In 2003, when we had just about begun to make our field recordings, one of our first trips was to Saptiguri village in Sahabad tea garden in North Bengal, 38 km west of Siliguri town. We went following the beautiful, recorded voice of Nirmala Roy, a singer of bhaoaiya, to listen to her live and […]

From the time that I had set out for Rangpur in Bangladesh, I was keen to find one singer whom I had heard on a recording made by the ethnomusicologist Deben Bhattacharya (1921-2001), who is known for his collection of songs from the gypsy trail, among other things. Deben Bhattacharya, a Bengali originally from Benaras […]

Bishwanath Mahanta, the music teacher from Mahiganj in Rangpur, whom we had met in 2006, passed away on 2 March 2020. As I have contact now through Facebook with one of the Rangpur girls we met on that trip, she gave me the news of his death. We have often thought of going back to […]

Sudheer Palsane and I went to Rahima Kolita’s house in Krishnai, Goalpara, in Assam on our way back from Cachar, also in Assam, in the monsoon of 2005. It was our last-but-one stop at the end of a long journey of about 15 days. We had a taken a bus from Guwahati early in the […]

Changrabandha, is a small town in the India-Bangladesh border in Coochbehar district of North Bengal, where we went to record some bhaoaiya musicians. Abhay Roy, one of the main singers of this session and a health department employee, lived here and the session was organised by our local guides in Coochbehar, Chandan Paul and Amulya […]

Back in 1993 a Kolkata-based ‘institution of folk culture’ called Bhromora had brought out a set of eight audio tapes titled Shikorer Sandhane or ‘In Search of Roots’, with support from the Sangeet Natak Academy in New Delhi. It was an imaginatively produced collection of folk music from different parts of West Bengal and some […]

This was my first field trip, a kind of recce before the formal start of my IFA-supported project to explore biraho in the folk repertoire of Bengal. I went with my friend, Sudheer Palsane, a cinematographer. He had a Sony PD 150 DV camera, which was our recording equipment for the session. The reason for […]