Salil Chowdhury - an obituary (Long)
Sambit Basu
Salil Chowdhury, as a musical personality, is my favourite.
The informations for this article were gathered over a period of about 10
years. It's not possible for me to acknowledge to all the sources, because
I don't have their copies and I don't remember them explicitly. But of late,
two articles gave me some information:
1. Bangla Gana-sangeet-er dhara - Sudhir Chakrabarty
2. An article by Manab Mitra on Salil Chowdhury (Thanks to Sudipto
Chottopadhyay for providing me with a copy of the article).
And lastly, sorry for this looooooooooong babbling.
And the length of the article inhibited me from checking for the mistakes.
Sorry for all the mistakes - grammatical and/or spelling.
Regards,
Sambit
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Salil Chowdhury was born on 19th November, 1923 in a village called Sonarpur
in Bengal. His father was a doctor by profession but was very much into
music. Salil's elder brother Nikhil Chowdhury had his own orchestra name
"Milan Parishad". Also, Salil's family had a good collection of gramophone
records of Western Symphonies. Salil Chowdhury was brought up in this
musical atmosphere.
Salil spent a part of his early life in North East India's mountainous
state of Assam, where he gathered his appreciation for folks (one may recall
here that the tune of the song "chhota sa ghar hoga" sung by Kishore Kumar
or its Bengali version "ak je chhilo raja" sung by Antara Chowdhury was
an improvisation of a Nepalese folk tune). Also he spent a good number of
his formative years in rural bengal where, apart from going deep into Bengali
folk music, he polished himself as an accomplished flutist.
Salil Chowdhury came to Calcutta for his College studies. That was a time
of extreme political unrest. On one way it was the Indian National
Congress led anti-British movement, and on the other the left-oriented
anti-fascist movement. And the international arena was clouded heavily
by the on-going second World War. The platform for the left-oriented
intellectuals for their anti-fascist activities was the Indian People's
Theater Association or IPTA. Salil joined IPTA as a flute player.
In IPTA he directly came in contact with Binoy Ray, Sudhi Pradhan, Jyotirindra
Moitra and indirectly with Ravishankar et al. This is the time when Salil
started maturing as a professional musician and a social commentator. IPTA
movement gave rise to a new genre of Bengali songs called "Gana-Sangeet" or
"People's Song".
Slowly Salil started writing and composing songs for IPTA. In that he was
influenced by Binoy Ray, Jyotirindra Moitra, Hemanga Biswas et al. But
very soon he created his own niche and became one of the musical stalwarts
of IPTA. His penetration in leftist intellectual and cultural circle was
by no means easy. According to Salil himself, IPTA was very reluctant in
recognizing Salil's talent; but eventually they had to acknowledge his
genius because of the pressure of people's demand.
During the later days Salil became very lonely in IPTA. There was a major
difference of opinion about the form of his songs within IPTA, Hemanga
Biswas being the main critic of Salil's songs. Then the communist party
directed Salil to "pass" his songs through a committee before he makes
them public. And Salil revolted. He was tagged as "anti-party", "US-spy"
and he quit IPTA. By that time Salil's mentors also virtually had left IPTA.
Salil went on writing and composing Bengali modern songs, which he had been
doing since his association with IPTA. Even he quit IPTA, he continued to write
and compose "socially committed" songs along with the mainstream modern songs.
During his IPTA days, Salil and Hemanta Mukhopadhaya made a good combination,
and now this combination started producing long-lasting modern songs.
About this time Salil got an offer from Bombay movie industry, primarily
as a music director, but also as a story and screenplay writer. There also
Salil, very soon, made his own niche among the well known composers like
Anil Biswas, Naushad, Sachin Dev Burman, Madan Mohan, Shankar Jaykishan.
Madhumati was a big bang in hindi film-music industry. And after that he
continued producing good numbers for next 20-odd years. But in Hindi film
music Salil never became the number one composer. He was always considered
as a very good composer who composes off-bit music. Among the performers
he was known as a extremely knowledgeable perfectionist who composes
highly difficult tunes.
Salil's Bombay music-life turned out to be very educating for him and for
Bengali music. During this period two major things happened - Salil's
extensive experimentation with music arrangement and orchestration and
his musical association with Lata Mangeshkar.
Although he was always fascinated with the scope of proper orchestration
for Bengali songs, he didn't get chances to meet people who actually
had some first hand experience of arranging a big orchestral piece. Also
Bengali music never had enough money to afford whatever instrument Salil
wanted to use and experiment with. Bombay gave him that opportunity.
During these days Salil was accused of plagiarism and rightly so. He lifted
tunes from Mozart's symphony, from Hungarian martial song, from Nepalese
folk song, from Tagore's song and even from "Happy Birthday to You" for a
Bengali song. He surely put lot of originality in those, but the truth
remains that a plagiarism is a plagiarism.
During his Bombay stay another major work Salil did was to form Bombay
Choir with the help of Ruma Ganguly (Guha Thakurata). Salil has been
often referred to as the father of Indian choral music. Composing the
choral part of a song was always his forte and point scored over other
prime music directors - be it in the form of the main melody or as the
vocal refrain.
Parallelly Salil went on composing Bengali songs, and probably during this
time he contributed more to the Bengali music than any other musical
personality of post-Tagore era.
During this time he composed "Surer jhorna" - first Indian song to
use harmonized singing, "Ujjal ak jhNaak payra" accompanied by an
orchestral prelude resembling highly sophisticated Western symphony,
"Amay dubaili re, bhasaili re" (for film "Ganga") - resembling a
real bhatiyali (Bengal's boatmen's song), but used Piano as the
background instrument, "Ichchha kore porandaare gaamchha diya" (from
the same film) with a touch a rural humor, "Jhanana jhanana baaje" -
based on raga Kalavati, and the list goes on.
In 1970s Salil returned to Calcutta, primarily because Bombay film industry
took a sharp turn from the days of Naushad, SD Burman, Salil Chowdhury when
the changed public taste forced Salil to retire from Hindi film music.
Salil Chowdhury came back to Calcutta with a project of starting a new
sound studio. He founded Center for Music Research - CMR with a studio
named Sound On Sound. He devoted last 15 years of his life to experiment
with sound recording, and its application on music and occasionally
composing Bengali songs. But any significant achievement in the field of
sound recording compared to his achievements in music composition
is yet to be heard.
He wished to write a full-length opera in Bengali. Of late he composed
music for a film named "Vivekananda". Just before his death, Hrishikesh
Mukherjee decided to make a film (or may be a television serial) based on
Salil's story named "Dressing Table", for which he agreed to manage the
music. The project remains unfinished as of today.
Salil Chowdhury died in September, 1995 in Calcutta. Arguably Bengal's
greatest composer after Rabindranath Tagore and Dwijendralal Ray died
when the Hindi Film music is in the hand of untrained mediocre and
Bengali music...
Rajan P. Parrikar
>Salil Chowdhury, as a musical personality, is my favourite.
<deleted>
>In IPTA he directly came in contact with Binoy Ray, Sudhi Pradhan, Jyotirindra
>Moitra and indirectly with Ravishankar et al.
In the early 80s, I recall reading Salil's stinging criticism of the
Ravi Shankar's concerto scores written for Western orchestras. I particularly
liked Salil's outspoken and no-mincing-of-the-words style. Does anyone
have details of this?
>During his Bombay stay another major work Salil did was to form Bombay
>Choir with the help of Ruma Ganguly (Guha Thakurata). Salil has been
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Isn't she Kishore Kumar's first wife and Amit Kumar's mother? Is she
related to Satyajit Ray?
r