This rare and precious recording would have stayed in the British Library Sound Archives, unnoticed, unnamed and unplayed, had I not accidentally come across it in 2018. The process of naming Nabanidas’ voice was a longwinded journey. Young Purna Das Baul was in the concert with his father Nabanidas in 1956. In 2019, it was very emotional for Purna Das to listen to his father, sister, brother-in-law and friend, as well as to himself as a young man.
Laksmisvar Sinha had come to Santiniketan from Rarishal in Habiganj, Sylhet, now in Bangladesh. He was an explorer at heart who travelled to many lands and later became and a practising Esperantist, yet he remained rooted to his soil through his songs. I went looking for him in many places and found much more than this little archive can hold.
All that we get from the catalogue of Arnold Bake’s cylinders is that on 19 August 1933, he recorded a ‘Song of labour’ of some ‘Baori women working on the roof of the post office’, in Santiniketan. Their names, age and where they came from remains unrecorded.
In 2011 we were commissioned to make a piece of work by the National Maritime Museum in London, using footage from their film archives, as part of a series of programmes titled ‘Traders Unpacked’ which they had organised to mark the opening of a new gallery in the museum, on Britain’s trade with Asia. The […]
When the 25-year-old Ranen Roychowdhury came to Calcutta from Sylhet, he carried in the vessel of his body, songs from a home he had to leave behind. But this was not just generic communal music that he brought with him, this was also a music processed inside the artist, something of his own…
We had this session in the courtyard of our late friend, Sadek Ali’s house in Ambikapur bazar, Faridpur. The evening before we had had another session inside his house. Like his mentor, the poet Jasimuddin, Sadek Ali bhai was a true lover of music, which is why he could open his doors to anyone who […]
This was our second recording session with the well-known Sylheti singer Helal Miah, in his Limehouse council flat in East London. Ahmed Moyez had taken us to Helal. First we met in Moyez’s Surma News office, then went to this Limehouse flat on 3 March 2007. There was Helal and his friend Ahmed Ali, the […]
This audio clip is from a documentary film on people who live in the forest regions of south-western West Bengal and policies which govern their lives, for which I was asked to compose music. I decided to base the music on field recordings and so Sukanta and I went to Jahajpur village of Purulia, to […]
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 […]
His singing reminds us of Hemango Biswas’ Bhatiyali. Barindra singing
We have also brought to this page our own attempts to more creatively engage with our field recordings, connecting with the works of others before and after us. In Film, Art or Illustration?, we are searching for a lineage, a place to belong. Is what we are doing also not part of something larger; are […]
Moushumi will present at a workshop on THE ARCHIVE AS A KNOWLEDGE SITE: THE EXPERIENCE OF EUROPE AND INDIA, Organised by SCTR, JU in association with CNRS, France and IRN-AITIA.
Moushumi spent five days with students and teachers of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai and also spoke at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. Her main talk was on The Travelling Archive
