Agomoni gaan: the songs of Uma coming home, sung by her mother

To our ear, agomoni gaan are the festival songs that move even Bengalis who would never call themselves religious, and the reason is who they are about. Bengali Wikipedia's article on agomoni gaan puts it in one clause: Uma comes to her father's house not as a goddess but as a daughter.

Uma is Parvati, the daughter of Giriraj Himalaya and Menaka, married to Shiva of the cremation ground, and once a year she comes home for a few days. How many is not agreed. Bengali Wikipedia says about four, and English Wikipedia's article on Agamani and Vijaya says the three days of the festival. Anyone whose daughter lives in another city knows the visit is always shorter than it was meant to be.

What are agomoni gaan?

The story is simple, and the songs keep coming back to the same few moments. One autumn night Menaka sees her daughter in a dream. She wakes and begs Giriraj to go and bring Uma home. Uma comes, stays her few days, and leaves; the songs of that leaving are Bijoya. Agomoni and Bijoya are two halves of one song, the arrival and the parting.

Tagore thought the dream was where all of it began. In the essay Gramyasahitya, in his book Lokasahitya, he wrote that this is where the story starts and that it is the prelude to every agomoni song. The old printing on the Internet Archive adds a lovely detail: Giriraj, he says, has been hearing about this dream since our grandfathers' time in Lalit, Bibhas and Ramkeli, the ragas of the early morning.

A mother's song, not a goddess's

The person who matters in agomoni is Menaka. Uma hardly speaks. Her mother does, and she is not a devotee at all but a mother in a Bengali house, with a temper, a sulk and a grievance against her son-in-law. One of Ramprasad Sen's padas opens with a threat.

Giri, when my Uma comes this time, I will not send her back.

Giri, ebar amar Uma ele, ar Uma pathabo na: Giri, when my Uma comes this time, I will not send her back. In Calcutta University's anthology Shakta Padavali, edited by Amarendranath Ray and scanned on the Internet Archive, the pada is signed with Ramprasad's name. In the same song the mother warns that if the son-in-law comes for Uma, mother and daughter will quarrel with him together, and she will not treat him as a son-in-law at all. It is more than two hundred years old, and the anger is still familiar.

Ramprasad's family home was at Kumarhatta on the Hooghly, today's Halisahar; he died around 1775, and Bengali Wikipedia's page on agomoni gaan counts him its first and finest songwriter. A legend about him reads differently once you know these songs. Kali, it says, came to him in the form of his daughter Jagadishwari and helped him mend his fence. The poet who turned the goddess into a daughter in his songs was visited, in the legend, by the goddess as his daughter.

After Ramprasad the great name is Kamalakanta Bhattacharya, a poet of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who served at the court of Maharaja Tejchandra of Bardhaman. In the same anthology one of his padas starts with the mother's dream, Kal swapane Shankari-mukh heri, what joy it was to see her face in last night's dream. Uma sat in her lap and called her Ma. Awake, the mother cannot bear it, and in the last line the poet himself tells Giriraj not to delay.

The anthology's preface was written in 1942, and its editor makes a proud claim: that only Bengalis could have written agomoni and Bijoya, because only they dressed the Mother as a daughter and brought her home. It sounds like a boast. Read the songs side by side and it is hard to argue with.

What Tagore heard in them

The deepest reading is Tagore's. In the essay Chhelebhulano Chhora, in the same book, he wrote that Bengal carries a hard inner grief, the sending of a daughter to her husband's house, a young girl handed over to strangers. A few lines on, he said it all in one sentence.

Agomoni and Bijoya are the songs of Bengal's mother's heart.

Agomoni ebong Bijoya Banglar matrihridayer gaan: agomoni and Bijoya are the songs of Bengal's mother's heart. In Gramyasahitya he widens the picture. On Saptami the daughters and young wives of all Bengal come to their mothers' homes, and on Bijoya, he writes, the eyes of the whole country fill with tears. So Uma is not one girl. She is every daughter who comes home once a year.

That is where the songs get their edge. When we go out to see the pandals we look at the goddess in the idol's eyes. The song that opens the Puja looks somewhere else, at a verandah and a mother watching the road. Whether a married daughter will make it home for the Puja is still, in a great many Bengali houses, the real question of the season.

After Ramprasad: from the kabiyals to Nazrul

The tradition did not stop. Bengali Wikipedia lists among the later poets the kabiyal Ram Basu, Dashrathi Ray and Kazi Nazrul Islam, and the anthology prints padas by Ram Basu and Dashrathi in its agomoni section. It has one by Girish Chandra Ghosh too, in which Menaka says a son-in-law is as good as a son of her own: on the son-in-law at least, the opposite of Ramprasad's angry mother.

Kangal Harinath, who wrote Baul songs under the name Fikirchand, is in the anthology as well, and a book of Fikirchand's Baul songs from 1903 names agomoni songs in its title. One of his Bijoya padas ends on a thought worth keeping: the Mother has no invocation and no immersion, because she lives inside the heart. A song of parting that ends on staying.

Which agomoni gaan to play

All six play on this page. Put one on each morning from Mahalaya to Shashthi and you will be ready for the dhak. Our Durga Puja songs playlist starts where this one ends, and the rest is in the Pujo mood.

4:15

O Maa Kemon Kore Horer Ghore

Aalo | আলো 🪔

The first song. Anwesha Ganguly sings, 4 minutes 15 seconds; Aalo credits the words to Girish Chandra Ghosh and the tune as traditional. The title is Menaka's question, how did you live in Hara's house, my girl: all of agomoni in one line.

▶ Play hereMore in the Pujo mood

4:21

Aay Maa Uma

Aalo | আলো 🪔

Rahul Dutta sings, 4 minutes 21 seconds; Aalo credits the words and tune to Kazi Nazrul Islam. A song of calling the daughter home, for the morning of Mahalaya.

▶ Play hereMore in the Pujo mood

3:13

Gouri Elo

Times Music Bangla

Dohar with Tirtha Bhattacharya, for the film Raktabeej, 3 minutes 13 seconds. Times Music Bangla calls it traditional, collected by Shyamapada Bhattacharjee and Kalikaprasad Bhattacharjee. For Shashthi, the day she arrives.

▶ Play hereMore in the Pujo mood

7:03

Ashchhe Jamai Digombor

SVF Music

Parvathy Baul, 7 minutes 3 seconds. SVF Music describes it as an old Baul song by an unknown poet, sung at Shashanka Gonsai's akhra. Here the words are about the groom, and Menaka is asked whether a naked ascetic like him can be accepted: Ramprasad's angry mother again, arriving by another road.

▶ Play hereMore in the Folk mood

5:41

Agomoni Aalo

Jayati Chakraborty

Jayati Chakraborty, 5 minutes 41 seconds. This is Ogo Amar Agamani Alo from Mahishasura Mardini, words by Bani Kumar and tune by Pankaj Kumar Mullick, first sung there by Sipra Bose; Jayati's channel credits this arrangement to Prattyush Banerjee.

▶ Play hereMore in the Pujo mood

5:13

Sharado Rupini Maa

Nilanjanaa De

We end with Nilanjana De, 5 minutes 13 seconds, words and tune by her father Dulal De; her channel calls it a Bangla agomoni gaan. It calls on the goddess to wake, a newer song that has moved from the daughter to the goddess. Play it after O Maa Kemon Kore and you will hear the difference at once.

▶ Play hereMore in the Pujo mood

The Menaka of these songs is no queen of a mountain. She is the mother in a Kolkata flat asking three times when her daughter's flight lands from Bengaluru, and the mother in Dhaka, and the one in Melbourne. The songs are two hundred years old. The waiting is new every year.

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