the concert for bangladesh half a century later

What if The Concert for Bangladesh had never happened? The global public would have known even less of the genocide by the West Pakistani army against the people now known as Bangladeshis. There would have been no Live Aid, because Bob Geldof took direct inspiration from George Harrison’s big event.

But in its use of searing messages of human pain, the Concert also left a darker legacy - an image of Bangladesh as a place of misery and destitution that persisted long after it had turned its fortunes around. One theme I explore in this reflection on the Concert for Bangladesh, almost 50 years ago at the time of writing, is that this depiction of human pain was necessary not to call for charity, but to conceal a more subversive and solidaristic political agenda – to sing Bangladesh into being, at least in the minds of the world audience commanded by an ex-Beatle. 

‘The people of Bangladesh will always remember you’

George Harrison has this heart-warming postscript to his epic Concert for Bangladesh, staged in New York’s Madison Square Gardens on August 1 1971:

Even now I still meet waiters in Bengali restaurants who say: “Oh, you Mr Harrison. When we were in the jungle fighting it was great to know somebody out there was thinking of us”.

The former Beatle, then one of the most famous and well-loved figures in the world, put his heart and soul into organizing this star-studded charity benefit. It was the first of its kind. The gig, and the album and film that followed were to help his friend, the Indian classical music virtuoso Ravi Shankar, raise funds for refugees from what was then still called East Pakistan. In mid-1971, tens of thousands of people were crossing the Indian border daily into Ravi’s own home state of West Bengal, fleeing genocide by the Pakistani army. This was a mighty force backed by the even mightier US government, acting out of a larger Cold War logic.

The concert shone a spotlight on a people who were fighting for their own Bangla Desh, a country as yet unrecognized by world powers. It was a much-needed morale boost for the liberation struggle. Aly Zaker, the Bangladeshi freedom fighter and acclaimed actor-director said (in Hossain & Aucoin 2017):

The voice that was raised about Bangladesh and the sufferings of humanity reached all corners of the world

Pitched as a charitable and humanitarian initiative, the initiative was pregnant with politics from its title on. The sleeve of Harrison’s single ‘(we’ve got to relieve) Bangla Desh’ bore news reports and images of those caught up in the conflict; its lyric enjoined listeners to ‘lend a hand, try to understand’ the crisis.

Together these musical innovations – the single, the concert, the album and the film - eventually earned millions of dollars for refugee relief, much of which was infamously tied up in legal and tax issues till after the refugee crisis ended. Yet this unlikely collaboration between one of the Fab Four and a foremost Indian classical musician proved an exciting mashup of music and humanitarian politics. The world’s attention was now on this emergent nation and the deadly conflict surrounding its birth. It brought Bob Dylan back to live performance, to an ecstatic audience now also almost incidentally aware of what was going on in eastern South Asia.

In the digital afterlife of the concert, now available to view in parts online, the affection for George Harrison lingers in social media feeds. Selected comments on one video give you a flavour of the esteem in which Bangladeshis hold George Harrison:

You will be memorized 1000 of years. Love from Bangladesh

The people of Bangladesh will always remember you. #Respect  

im from bangladesh and im honoured asf😭😭  

Many many THANKS, RESPECT n LOVE to you n all from the people of BANGLADESH!!!  

Bangladesh will never forget what our allies did for us. Bless you all.

Love from Bangladesh❤ #বাংলাদেশ We love you 🐱‍🏍 #Legend #Beatles 🐱‍🏍

We owe you so much. Even after a long period of nearly 50 years we still remember and appreciate what you've done for us and will continue to do so for ever. Love and respect #Beatles #Harrison #Ravi_shankar #Dylan and others

This warm affection comes from across the age range; some people remember George Harrison’s grand gesture firsthand, others discovered it just now. For Bangladeshis it was a shining moment of international solidarity, a hit of rockstar-fuelled hope for an apparently hopeless struggle against a potent military machine backed by the mighty United States Government.

What if the Concert for Bangladesh never happened?

The cute conceit of a romantic film got me thinking again about the concert (Yesterday; 2019, Dir. Danny Boyle). Yesterday depicted a somewhat diminished but otherwise recognizable world where The Beatles had never happened. The message was: the world would be a distinctly sadder place without ‘She Loves You’ or ‘Penny Lane’ or even ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’. But I was gripped by the notion: if The Beatles had never existed, nor would the concert for Bangladesh. Would the wider world have known or cared about West Pakistan’s genocidal attack on its seceding eastern wing in 1971? Or that the genocide was backed by the US because of some Kissingerian realpolitik? What would it have meant for the eventual liberation of Bangladesh?

Naturally enough, Danny Boyle did not tackle these questions in his charming comedy. But they stayed with me, and in those long home-bound hours of 2020, I read about the concert in the press of the day, in books and articles about the Bangladesh liberation war, Western imaginaries of the Third World, and on how the concert reset rock music’s moral compass. I tracked down biographies and cultural studies of The Beatles, Ravi Shankar and the people around them, and watched a secondhand DVD of the official film of the concert. I followed its social media tracks into the present.

So what if the Concert for Bangladesh had never happened? Would it have affected the final outcome of the war? It is tempting to think so. Who would not want to believe that such a unique mix of glamour and tragedy could challenge powerful interests pitted against the just cause of the underdog? But looked at half a century later, it seems unlikely it shaped the political choices of the US government: they were facing more potent pressures from elsewhere. Srinath Raghavan argues that the Concert lit up the crisis in a way that made it unignorable, and in so doing helped make US policy to support Pakistan less tenable, speeding up the humanitarian response. But in all honesty – we don’t really know.

The Concert happened when the US government was illicitly backing the West Pakistani genocide, supplying materiel and moral support for an attack on a people that had emphatically and democratically voted against neocolonial rule. Not all the US government was in favour of this ‘tilt’ towards West Pakistan by President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Edward Kennedy had made powerful speeches against the atrocities the US government was enabling. Pro-Bangladesh activists in Europe and the US did publicity-raising stunts and produced devastating testimony of the conditions of refugees.

But it was a struggle to arouse US public interest in the conflict, yet another massive disaster looming in far-off Asia. The public was told there were ‘shades of Vietnam’ in the full-scale disaster in Bangladesh, another holocaust approaching the Nazi genocide, which was still a fresh horror. These were strong messages to the US public in 1971, but they invited no simple solutions: the implications pointed to intervention, and nobody in America wanted another war. Gary Bass (page 199-200) tells us that

Despite the extensive and heartrending press coverage, the advocacy of [Democratic Senator Edward] Kennedy and others in Congress, and some public activism, the American public never really mobilized for the Bengalis

The Concert helped make the cause world news, sneaking into public discourse a degree of familiarity with the carnage in South Asia. On August 1st, the day of the benefit, the New York Times published two major articles on the crisis in what it was then still calling ‘East Pakistan’. One, a lengthy firsthand piece by the distinguished Indian writer Kushwant Singh, gave refugees’ accounts of mass murders, rapes, and destruction by the Pakistani forces in grave detail. A second compared the conflict to the ongoing American war in Vietnam.

Despite this quality coverage of its cause, the next day the New York Times ran an account of the Concert without once mentioning the name ‘Bangladesh’. But the name-genie was already out of the bottle. The conflict was now, to the Western public at least, about an actual nation of a nameable people; they were Bangladeshis striking out for their liberty, not merely ‘a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems’, as Richard Nixon so memorably described us. By the 3rd of August, two days after the Concert, the Presidential briefing on the crisis cited ‘mounting press and Congressional pressure on our assistance to Pakistan’.

Star power was already in play. As the late writer Avijit Roy reminded us, Joan Baez had been so moved by what was happening in Bangladesh that she wrote and performed ‘Song of Bangladesh’ in July of 1971. The Queen of Folk wrote a gritty lament of massacres and refugees, presenting these as the latest episode in struggles of right against the ruthless and powerful:

The story of Bangladesh
Is an ancient one again made fresh
By blind men who carry out commands
Which flow out of the laws upon which nation stands
Which is to sacrifice a people for a land

Lines about the ‘vacant eyes’ of a teenaged mother trying ‘to fight the monsoon rains and the cholera flies’ for her sick baby were repeated in photographic form on the sleeve for George Harrison’s single ‘(we’ve got to relieve) Bangla Desh’. Depictions of Bangladeshi pain from the counter-culture continued with the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s excoriating ‘September on Jessore Road’, on the human tragedy he had seen in the refugees camps in Bengal.

These left lasting impressions on the liberal intelligentsia, but could not reach the audiences a Beatle could. Together, these images of devastation spoke to popular anti-establishment sentiment (Raghavan, page 147):

Ginsberg’s poem, like the songs of Harrison and Baez, strummed the conscience of global opinion, particularly in the Western world, by braiding Bangladesh with the causes espoused by young protesters around the world. For a few months in 1971, Bangladesh seemed to distil all the hopes and fears of the Swinging Sixties

The industry was in a dark place in 1971, and the invention of the charity rock concert arguably saved rock music as much as rock music saved Bangladesh. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin had both died of drug overdoses in the autumn of 1970, after the Summer of Love had soured with the Manson murders and other violence and excess. When the Beatles split in 1970, it marked the cultural end of the 1960s. George and Ravi’s concert was a beautiful thing for an industry facing well-founded criticism for its excesses; it could regain some of its moral purpose, its standing as a means of rebellious popular expression against power-hungry elites.

The child on the album cover

Ebay yielded a pristine cellophane-wrapped copy of the Grammy-winning triple album, and it was just as I remembered it from my parents’ record collection. My father had rushed out to buy it when it hit the record shops in 1972, and it had always stood out among the others, three LPs and a booklet stacked into a sizeable brick-coloured box, austerely illustrated with the image of the bare hungry child in its centre. I cannot remember what I thought of it all then. But the record is such an early memory that as a child I associated George Harrison with Bangladesh. I knew about the Beatles. But it was news to me that The Beatles were the biggest band ever, so even people unconnected to Bangladesh knew George Harrison! For a child it was a thing of wonder that someone so famous would have done so much for the poor child in the picture (and therefore, in some sense, for me). I still retain that small sense of proprietorship – he is our George, our Beatle, and we will always remember him with love.

This abiding fondness for Our Beatle means the concert can now make us deeply uncomfortable. The child on the album cover is one reason. The child is seen bare and undernourished in a grainy black and white image; keen eyes will note what appears to be tabiz or amulets around one arm, a forlorn parental effort to ward off bad luck. Sitting before a plate, she (or he) has paused eating to look to the side, as if in hope of help.

What can be said about such images that has not been said before? The album cover at least is highly recognizable in its own right; it passes the litmus test for Western cultural significance, having featured in not one but two episodes of The Simpsons. The choice of picture was not hasty or unconsidered, but careful and deliberate. The pictures were striking and grabbed attention, as intended. But they also represented Bangladeshis – at that moment fighting a valiant war against the odds, after a historic struggle against imperial rule earlier that same century – as helpless victims in desperate need of Western compassion. As an impression of the Bangladeshi people it was misleading. As a depiction of the desperate need for action, it worked.

This was Bangladesh’s earliest outing as the poster child for the Third World, but perhaps its most memorable and lasting. Writing in 2011, the anthropologist Nayanika Mookherjee (page 401) thought the album cover

solidified the image of Bangladesh. The poster featured a starving child with a bowl in front of them. The image of the child was representative of the starving nation, bowl in hand waiting for the world community, the ‘global civil society’ to save it, protect it. Above this image the poster proclaimed that the Bangladesh benefit concert was ‘a triumphant success, a historic event’.

The brilliance of the event was all the shinier against the dark misery it sought to assuage. I could list the litany of horrors from which the refugees were fleeing, but if you do not already know the story, be assured you will be adequately horrified.

Mookherjee’s points are underlined by the fact that we know nothing about the fate of the child, not even their name. The historian Samantha Christiansen saw the concert as a turning point in the ‘reductive imagining of South Asia’ (page 141):

By presenting starving babies in need of salvation, and the rock and roll benefit concert as the savior, popular music was a conduit through which the West’s economic and moral superiority was reaffirmed.

This did happen; the painful paternalism of the Live Aid famine relief concerts confirmed this role for rock music-humanitarianism, and it was a role Bob Geldof learned from George Harrison’s big event. Yet while Geldof was paternalistically charitable, Harrison acted in solidarity; helping ‘the starving people’ as he ironically notes his aims in the film of the event, licensed his subversively overt statement of solidarity with Bangladeshis and their cause.

It is right to draw attention to the troubling ways in which these images reduced Bangladeshis to helpless victims, because these were real effects, and lasting. Yet I find it difficult, a half century later, to make sense of what that might have meant at the time. We have seen worse pictures since, even more reductive and victimizing than these. We may have become inured to them, as Susan Sontag predicted in her 1977 essay On Photography. But in 1971 these were still shocking images to juxtapose with the glitter of popular music, latterly better known for drugs, free love, and forays into the far-out. Images of human devastation commanded headlines in those times, and real-time televisual tragedy was a novelty.

Naeem Mohaiemen (page 40) reminds us that the Bangladesh liberation struggle was one of the first televised wars, and that

electronic media [was] the deciding factor in the mobilisation of world attention to this conflict.

Images of ‘pre-technology’ Bengali refugees were of vital shock value in keeping Western eyes on the war. We should also keep in mind that Susan Sontag would not publish her definitive accusation of ‘disaster porn’ until 1977, so we could suppose that we had not yet learned to read such images as harmful to those depicted and empowering to those who view them.

When we look at that child in 2020, we see her knowing not only the harms caused by such images, but also knowing the conditions that brought her there. And yet with all of this knowledge, the picture on the album still evokes in me the same childish or childlike feelings. I want to ask, how could any child be left like this, hungry, uncared for? Who allowed this?

“My friend came to me…”

These images were reductive and victimizing, and they did help form an enduring world opinion of Bangladesh. But do we miss the possibility that these images were part of the plan, to elevate the charitable face of the enterprise beyond political question, as a distraction from its more subversive intent: to sing aloud the name of a country as yet unrecognized by the world? Was this rock music as political activism, cloaked in humanitarian aid? There are good reasons to believe this was the case, and that George Harrison acted out of solidarity with the underdog in an unjust and unequal fight, not because he had some grandiose notion of saving the starving, but because his friend asked him to help.

He tells the story in the opening to his single ‘(We’ve got to relieve) Bangla Desh’, the intro of which finally went:

My friend came to me, with sadness in his eyes

He told me that he wanted help

Before his country dies

At the press conference to announce the concert, George Harrison said:

The political side – I’m not interested. There is a war – any war is wrong as far as I can see. Bad situation there. All I’m trying to do is to generate enough money, and make sure the money is distributed in such a way as to alleviate some of the agony. That’s all. I’m not interested in the politics.

Samantha Christiansen takes these claims at face value. But was George Harrison really so uninterested in the politics? A closer read suggests otherwise. In his biography he reflected that the greatest achievement of the concert was to have raised awareness of the conflict. Others around him commented on how wrapped up with it he had been. Ravi Shankar, the friend he was trying to help had spoken to him about the conflict at length; he widely read about the conflict in the months before August. In a 1997 television interview, Harrison and Shankar recalled the event:

Ravi Shankar:

Many of my relatives were there. They came as refugees, a lot of children. So all that was very painful to me and I was at that time planning a benefit show and maybe raise 20,000 …. 25,000 … 30,000 dollars and send it you know … and George happened to be in Los Angeles at that time, and he saw how unhappy I was, and I told him. He said ‘that’s nothing, let’s do something big’

George Harrison:

America was actually shipping armaments to Pakistan, who were, you know, just massacring everybody, and the more I read about it and understood what was going on, I thought, “Well, we’ve just got to do something” and it had to be very quick. And what we did really, was only to point it out. That’s what I felt.

‘Only to point it out’ was a radical act, intentionally so. This was not the ‘help the starving’ message of Live Aid so much as ‘be aware of the politics’; perhaps a critique of charity concerts developed since Live Aid cannot help but miss these elements. Yet Srinath Raghavan sees these as political interventions:

There was no mistaking the message of the concert. By invoking the name of “Bangladesh” and by refusing the more cautious alternative of “East Pakistan” or “East Bengal”, Ravi Shankar and George Harrison laid bare their political sympathies … The audiences were left in little doubt that the Bangladesh crisis was a political as well as a humanitarian tragedy.

There are other reasons to think the concert was politically aware. Multi-millionaire pop star though he was, at 28, George Harrison, The Beatles, and popular music more generally were still part of the counterculture, even if this was never ideological in the strict political sense of the times. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones traced their roots to the rebellion and resistance of Black American music; Bob Dylan rewrote folk and protest music for the changing times. The American war in Vietnam had been a lightning rod for musical activism. Pop music still took a stance against the establishment, militarism and empire, even if by the early Seventies it looked to have lost its moral purpose amid the hedonistic excess.

Some people would say the concert for Bangladesh was an expression of Harrison’s spiritualism and counter-cultural politics. Martin Scorsese’s 2011 documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World portrayed him as:

an iconoclastic thinker who doggedly pursued his own way in music, spirituality and relationships … a leader of key social trends and moments, rather than a follower, a notion that broadly contrasts with Harrison’s more usual public image as a subordinate to Lennon and McCartney.

Such a revision could do well to take another look at the Concert for Bangladesh, a startling intervention into world politics that reverberates today in both how the West sees the rest, and in the harnessing of celebrity power for global and developmentalist aims.

Watching The Concert 50 Years Later

We are now used to the uncharitable idea that celebrities adopt causes to boost their brand, but this was as far from George Harrison’s truth as can be imagined. His post-Beatles career was flying; he had produced the highly regarded Wonderwall film soundtrack, and released a triple album, All Things Must Pass, that topped the charts both sides of the Atlantic. Yet he was aware of his brand power, and so when his friend asked for his help, he knew he could lend his fame to a good cause. Graeme Thompson wrote (page 222):

He had, he later admitted, become emboldened by virtue of being a Beatle, and he was also learning from Lennon’s bolshie chutzpah: “Let’s film it and make a million dollars!”

Organizing the concert turned into a six week marathon of persuading rockstar friends, finding producers and filmmakers, talking to journalists, tax bods, and an astrologer, this last to establish the lucky dates for the event – which fortunately coincided with a date on which Madison Square Garden in New York City, the preferred venue, was available.

Pulling off an event of this scale and complexity was a feat by any standards. It is all the more remarkable when we realize that it was pulled off by a man who had come to hate live performance and who, for all his experience, had never stood up in front of a crowd as the main man; he had always been part of a band, even if it was the band for so many millions. Insider accounts say he was nervous, never sure his big star friends would overcome their own fears (Dylan, after his motorcycle accident and years away from live performance) or addictions (Clapton, heroine) to actually show up. And he was only 28 when he magicked up this pioneering event. It took guts and slog; Harrison did it because he wanted to help his friend, whose people were being killed and displaced in their millions. 

The gamble paid off: the Concert was a sellout success, unique musically because of its spectacular mix of star performers, and in the curious combination of tragedy and politics that brought it together. Ravi Shankar kicked it off with a virtuoso set with musicians easily as starry in their own milieu as the rockstars that followed them. Playing alongside Ali Akbar Khan, Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty, Ravi spoke first of the tragedy in Bangladesh, and then introduced their performance of ‘Bangla Dhun’ – a piece he described as ‘based on a folk tune of Bangladesh’. He could have said ‘Bengal’, and it would have been as accurate. But having explicitly denied any political intention, he immediately made the political affinities of the event clear, by proclaiming this a country with a beautiful and important culture, fit to start a world class concert on a world stage.

The novelty of Indian music for the American audience is clear in the famous moment when the audience applauds early on, and Shankar thanks them for ‘appreciating the tuning, and hopes they will appreciate the playing more’. The film of the concert shows a shortened version of the set, and edits out much more of the concert, perhaps because both audio and video quality were uneven. The concert we can see now is an edited and overdubbed mix of parts of both of the two concerts played on that first day in August, 1971. But the section is shot to showcase the musical partnership between the players, with screens split diagonally to film them listening and responding to each other in real-time, in this most glorious life-affirming performance.

Musical partnership is a thread throughout: the hugest stars showed up to George’s gig to act as backing musicians in an all-star line-up of the like never seen before, egos paused for a bigger cause. The rock section started with an exuberant version of Harrison’s ‘Wah Wah’ that pioneered the live use of Phil Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ multi-instrumental technique to maximal effect: a saturation of sound from an ensemble of backing singers, the band Badfinger, and a line of world class guitarists - not least the ineffable Eric Clapton, aroused from a heroin-induced stupor only hours earlier. One of the biggest stars in the world, Ringo Starr, was tucked away in the back, happily beating his drums in support of his friend’s cause. The film occasionally cuts to George himself, and we see him carefully scanning the crowd, trying to make out if it has worked, if people are listening to what he has to tell them.

There were star turns by R&B artist Billy Preston, one of several musicians known as ‘the Fifth Beatle’ for his backing work, and the multi-talented Leon Russell. But the show belonged in the end to Bob Dylan, who had nervously agreed to perform live because he was ‘really into the refugee thing’, and George had asked him.

Dylan had not performed live for some years, after a motorcycle accident and a hostile reception to his experiments with electronic guitar. But to one from a generation brought up on a view of Bob Dylan as the ‘old guy who couldn’t sing’ on Live Aid, his performance at its mother concert was a revelation. He opened with ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’, and nothing so far had quite captured the pain and fear of the people on whose behalf they sang as

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

or

I heard the roar of a wave

That could drown the whole world

There’s more, and finally, after George Harrison and Friends have left the stage, they return to perform ‘Bangla Desh’, singing the new nation into being in the imaginations of their vast and enthusiastic audience.

Sources

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