The Search Result for - Bichchhed:
‘Moving with the Song: Loss and Longing in the Migrations of Bengal’ is a paper Moushumi presented at a Sound and Anthropology conference in St. Andrews University in 2006, convened by anthropologist Stephanie Bunn and sound scholar and artist Cathy Lane. This was one of our earliest attempts to talk about our field recordings.
Borders and Freedoms/Borders of Freedom An 8-channel soundtrack, interspersed with video Languages: Bangla, English, Urdu, Khasi সীমান্ত ও স্বাধীনতা/স্বাধীনতার সীমান্তরেখা। This 41 min 20 sec soundtrack, which played in a loop in the long rectangular space of the gallery, every 10 minutes, was created as a meditation on the relation between borders and our […]
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 […]
Salamot Khan, who was Salamotbhai to us and was our friend and teacher, lived and died a ‘local man’ in Faridpur, in western Bangladesh in August 2015. Since his death, Faridpur, the place which gave to us some of the best of our songs–Ibrahim Boyati and Habib, Laila and Nuru Pagla, Jainuddin’s jari and Sadek […]
Bhungur Khan and his team of Manganiyar singers from Barmer in Rajasthan had been invited to our 10th Baul Fakir Utsav in Jadavpur Shaktigarh in January 2015. For some years we had been inviting a team of bhakti/sufi singers from outside Bengal, to come and sing songs which would have some overlap with the songs […]
We first met Linkon when we went to their house to record his mother and other women singing the Padma Puran on our first day in Dumra village in the Shalla region of Sunamganj, Sylhet. Our friend and guide on this trip, Suman Kumar Das, also lives in this village although his family originates from […]
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 […]
About eight months after we met Hajera Bibi in the courtyard of her house in Ambikapur, Faridpur, the 93-year-old singer and composer passed away, in December 2006. So this is probably the last recording of her voice, or maybe there were other visitors, although when we saw her, she seemed to be living a forgotten […]
Ruhitaswar Chakraborty, popularly known as Ruhi Thakur, a man who left such an indelible mark on us with his songs. Perhaps because he would be gone within a year of this recording? At the time of his death from cancer Ruhida was hardly in his mid-50s. A day before this recording session we had seen […]
Ibrahim Boyati is someone I knew from before the start of this project. I had first met him in Bangladesh in 1998, on the sets of Tareque Masud’s documentary Muktir Kotha, a film in which he was playing himself at a performance. Between Muktir Kotha and Tareque’s later film Matir Moyna (2001), two projects in […]
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 […]
Ali Akbar, a young folk singer from Kushtia, arrived at the home of my filmmaker friends Tareque and Catherine Masud, in Dhaka on this December night when I was staying with them. He had come to the capital to take part in some cultural event. The folk music collector, singer and radio and TV producer, […]
Monjila is a singer of bichchhed gaan and pala gaan who lives in Dhaka. I met her through the Bangladeshi filmmaker, my friend, Tareque Masud; she had played herself in his and Catherine Masud’s documentary on the oral history of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, Muktir Kotha (Words of Freedom, 1999) for which I had […]
This was my second field trip with Sukanta. The first one had also been to the temple town of Tarapith for the songs of the blind singer, Kanai Das Baul, but the session had got washed by rain, so we had decided to return the following week. My familiarity with the music of Kanai Das […]
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 […]
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 […]
Response is about how people have responded to our work of The Travelling Archive so far. But more than just stringing the comments in the Press and from friends, also people we do not personally know, this section opens up roads which can take us in endless directions. Those whose voices we have brought to […]
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
