Growing up in pre-liberalization socialist India in the 1980s, one of my memories includes this song being drilled into our heads times ad-nauseum. Come 15th August (Independence Day)/26th January (Republic Day), all the kids in the school were ushered into the school assembly hall or “maidan” and we sang patriotic songs that were interspersed with a liberal dosage of “Hum Honge Kamyaab, Ek Din”. Not that anyone protested, the song has a haunting melody and an unexplainable power to provide spiritual upliftment. The song even plays over and over in “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron”, one of my favorite satirical comedies.
Of course, no one bothered to explain the significance of the song or its origins because “it was not part of the curriculum”. So over the past weekend, as I was laying in bed recuperating from the effects of the allergy season, with my cough medicine starting to kick in, imagine my surprise when I hear the tune on a local channel in Florida, USA! Of course, the medication kicked in and I don’t remember who or what the tune was connected to – most likely a commercial for a local church, which is not unusual when you live in the South. But I made a “conscious” decision to look up the origins of this haunting tune and here it is.

This may come as a surprise to many people as it did to me but unlike what a hassled parent or teacher in India told you – the origin of the song is not from “somewhere in India most likely Bengal from where all patriotic songs came”, but rather from an earlier 20th century gospel song which later became the anthem of the US Civil Rights Movement and, later, even an inspirational anthem for the Bangladesh War of Independence.

The song derives from a gospel song, possibly a 1903 song by Rev. Charles Tindley of Philadelphia containing the repeated line “I’ll overcome some day”, but more likely a later gospel song containing the line “Deep in my heart, I do believe / I’ll overcome some day.” However, there are also earlier acknowledgements of the song date, with Pete Seeger, one of the first artists to record the song, noting that various versions of it can be traced to integrated meetings of black and white coal miners in the early 1900s and to black churches in the 1800s. (source).
In Charleston, South Carolina in 1946, striking employees of the American Tobacco Company, mostly African American women, were singing hymns on the picket line.

The lyrics of “Hum Honge Kamyaab, Ek Din” (quoting from memory):

Hum Honge Kamyaab
Hum Honge Kamyaak
Hum Honge Kamyaab Ek Din

man mein hain vishwaas
poora hain vishwaas
Hum Honge Kamyaak Ek Din”

The lyrics of “We shall overcome”:

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day

Oh, deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day

Pete Seeger is credited with actually recording the song and making it a worldwide phenomena. “The Boss” did his own version of the song in his 2006 album “We shall overcome: The Seeger Sessions”.

Pete Seeger (or someone else, he himself isn’t sure and writes that it may have been Highlander’s Septima Clark) changed “We will overcome” to “We shall overcome”; Seeger sang it with others at the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh, N.C., in 1960. He added some verses (“We’ll walk hand in hand”, “The whole wide world around”) and taught it to Californian singer Frank Hamilton, who taught it to Guy Carawan, who re-introduced it to Highlander in 1959. From there, it spread orally and became an anthem of southern African American labor union and civil rights activism. [Dunaway, 1990, 222-223], [Seeger, 1993, 32] Seeger has, on occasion, credited Carawan with authorship.

Peter Scholtes has some more information and some timeless photos about “We Shall Overcome” in his blog.

No one knows how or when the song reached India or who first did the Hindi version but it became a standard affair in schools. The song was popular in Bengal as “Amra Karbo Joy” and yet another version, Ek Din Surjyer Bhor which became an anthem during the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971.

In India, its literal translation in Hindi “Hum Honge Kaamyab / Ek Din” became a patriotic/spiritual song during the 1980s, particularly in schools, and the song’s popularity has continued to endure.
In the Bengali-speaking region of India and in Bangladesh there are actually two versions, both of which are incredibly popular among school-children and political activists. “Amra Karbo Joy” (a literal translation) was translated by the Bengali folk singer Hemanga Biswas and re-recorded by Bhupen Hazarika. Another version, translated by Shibdas Bandyopadhyay, “Ek Din Surjyer Bhor” (literally translated as “One Day The Sun Will Rise”) was recorded by the Calcutta Youth Choir during the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence and became one of the largest selling Bengali records of all time. It was a particular favourite song of Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and regularly sung at public events after Bangladesh gained independence.

To this day, “Hum Honge Kamyaab, Ek Din” continues to endure and be sung in schools across India, and hopefully will do so even more, because of its proud heritage and roots.

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