Gaganchandra Dam (Bengali: গগনচন্দ্র দাম; 1845–1910), mostly known as Gagan Harkara (Bengali: গগন হরকরা), was a Bengali Baul poet after the tune of whose famous song "Ami Kothay Pabo Tare" (কোথায় পাবো তারে) Rabindranath Tagore composed "Amar Shonar Bangla", the national anthem of Bangladesh.^[1][2]

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In 1975, Bangladeshi pundit Ashraf Al Minar claimed that Rabindranath Tagore copied Gagan Harkara's works.

Early life and background

He resided at Kasba village in Kumarkhali Upazila in Kushtia in present-day Bangladesh. As he was a postman at Shelaidaha Post Office in Kumarkhali, people used to address him as "Harkara"; in Bengali, "Harkara" stands for "postman". He was used to delivering and collecting letters from Rabindranath Tagore during his (Tagore's) days in Shelaidaha. Tagore wrote over him many times in his letters, accumulated in Chinnapatra to Indira Devi.^[4]

It was Tagore who first published Harkara's song in his Prabashi Patra (a magazine) in 1322 BS.^[2] Tagore's niece Sarala Devi Chaudhurani published also an essay entitled "Lalon Fakir and Gagan" in Bharati, a mouthpiece of the Tagore family.^[2] This essay included two songs of Gagan – "Ami Kothai Pabo Tare" and "(O Mon) Asar Mayai Vule Robe". Rabindranath Tagore collected the songs of Gagan in 1889.^[2]

Legacy

Rabindranath Tagore referred to Gagan and his songs in his article: An Indian Folk Religion, songs and speeches.^[2][6] Rabindranath Tagore wrote a short story too (The Postmaster) partly after his life. Based upon the story, Satyajit Ray made his film: The Postmaster.

Tagore mentioned the following about Gagan:

In the same village I came into touch with some Baul singers. I had known them by their names, occasionally seen them singing and begging in the

street, and so passed them by, vaguely classifying them in my mind under the general name of Vairagis, or ascetics. The time came when I had occasion to meet with some members of the same body and talk to them about spiritual matters. The first Baul song, which I chanced to hear with any attention, profoundly stirred my mind. Its words are so simple that it makes me hesitate to render them in a foreign tongue, and set them forward for critical observation. Besides, the best part of a song is missed when the tune is absent; for thereby its movement and its colour are lost, and it becomes like a butterfly whose wings have been plucked. The first line may be translated thus: 'Where shall I meet him, the Man of my Heart?' This phrase, 'the Man of my Heart,' is not peculiar to this song, but is usual with the Baul sect. It means that, for me, the supreme truth of all existence is in the revelation of the Infinite in my own humanity. 'The Man of my Heart,' to the Baul, is like a divine instrument perfectly tuned. He gives expression to infinite truth in the music of life. And the longing for the truth which is in us, which we have not yet realised, breaks out in the "Ami Kothay Pabo Tare". The name of the poet who wrote this song was Gagan. He was almost illiterate; and the ideas he received from his Baul teacher found no distraction from the self-consciousness of the modern age. He was a village postman, earning about ten shillings a month, and he died before he had completed his teens. The sentiment, to which he gave such intensity of expression, is common to most of the songs of his sect. And it is a sect, almost exclusively confined to that lower floor of society, where the light of modern education hardly finds an entrance, while wealth and respectability shun its utter indigence. In the song I have translated above, the longing of the singer to realize the infinite in his own personality is expressed. This has to be done daily by its perfect expression in life, in love. For the personal expression of life, in its perfection, is love; just as the personal

expression of truth in its perfection is beauty.