History of the Study

Bengal has been the bed of major revolutions in the nation. It has experienced the most tumultuous of socio-cultural movements. India reached its intellectual best during the Independence revolution, and Bengal provided some of the most noteworthy brains in it. The renaissance in this nation saw the likeness of Vidya Sagar, Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Vivekananda from Bengal; then in the pre-Independence period saw rise of the great Rabindra Nath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Dwijendralal Roy, Jibonananda Das, Rajanikanta Sen, Atulprasad Sen, Dilip Roy, and many more; while after Independence we have contemporary literary figures like Buddhadeb Basu, Sudhindranath Dutta, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Saiyad Mujtaba Ali, and modern writers like Nirode C. Chowdhury, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, who are bright children of Bengal. The prime reason behind citing this pedagogic inventory is, to defend the cultural and intellectual awareness and progressive outlook of this tremendously prolific landmass.

In Bengal, I find a dynamic enthusiasm about varied forms cultural amplification, amongst the people of Bengal. However much we critique the globalization process, we still embrace it in myriad sorts. And it is needless to say that Calcutta became the seat of all cultural upheavals and changes. Calcutta, which can be described as a heterogenetic centre as opposed to orthogenetic type of old cities, which not only carried forward its long-established local cultures, but also, created new modes of thoughts, both among the rich and the poor, that were in conflict with the old culture. These new modes either superceded or modified the thoughts associated with the old culture.

If we look at the history of Bengali Music, in context to the city of Calcutta, we would notice that towards the early 18th century, in the pre-natal stages of Calcutta, a lot of people were coming into the city, bringing with them their own cultures and their own music. Two socio-economic groups of Bengalis emerged in that stage, in the course of the growth and development of a metropolitan city under a colonial administration. Of the two, one is the Bengali elite and the other is that of the lower order migrants. These were the people from various walks of life; they were the craftsmen, goldsmiths, farmers, fishermen, washer-men, and so on. They found certain kind of patrons in the city. And it’s very interesting that the kind of class divide that dominates the cultural taste today is not relevant to the context of that time, because often the patrons and the lower order people came from the same category of continuum of culture, and therefore they shared the same kind of music. At that particular time, there were two particular combinations of political forces, which were very strong…one was the nationalist force that was coming up, and the other was the Victorian morality of the ruling British government. This combination proved fiery for the music of Calcutta in those days.

The feel of rebellion was evident in the tunes of the songs. There was a distinct opinion of protest voiced through the music and lyric of songs sung in Bengal, as it later forayed into the vanguard in the form of “Adhunik Gaan” and “Jibonmukhi Gaan”. At that point of time, most of this music would be considered BAWDY because they would be based on BODY. So, culturally, there was a banishment of both the BAWDY and the BODY from the sphere of music.

The ALTENATIVE BENGALI MUSIC or the POPULAR BENGALI MUSIC is based on a history of a very violent silence in alternative music. Though we find an evident comeback of it in the 90s, the foundations were laid much earlier during the 70s. In fact, I find Rabindranath Tagore a post-modern in the true senses; his creations are extremely progressive and ahead of his times, he wrote at his time what nobody else could or did, how will one analyze that? There is a mention of “Nagar Philomel” as being the first band formed in Bengal that catered alternative music, though “Mohiner Ghoraguli” is considered the pioneer of it; though they couldn’t reach out to the audience, mainly due to their music an lyrics being highly obscure from the common man’s grasp and starkly different from its contemporary Bengali mainstream music. In the songs I find a very high quota of individualistic emotion, which is characteristic of its social air, that of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing population. Gautam Chattopadhyay spearheaded “Mohiner Ghoraguli” apart from steering a musical revolution. An eccentric, he thought of a music that was ahead and inspired only a few of his epoch, but showed its true effect with time. This happened primarily because there was a gap between the listening subject and the singing subject. There was not enough audience to carry on this music. It was music without an audience to a large extent.

We find the advent of a new variety of lyric and sound, in the early 90s, with Suman Chattopadhyay. He was the first, perhaps, to construct a self which could provide an alternative without toeing the dominant Marxist line, that is, broadly being left but being left without having political affiliation. Suman changed the whole path of Bengali music. With him, Bengal found a new voice, a voice previously absent, which sung in protest, but was self-critical at the same time. This, I think, was a major departure. It is typical of Bengalis to create an all-perfect “I” and at the same time an “enemy” of “I”, and then a continuous struggle of the two to prove that there is no problem with “I” and everything is wrong with the “enemy”. But Suman begged to differ; he was a critic…a critic of himself, a critic of his times. Suman, now known as Kabir Suman
The alternative form of music – as pursued in Bengal can not be matched to the cultural state of any other territory of the country. Facts would reveal that, in the last ten years, the way music has evolved here after Suman Chattopadhyay, Anjan Dutta, Nachiketa, or Shilajit initiated the movement…has not been the case anywhere else. Bengal saw an intellectual renaissance in the 40s and again in the 70s. Politically, the youth of the era were silenced after that time and fed with steady streams of social conditioning. The positive anger, which leads to new ideas were muted in an alarmingly simple manner. The result was a flat mono-urban culture. Walking outside this realm was unlikely. Aptly it was in Bengal that the anger resurfaced. It showed itself in poetry, and then it showed in music.
And finally as an expression of this anger, Rock Music arrived, it was a new generation…and they were not just knocking the door, they were kicking it.