For how long are we going to make love in secret?

GUPUTE GUPUTE...

a song by Bhupen Hazarika

as Translated by

Syeda Senim Zahan

For how long are we going to make love in secret?

Let us sprinkle the colours of our love across the sky.

Come my love, let us show the world and its customs

Our two hearts as large as the sea.

How can youth be stained?

How can light be stopped?

Do the waves ever neglect the sea?

Your eyes

Your bosom

Your each look is beautiful.

Every touch is melting.

Open the windows

Open the doors of this locked house

O my love!

We don’t need to show discipline

Or propriety any more.

Can you bind love by rules?

Does a storm have any boundary?

Can you cover the dawn

With a garland of shame?

KANKHOWA'S NOTE:

Eroticism and sexuality appear in Dr. Bhupen Hazarika’s multiple Assamese songs. In fact nobody dared to deal with eroticism and sexuality in Assamese cultural practices ever after or before Bhupen Hazarika. The song “Gupute Gupute” starts with a dramatic orchestration and the orchestration gives a sense of conflict-within throughout the song. Many followers of Dr. Hazarika sang the song in course of time. But nobody ever could attain the sense of directness of sexuality either in the texture of their voices or in the background scoring.  

Dr. Bhupen Hazarika establishes the modernist iconography of the “ARTIST” in Assamese cultural practice. The Iconography later on accepted by the middle class Assamese society very well. The nationalism and the slogan of “Unity in Diversity” were so widely populated that the subjectivity of the artist obscured in the later phase.

We heard the song again and again, but we could not understand the meaning when he says to open up the doors and windows of the locked house. Neither could we understand the way he spoke so. Perhaps, as Kankhowa believs, he was speaking of DISPOSING the house…

painting by Anuradha Upadhyay