RMIM Archive Article "379".
From the RMIM Article Archive maintained by Satish Subramanian
#
# RMIM Archives..
# Subject: Salil - phenomenon in Bengali music - part 1
#
# Posted by: Sambit Basu sambit@agniroth.com
# Source: Sangeet Natak, Jan-Mar 1989
# Author: Suman Chatterjee (Manab Mitra)
#
This article was published in "Sangeet Natak" magazine, Jan-March 1989
issue. The article discusses Salil Chowdhury's work mostly in
reference to Bengali music.
Sambit
About the author:
Manab Mitra is the penname of Suman Chatterjee. Suman had a pretty
long preparation in Hindustani classical music and in songs of
Rabindranath. He had also been a very close and active follower of
Bengali modern songs. In early 70s, after cutting two discs of
Rabindrasangeet he abandoned his music career to go abroad. As a
radio-journalist he worked in France, USA and Germany. While staying
abroad Suman took formal lessons in Western music - classical guitar
and piano. In late 80s he gave up journalism, returned to Calcutta to
try his career in Bengali music. His first cassette in 1992 gave him
immense popularity and Bengali music a much needed change. He works as
lyrist, composer, arranger and singer of his songs. Suman probably is
the most discussed personality in Bengali cultural scenario in last
couple of decades.
Salil Chowdhury: A Phenomenon in Modern Bengali Music
- Manab Mitra
(Part 1)
As a child in British India, he heard the working people's nocturnal
songs in tea-garden in Assam, where his father was employed. And it
was there that his father played on an old gramophone discs of
European classical music left behind by a homebound philharmonic
British colleague. The combination of these early memories must have
left a deep impression on a child who later became Salil Chowdhury.
His father sent him later to his relatives in Bengal where young Salil
started growing up in the rural milieu. He took up the bamboo flute,
an instrument essential to Bengali folk music as the Dotara or the
Ektara. Salil was soon on his way to becoming a self-styled flutist -
an identity his later compositions and modes of instrumentation were
to bear witness to for a long time to come.
Extensive formal lessons in music, in the traditional senses, were not
for him. His music lessons were essentially those accorded to him by
his surroundings - the environment of Bengal where music grows like
nature itself, myriad in its manifestations. He has always been, by
and large, an autodidact and a collector of elements of music from all
around. And he learned. Young Salil Chowdhury learned his lessons not
only from the music people make, but also from the life people live or
have to live and then make music because of or in spite of it.
It is impossible to consider Salil Chaowdhury's growth in music
without taking into account his social and political engagements, his
personality as a socio-cultural activist shaped in the 1940s. Music
was Salil's expression. But it was his social and political
environment that motivated him to express himself in words and music,
in songs.
Barely beyond his teens, Salil Chowdhury faced the turmoils of the
40s: the final phase of the struggle for India's independence, the
impact of the second world war, especially its economic impact on the
rural population of Bengal - the famine with all its ugly variations,
the relief work and the organizational activities of the Communist
Party of India.
By the time Salil Chowdhury was initiated to Marxist ideas and was
going to college in Calcutta, he had already begun writing songs. His
very early songs, though simple in structure, reveal a keen sense of
the social situation of the rural population, especially the peasants
and sharecroppers, exploited to the bone by the ruling classes. This
young song-writer's journey to the left-wing political and cultural
circles of Calcutta was that of a rural Bengali youth, bubbling with
creative vigour, trying to make his way into the urban intellectual
stronghold of the great metropolis. This entry was by no means easy
and was not always rewarded with welcoming gestures. But the leaders
of the Indian People's Theatre Association and the leading cultural
activists must have recognized the great talent of this young man from
Changripota (now Subhashgram in the 24 Parganas, West Bengal), and he
did receive their encouragement.
In a relatively short time, Salil Chowdhury became a key figure in the
left-wing cultural milieu where, in the 40s, IPTA reigned supreme. He
was asked to compose suitable songs and perform them with his group of
singers and musicians at all major gathering and conventions. And
Salil did have a song to fit any occasion, any important issue. These
songs were directly politically motivated.
There had been politically motivated songs in Bengal long before Salil
Chowdhury appeared on the scene. In urban Bengal they started taking
shape in the 19th century and culminated in the compositions of
Rabindranath Tagore and Dwijendralal Roy. Historically, Tagore and
Roy were also the important initiators of a new genre of songs - the
modern Bengali song. Hence in verbal diction and musical idiom, the
early, urban political songs, mostly patriotic in nature, were a part
of modern Bengali song itself.
Rural Bengal also produced its own political songs, sometimes more
radical in nature than their urban counterparts. In the matter of
opposition to British rule, political songs originating from rural
Bengal (like those of Mukundodas) were verbally more direct and
poignant than the "modern" political songs emanating from Calcutta.
The early decades of the 20th century saw the rise of armed struggle
of certain sections of the Indian population against British
imperialism. This new political force, the brave struggle and
self-sacrifice of the militants, their martyrdom and the ensuing
police terror, not only sharpened the political situation of a nation
under foreign yoke, but gave a new impetus to political songs as
well. In Bengal, Kazi Nazrul Islam's songs ushered in a new age of
political expression in music. The modern Bengali political song took
a sharp turn toward direct expressive of protest against and rejection
of imperialism. Subversive and explosive lyrics combined with strongly
accentuated rhythms and vigorous melodies with cutting ups and downs.
As the Indian Marxists started organizing peasants and workers and as
the progressive elements of the Indian intelligentsia consciously
started looking for new modes of literary and artistic expression to
embody the condition and needs of the exploited masses - and also
impart to the people, in general, a vision of liberation - a spate of
new political songs came to be written. In Bengal, these songs, fruits
of the left-wing cultural activism in general and essentially popular
in nature, have been known as "ganasangeet" (people's songs), a term
denoting not only a particular genre but a movement as well. This
movement of new political songs went hand in hand with the IPTA
movement which was sending far-reaching throbs of refreshingly
youthful creativity throughout India in the 40s and 50s.
When Salil Chowdhury arrived on the scene with his own compositions,
he was already a product of the afore-described history, with IPTA as
his historic platform. It would be ungrateful not to mention in the
context of IPTA and its activism in new political music in Bengal the
names of Jyotirindra Moitra, Binoy Roy, Haripada Kushari and Hemanga
Biswas. With their own contributions to the stream of political songs,
they were Salil Chowdhury's mentors. Their compositions were, more or
less, examples that were readily available to Salil Chowdhury as he
became a part of the movement. Another thing that IPTA offered Salil
Chowdhury was its series of conferences which took place in different
parts of India. In a certain interview Salil Chowdhury has recalled
that these IPTA conferences were somewhat like open universities where
so many interesting things could be picked up. Musicians from all over
India came and performed at these gatherings and Salil, the innate
collector and learner, would be listening hard, taking in elements of
the endless varieties of subcontinental music, certain phrases of
which he would cheerfully adapt to his own needs in his
compositions. An example: the opening movement of his famous political
song "Manbona e bondhone, manbona e srinkhole" is an adaptation of a
tune Salil Chowdhury heard in Andhra Pradesh. Like his great
predecessor, Rabindranath, Salil has utilized, in his long career of
in music, a broad range of musical influences from disparate sources,
modifying them, reshaping them and thus making them his own.
In one of his most-remembered early protest songs, "Bicharpoti tomar
bichar korbe jara", a song against the brutality of British justice in
its judgement of Indian freedom-fighters, Salil Chowdhury took as his
leitmotiv a popular Bengali "kirtan" tune, traditionally devotional in
character, and laced it with an openly political text, transforming an
old melody of devotion into a statement of explosive protest and
anger. It is interesting to note that this same "kirtan" motif had
been adapted in a song by Rabindranath for a completely different
purpose. In his song, "Bhenge mor ghorer chabi", Rabindranath used the
intimate and personal aspect of the traditional tune. Many years
later, Ustad Vilayat khan, in his Sitar improvisation on the same
tune, cashed in on the same aspect again. But Salil Chowdhury
impregnated the melody line with political message, replaced the soft
intimate contours with sharp edges - and a new song with a new
identity was born from the womb of the old. The soft intimacy of a
folk melody was suddenly transformed into the battle cry of the
oppressed people. With this one treatment of a traditional tune Salil
chronicled the changes that occur in the attitudes of a people toward
its past and present and also those that necessarily take place in the
body of music due to changed social circumstances. "Bicharpoti" still
remains one of the most famous agitprop songs both in West Bengal and
in Bangladesh.
Between 1945 and 1950 Salil Chowdhury composed some of his most
important political songs. They were important both in their political
impact and in their textual, tonal and structural novelty which
proclaimed this young composer's uniqueness. The lyrics were clear,
unequivocally direct and consistent in their themes. Moreover,
Salil's lyrics manifested a significant poetic skill. Seldom before
had a Bengali lyrist addressed the burning issues of his times in
songs written with such an acute sense of immediacy, powerful imagery,
and such a wealth of vocabulary.
But all these powerful lyrics would have been a waste, had it not been
for the structures of the songs. Salil Chowdhury's song structures and
his unique mode of phrasing words, melodies and rhythm patterns
probably constitute the key to understanding his uniqueness. These are
the most significant characteristics that set him apart as a composer
from most of his contemporaries.
As a composer of modern Bengali songs in the 40s and the 50s, Salil
Chowdhury had to face the formidable challenge embodied in the works
of his great forerunners: Rabindranath Tagore, Dwijendralal Roy, Kazi
Nazrul Islam and himangshhu Dutta. The first three were composers as
well as lyrists, while Himangshu Dutta was only a composer. These four
composers and lyrists had explored, with a great number and variety of
songs, countless modes of musical expression, and had created idioms
and patterns unknown before their times. They had experimented with
almost all musical elements and materials, available far and near, and
had shown a broadness of mind and boldness of spirit that remain
unique in the history of modern music and that of "song" in
general. Bengali folk music, Hindustani ragas, south Indian
modalities, European music - both classical and popular - anything and
everything was welcome to them as long as the raw material contributed
to the making of a new song. In modern Bengali song between the late
19th century and the end of 40s, the East had already met West, long
before such a term became fashionable in the culture industry in the
early 70s. The nascent spirit of modern India had discovered itself in
terms of its own endless wealth of music and had reached out for
distant shores in search of newer musical experiences, thus enriching
its own. Rabindranath, in a conversation with Dilip Kumar Roy, the
eminent son of Dwijendralal Roy, had already spelt out the ultimate
challenge of new Bengali music:
Should we then await the verdict of a special tribunal to find
out what belongs to the Bengalis and what does not? Listen, if
European music has flavoured your father's songs, what's so
wrong about it? Blind imitatio n would be wrong, but not
assimilation. Europe has been our neighbour for some two
hundred years now. Well, are we stones or barbarians that we
should turn down its gifts?
From the RMIM Article Archive maintained by Satish Subramanian