We grieve the passing of Chandrabati mashima. At the same time we feel blessed to have known her through this last decade of her life, although it seems like too short a time now.. Chandrabati mashima opened for us new worlds of listening and understanding music. Also new ways of understanding what it is to […]
Chandrabati Roy Barman was invited to the Baul Fakir Utsav in Kolkata in 2010. It was through our work that our friends in Kolkata had come to know about her. Our friend and guide in Sylhet, Ambarish Dutta, brought a team to this festival; this became the beginning of a new phase of music sharing […]
Chandrabati Roy Barman and Sushoma Das were both born and brought up in the natural environment of song and rituals in villages in the Sunamganj area of Sylhet in eastern Bangladesh, a region known for its music and mystic poets. This was the time before Partition in 1947, for both women are now above 80. […]
I went with the disembodied voice of the seamen, plucked from the sound archive, to the one who keeps songs in her body. Sushoma Das was 90 when I went to her in 2018. She could hear what we can’t.
On questions of the appropriation of folk music by mainstream media, divided Bengal, hegemony, ‘purity’ of dialect and diction and so on. Written by Moushumi in response to a Facebook post after the death of the singer and composer Kalikaprasad Bhattacharya.
Response is about how people have responded to our work of The Travelling Archive so far. But more than just stringing the comments in the Press and from friends, also people we do not personally know, this section opens up roads which can take us in endless directions. Those whose voices we have brought to […]
Travelling Archive Records is a record label which comes out of field recordings made in the course of our continuing journey through Bengal and other connected places. What we are presenting here are audio essays, in the format of the CD, in which our own recordings are woven in with recordings made by others, songs […]
Fayazullah (stoker) from Damrasari, Hirpur Bazar, Sylhet became a story about a lost place and a found song. Looking for Damrasari, we went from place to place, met a curious bunch of people, almost reached the Indian border at Tamabil and recorded song and dance we weren’t at all expecting to find.
When friends decided to start a festival of the music of the bauls and fakirs of Bengal at Shaktigarh maath, a community ground in Jadavpur, South Kolkata, in 2006, quite naturally we got drawn in. Not so much as The Travelling Archive, but as individuals. In fact, we hadn’t started to think of our work […]