Introduction

‘Every passion borders on the chaotic but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.’ –Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking my Library’, in Harry Zohn transl. Illuminations, edited with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p.60.

My first encounter with Arnold Bake’s Bengal recordings was at the British Library in 2004. It took years for this encounter to start becoming a ‘collector’s passion’. I kept meeting him on the road, as he was part of the road that I was walking, alone, and on the shared journeys of The Travelling Archive. Bake’s sounds, sights and tales of Bengal from about ninety years before me are my inherited memory. It is in the course of my work with his recordings that I became conscious of this inheritance.

From the end of 2013, I began to formally work on a doctoral research entitled ‘Songs of Absence and Presence: Listening to Arnold Bake’s Wax Cylinder Recordings from Bengal (1931-34)’ at the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, under the supervision of Professor Amlan Dasgupta. As I present this set of recordings from the last seven years, marked perhaps by what Benjamin says is a ‘dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order’, I know that too much remains unfinished. I have arranged the sessions chronologically from 2014 although within this order of time, you will find jump-cuts from theme to theme and many abandoned trails. There was also the going back to the same song or place again and again, and always finding a little bit more of something—some piece of previously unnoticed sound or silence.

Beginnings also have beginnings. As I look back, I find a funny email dating to 2007, in which the director of the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE), Dr Shubha Chaudhuri, is writing to me about an article I wrote for the first issue of IFA’s journal ArtConnect. ‘I just read ur piece in Arts Connect and remembered meeting you here! Glad it all went thru and it is a lovely evocative piece of your “journey”. I hope you will consider archiving your recordings with us here at ARCE and think about making some recordings available on Smithsonian Globalsound … I would like to also add some information – that the Bake collection is at ARCE also and has been here and much used since 1982- and not available only in England. Also, the name is Arnold Bake.’ Whatever made me write Adriaan Bake instead of Arnold is something I still do not know; I don’t suppose anyone has ever called Arnold Adriaan Bake by his middle name before or after this huge faux pas! However, that surely was the beginning of something. Then the first visit to ARCE in Gurgaon to see their Arnold Bake Collection, in November 2009; and I remember the joy of seeing the baul footage—the graceful dancing baul—and Dinu Thakur and Nandalal Bose covered in colour, followed by students, talking and laughing, a flower tucked behind Nandalal’s right ear, on some Dol Purnima (Holi) morning. Earlier that year I was giving a lecture at the Mahindra United World College near Pune. I see from old emails that I had said something about an album compiled by musicologist Alain Danielou and its review by ethnomusicologists Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy and Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, at which two members of the audience had informed me that Nazir and Amy were their friends, but also gave me the sad news that Nazir had passed away in June that year. So, it was Binaifer Malegam and Jehangir Batiwala of Poona Music Society who first wrote to Amy to introduce me, and something began to flow. From that to a meeting the next month in Mumbai with Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, co-creator with her late husband, Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy of The Bake Restudy in India 1938-1984—all of this was happening even before this website was created and launched. Items from ARCE’s Bake holdings. and our conversations with Amy became part of our website which we launched in 2011. But before that Sukanta Majumdar and I were in Leiden, at the university library asking for the Arnold Bake Collection. We were given temporary library cards and the next few days we spent looking through Arnold Bake’s photographs and letters from Santiniketan to his mother, written in the late 1920s and early 30s, familiar faces in the photos and unfamiliar words in Dutch staring at us; in their midst the flicker of names of people and places we know—Surul, Mr Datta, Gurudev, Sunitibabu… Every letter was written on a Wednesday, we realised. Of course! That is the weekend in Santiniketan after all. We began taking photos of those photos and letters. Finally, in 2013, before I wrote my doctoral research note, The Travelling Archive had made a short audio-video installation piece entitled Footsteps of Sound for an exhibition on early sound recordings in India and I wrote an essay for the catalogue, ‘Man with the Recording Machine’. My doctoral research which followed seems now to have been the logical next step. At that time though I was not entirely convinced I was doing the right thing.

No research is done by any one person, whatever our claim might be. The many voices which can be heard below, and the many collectors of these voices, are proof of the collective of which I am part. Where no other recordist or collector is mentioned, the recording is mine.