70. Our Country

Miriam Daniel, Rahel Nehemia, Toba Sofer, Simcha Yosef. Recorded by Avigdor Herzog Moshav Taoz, November 9, 1981. CD Track 36; I-31.

Nammukkuḷḷa rājiyaṃ nammukkāyi kiṭṭītě   (x2)
Raņḍāyiraṃ kŏllaṃ kaṣṭṭattinuśeṣaṃ   (x2)

1. Now we have our country, in our very own hands,   (x2) 
After all the suffering    of two thousand years.   (x2)

2. Under the Turkish raja, during all those years,   (x2)
We ate our food like beggars, ate it like charity.   (x2)

3. Then was Doctor Weizmann appointed to protect us;   (x2)
By the Siyon Sangam  he was named as chief.   (x2)

4. All the Israel People felt the great importance   (x2)
To join the Siyon Sangam, together to unite.   (x2)

5. For this excellent country, the work is now complete.   (x2)
Because of the Siyon Sangam, this work is now complete.   (x2)    

6. By Your grace, O God, all our scattered People—   (x2)    
All Israel—must prepare to gather in Siyon.   (x2)

7. It was the English raja, the king himself who told us:   (x2)
“You may go,” the raja said, “to your ancestral land.”   (x2)
    
8. He gave to Herbert Samuel the royal authority,   (x2)
The power to redeem, redeem the people of God.   (x2)

9. Oh merciful God, we pray: please send to us now,   (x2)
Send the sacred Messiah as our king to reign.   (x2)

10. For the Israel people, caught waiting in between,   (x2)
Let them come together and unite in their own place.   (x2)

11. Bring shalom for comfort. May Eliyahu Hanabi   (x2)    
And Mashiya ben David come now to redeem.   (x2)

12. By giving light in Siyon, O Strong God, we pray:   (x2)
May the holy Temple be built up right away.   (x2)

Probably composed in the 1920s, this Zionist song is full of historical references—to the end of Ottoman Turkish rule after World War I and the establishment of the British Mandate for Palestine; to the British Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine; to the choice of Chaim Weizmann as head of the international Zionist Organization (here called the Siyon Sangam); and to the British appointment of the Jewish politician Herbert Samuel as High Commissioner in Palestine (1920–25). In its concluding stanzas, the song reflects the religious messianic hopes associated with the early stages of Zionism, in contrast to later Kerala Zionist songs of the 1950s.

The text is found in just four notebooks, one from Kadavumbhagam-Kochi and three from Parur. In 1995, Rivka Yehoshua from Parur sang it for me in Moshav Aviezer to one of the tunes included in “The Song of Sarah Umma” (song 43). It may well be that “Our Country” was composed in Parur, but for this 1981 recording in MoshavTaoz , it was sung with a very different melody by Simcha Nehemiah Yosef and her mother, Rachel Nehemiah, along with two other women from Kochi, singing from the Nehemiah family notebook, S-14. 

Simcha recently explained to Venus Lane that her mother (or perhaps someone else) had set this Zionist song to the melody of a non-Malayalam song called Tiyarata, which had been brought to Kochi by her own father, Moses Nehemiah. He had learned it in Rangoon while he was employed there until 1943 (along with many other Kerala Jewish men). Tiyarata is found transliterated into Malayalam script near the end of notebook S-14, on page 156 immediately before the Malayalam text of “Our Country.”^[1] The Nehemiah family and other women from Kochi called it a “Burmese song” and enjoyed singing it without knowing its language or the meaning of its words.

My thanks to Sreemati Mukherjee, Senior Lecturer in Bengali Language at Cornell University, who identified Tiyarata as a love song in the Bengali language, and noted that many Bengalis from India had also found employment in Burma during this time period.

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^[1] This final section of the notebook was hand-written and signed by Moses Nehemiah himself. See Cernea 2006 for a history of Indian Jews in Burma.