Desh Bideshe Berai Ghure

In my doctoral research, I worked on Arnold Bake’s wax cylinder recordings from Bengal from the 1930s as a listener and a music practitioner and here in this concluding section, I am presenting a soundtrack which I have created by stitching various sounds and songs together. Let this soundtrack speak for itself, without too much explanation. All I can add here is some bits of information. I conceived this soundtrack and recorded myself partly at home and partly in Suchal Chakraborty’s Little Peak Studio in Kolkata. The parts I recorded at home on my Zoom H2N recorder in the middle of the night are intimate, but rough and noisy. You can hear me shuffling in my seat and turning pages of my book. I am not such a good recordist and do not have the skill to pay attention to technical perfection while performing and recording myself. The noises are audible and we did not try to erase them—let them be as they are. Such noises also contain critical information about the recordist and the context of the recording.

Then I carried my recordings to sound designer Sabyasachi Pal and together we sat and mixed the track, over two days. It is Sabyasachi who did the actual work of mixing; I merely told him what was on my mind.

This soundtrack is made of two main songs. Rabindranath Tagore’s composition ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’, which is also the national anthem of Bangladesh, and ‘Ami Kothay Pabo Tare’—the song of the nineteenth century composer Gagan Harkara. In my singing I move from one song to another, back and forth, as I stitch the two songs together, also bringing in the sounds from Bake’s wax cylinder recordings. In the course of this work I have realized that home and homeland are as illusory as the moner manush, the one whom the heart desires and for whom the search never ends.