The people of the United States shall win. Their struggle is one with the fight of all other peoples who are fighting against imperialism and oppression, who are fighting for peace.

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M. C. Chagla
Shri M. C. Chalga was former Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court and former Cabinet minister

In my presidential address at the Paul Robeson 60th Birthday Celebration in April 1958, I stated that in Robeson’s view it was the duty of an artist to give expression, through his medium, to the sufferings of his people, to use his art to give them hope and solace, and the assurance that one day they would reach the promised land. Robeson felt that an artist must use his art as a powerful weapon to wage war against cruelty, oppression and inequality. Robeson was fighting against the insolence and arrogance of a “superior” race, and the sense of dominance which comes from a lack of pigmentation in the skin. 

I also drew the attention of my audience to the fact that there were 28 countries where Committees had been set up, and who were paying tributes to this great artist, and, as a matter of fact, the initiative for these celebrations came from a country in the West— England— one of America's allies. A very strong and powerful Committee had been set up there, and among the members were the Lord Bishop of Birmingham and Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, and I did not think that either of these venerable gentlemen could be accused of being communists. I ended my speech with the reminder: “We have been told on high authority that ‘it is the humble who will inherit the Kingdom of God’. If there is a God, and God is only another name for compassion and kindness, the Negroes must be dearer to Him than any other people, because today they are the oppressed and the downtrodden. I have no doubt that they would inherit the Kingdom 
of Heaven”.


Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya was a freedom fighter and socialist who worked greatly towards the revival of Indian handicrafts 

The Negro’s most outstanding genius is in his divine gift of song. The Negro music was born out of the boundless loneliness of his soul, seeking solace in the outpouring of his heart in melody. Its piercing pathos, its solemn simplicity, its gay swing, are indigenous to the Negro and a part of him…The Negro spirituals are unequalled in their delicate beauty. There are few finer musical treats than their church music. Nor must the fact be overlooked that many Negro composers have ventured into the broader fields of musical endeavour, including operatic music. 

And few forces have so successfully cut across the rigid race barriers as music. Those who have witnessed the enormous crowds of hundreds of thousands and more rise spontaneously to honour Paul Robeson or cheer lustily Marion Anderson, can perhaps gauge the wonder of this miracle. For when Paul Robeson sings he becomes something more than a singer. He transcends all human limitations and becomes the disembodied melody, which knows neither colour nor race. He interprets the ageless, deathless spirit of his lost land of Africa, his priceless heritage, before which even the hooded order of bigotry and hate spontaneously retreat. 

Rikhi Jaipal
Rikhi Jaipal was a former Indian diplomat

Paul Robeson entered our consciousness at an early age, during the years before the Second World War, when Asians were struggling to regain their nationhood from Western imperialism. We remember him as a great American, great in every sense, in body and soul, larger than life. It is not only the things that he stood for, but the manner in which he said and sang about them that compelled the attention of the world. He had a largeness of heart, and a loftiness of spirit which embraced the entire human race in the universal brotherhood of man. His voice, always vibrant with love and compassion, stirred the depths of one's being. It was a voice that could not be silenced. It demanded freedom and the fullness of the promise contained in the American Constitution for all American citizens regardless of race. It demanded also the right of the Negro people to take what was theirs---equality in the constitution. Paul Robeson related this American dream to the larger concept of the dream of one world in which every human being would freely enjoy equality in conditions of peace and security. 

This interrelationship between him and the peoples fighting for freedom everywhere was bound in the same web of history, human suffering and human aspiration. Inevitably, he became a part, and indeed a symbol, of the world movement for freedom and liberation. His songs were the purest expressions of the essence of humanity. Like the rest of us, he too was a victim of the white man's law and the white man's world. But not for long, because the victims of yesterday have now become the children of destiny of today and tomorrow.