Sushoma Mashima, a Keeper of Songs
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.
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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.
Baotipara, a village of Faridpur near the town of Bhanga, was the home of the folk poet Banikanta Das and a place of kirtan. We have done fieldwork in this village many times and on this first trip, the women of Baotipara, aged probably between 20 and 45 years, sang songs of puja and wedding […]
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 […]
This was my first trip to Sylhet, escorted by Shah Alom Boyati. Boyatibhai took me to the shrine of Hazrat Shah Jalal, where we met Abdul Hamid ‘Jalali’. Then we went to Hamidbhai’s house in Sylhet town. Abdul Hamid, originally from Bogura in the north of Bangladesh, is a singer-composer of murshidi, bichchhed and Bangla […]
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 […]
They were all insiders to the sound of Arnold Bake’s recordings from the Dumka Hills, yet they were all different too. The listening sessions in Kairabani, Harinsingha, Jamuasol and at Johar and NELC in Dumka in Dumka town, revealed a range of reception and interpretation of the sounds held in Bake’s Santal cylinders.
Arnold Bake knew that students from Manipur used to come to Mainadal to their ‘tol’ to study the kirtan with the Mitra Thakurs. When he came to India for the last time in 1955, he wanted very much to go to Manipur, but couldn’t. What would he find if he went there then? How is kirtan performed in Manipur now?
I have shared the POW recordings with sound recordist Ali Ahsan of Kushtia, who carries in him a long history of listening to such songs, and the songs of the bauls and fakirs too. There used to be puthi readings in his home in his childhood, his grandfather would teach him to listen. Hence the old archival recordings, though buried under surface noise, revealed meanings to him which I would not be able to understand on my own.
Costis Drygianakis and Yiorgis Sakellariou, who have worked on Russian and Lithuanian folk music respectively, share their thoughts on the notion of traditional music.
Left: Yiorgis. Right: Costis The following is a conversation between electroacoustic music composers Costis Drygianakis and Yiorgis Sakellariou, both originating from Greece. Besides their compositional activities, Costis has been researching on and collecting folk music from Russia and other former Soviet republics while Yiorgis has done field work exploring music from Lithuania. His recordings are […]
On 9 June 2016, we were invited to take part in a public arts event in Sarsuna, an area on the south-western end of Kolkata, around an artists’ residency project called Chander Haat (www.chanderhaat.org). This event was called ‘Sarsuna Theke Jana’ or ‘Derives from the Metropolis’ and it was curated by Sayantan Maitra Boka of […]
The four recordings in this session come from an ongoing project on Manasamangal or the Song Cycle of the Snake Goddess, Manasa, which we have been recording, bit by bit, in different places in Bengal for some years. The idea is that over a period of time we will have different versions of the story […]
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. […]
For this session we had gone to the Kumar River, to record ‘bhatiyali’ in its ‘natural setting’—the famed ‘song of the boatman’ on the boat. That was the idea, but the session in turn has provoked questions about field recording and about the genre/form/musical structure(s) known as ‘bhatiyali‘. Is this really the boatman’s song or […]
Tareque had opened for me the possibility of having a new country; a country of the mind. What connected me to him was the fact that both of us were engaged in a kind of cartography, mapping our fragmented land of Bengal with songs and stories, crossing boundaries, making mental journeys to distant geographies, playing […]