The Discourse of ‘Desh’

When noted Bengali poet and littérateur Dwijendralal Roy (1863-1913) wrote his famous patriotic song Dhana dhanya pushpa bhara amader ei basundhara (‘Replete with wealth, grain and flowers is this earth of ours’, first published in 1892 in Aryagatha Part I) extolling India as ‘the queen of all the nations in the world’ (‘shokol desher rani shey je’), it was not the enslaved and exploited colony that he eulogised but a metacartographic and supranational entity more potent than reality – the land of his birth, his janmabhoomi, his ‘desh’. The referential range of ‘desh’ extends from region to province to country, as the context demands. In the colonial milieu, ‘desh’ as ‘mother’ (as in Dwijendralal's Banga amar, janani amar, dhatri amar, amar desh / ‘My Bengal, my mother, my nurse, my “desh”’) mediated but also subsumed the nationalist icon of ‘Mother India’ – the ‘mother’ languishing in chains under foreign domination and calling to her children for deliverance. This is because the significance of ‘desh’ goes beyond the notions of political autonomy and sovereignty associated with the nation-state.

As the land or place of one's birth or familial origin, and therefore of one's ancestral heritage and spiritual and cultural belonging, ‘desh’ is a grounding idea, multivalent and even sacred (as in Tagore's song O amar desher mati tomar pore thekai matha / ‘I pay obeisance to thee, O soil of my “desh”’). It is quite different from rashtra or ‘state’, which is formal and legal. Indeed, unlike the geographically bounded nationstate, ‘desh’ is present even in absence. Bharati Mukherjee writes in The Tree Bride: