We are marking the year as 2003, as that is when Moushumi Bhowmik sent a proposal entitled ‘Love, Loss and Longing: Biraho in the Folk Music of Bengal’ to India Foundation for the Arts for a research and documentation grant; it took a year for them to decide, but she had already started to travel, alone and with friends, by 2003. Around 2004, Moushumi met Sukanta Majumdar, then a film school student, and for over a decade and a half, they travelled together, collecting ‘oceans of sound’ and shells from the shore, filling their bags and their heads with field recordings, plucking sounds from the shelves of archives along the way, encountering living archives of songs bent with time, soon to turn to ashes floating in the river; soon to mingle with the earth. That earth of Bengal is from which this archive, like a tree, grows and branches out, skyward bound. In a sense, this archive of music and sounds birthed itself in the course of an expansive and immersive journey into physical spaces and worlds of listening.

On the road we experienced time as a physical presence. You record someone now, she might be gone in moments. The present was becoming past in the blink of an eye, so we had to think about the future. How do we take this ever-growing past into the future? This question is essentially political, because to it is attached the question of how to listen and to what we shall listen. Over the years The Travelling Archive has evolved into a collective of voices, including the voice of the recorded, the recordist and the listener. This website holds that tangle of voices, it signals possible ways of listening. But, there are many other ways of listening too, of which we do not yet know.

Unfurling the Map

I was picking up music with which I could instinctively connect, as a musician. There was no route map laid out before me, only repeated visits to music stores of Patuatuli in old Dhaka…

Of the Record