Preparing for the Field

I met ethnomusicologist Felix van Lamsweerde (1934-2021) in his home in Santpoort Zuid. My friends, the Carnatic flautist and music scholar Ludwig Pesch and art historian Mieke Beumer took me to him.

Mieke and Moushumi at Tyler’s museum in Haarlem. Photo by Ludwig Pesch.

We talked about Dr Lamsweerde’s association with Arnold Bake and Jaap Kunst and his friendship with Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy, about Tagore’s visit to The Netherlands, Santiniketan and much more. Here are two clips from that conversation which took place on 30 April 2015.

All recordings on this page, also the ones in Leiden, were made by me on my Zoom H4N recorder.

Photos by Ludwig and Mieke.

I was in The Netherlands in April-May 2015 as I had a short-term Scaliger Fellowship to study the Arnold Bake holdings of the Special Collections of the Library of the University of Leiden. I was vigorously taking photos of things to read and see later. Other than letters, photographs and other papers, I also found several diaries and notebooks of Arnold Bake and his wife Cornelia from the 1926 to 1953 period. They are mostly in Dutch, but treasures troves in themselves. I wanted so much to know what Corrie was writing about their life in Santiniketan that I had two PhD students, both Bengali, help me by reading the pages I was photographing. And then I recorded their reading. Listening now it shows our tentativeness, the fun we were having, the mistakes we were making—the recordings are pretty disarming really!

The photos are all of things carefully kept at Special Collections, Leiden University Library.

Archishman Chaudhuri was into his third year of doctoral research at Leiden when we met and spent several days reading Corrie’s diaries, sitting in the noisy cafe. This track transports me to that space and time. Archishman teaches now at McGill University in Canada.

There were bits of things tucked into the notebooks and I was so fascinated to think of the people behind them.

Byapti Sur was also a PhD student at Leiden and now she teaches at the Thapar School of Liberal Arts and Sciences. This session with her was on the last day that we met, reading Cornelia Timmers-Bake’s 1929 diary pages. The university was closed on the day so anthropologist Erik de Maaker and filmmaker and English teacher Nandini Bedi offered us a room in their house to sit and work. There were discussion over words and Erik and Nandini also joined in.

I am very grateful to Archishman and Byapti for sharing their knowledge and time with me.

Postscript

In January 2021, had sent the above note to everyone on this page to check for errors and Dr Felix van Lamsweerde had written the following email to me.

21 January 2021

Dear Moushumi,

With some delay I am happy to react positive to your request to use the interview and the photo’s as part of your thesis and on your website. Only it is not clear for me any more which photo(‘s)  you selected.

Of course I realize that if I go through the audio I might sometimes think: I should have formulated my answers more clearly or otherwise, but it is now also an historical document and represents your source of information.

One little spelling mistake in your text: my house is officially located in Santpoort Zuid, and not Santpoorte.

I wish you success and also good health in this period of dangerous infections.

With warm regards,

Felix

On 31 July 2021, two days after I submitted my dissertation, Dr Lamsweerde passed away. I deeply regret that I could not show him my completed work.

Felix van Lamsweerde. Source: Internet