Hindustani

• What baggage does any music acquire when it shifts from being – in South African literature scholar Zoë Wicomb’s phrase – “national culture to official culture”?
• South Africa’s national anthem is a composite of the African liberation hymn Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika and the apartheid-era Afrikaans hymn Die Stem (The Call of South Africa).
• In recent work, two prominent contemporary composers, Philip Miller in South Africa and Amit Chaudhuri in India, have explored fresh ways of interpreting national anthems.

Phillip Miller

• Miller grew up during apartheid with the enforced singing of Die Stem at school.
• In an interview with me he recalls:
  Coming from a very liberal home instilled almost a horror of national anthems in me.
• Miller and co-composer Thuthuka Sibisi had explored the meaning of singing South Africa’s former colonial anthem, God Save the King, for Victorian-era African choristers in an earlier project.
• And even the postcolonial South African anthem Miller finds so beautiful can jar with some.

Amit Chaudhuri

• It was composed by poet, artist and thinker Rabindranath Tagore in 1911.
• Chaudhuri, a novelist, critic and classically trained Hindustani singer, reimagines Jana Gana Mana on his most recent album, Across the Universe.
• Chaudhuri told me in email correspondence he is treating Tagore’s composition as a piece of music.

Burden of history

• Miller isn’t sure it’s possible to shear away the baggage from music, however beautiful, once it’s been appropriated to power.
• He points out that before Nkosi Sikelele was adopted, the ANC anthem was South African composer Reuben Caluza’s iLand Act.
• Anthems, it seems, are what a country’s rulers, peoples – and artists – make them.