Songs of Absence and Presence

আছে, ছিলো,          আর নেই-এর গান

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Songs from the Sea

This chapter is about some ‘lost’ and ‘found’ voices of sailors recorded on a ship a long time ago. The vessel was the Streefkerk, the sailors were from eastern Bengal, the man who listened to them and made the recordings was Arnold Bake, who was sailing with them, going home to Europe after three and a half years of continuous work, making recordings on wax cylinders with his phonograph, travelling across Bengal and other places. The year was 1934. The recordings were pretty much ‘lost’, in the sense that they had not been listened to. I think end of his first field recording trip, Arnold Bake had handed them over to the archives and moved on and I doubt he listened back to them again. At least, to my knowledge, he did not ever write about these songs. What is a sound if we don’t listen to it? This chapter is divided into four sub-chapters, which tell stories about my journeys with these voices, in order to ‘find’ them. These are stories about seamen’s songs sailing in search of home. However, I believe that it is in this search, in our listening to them, that the ‘lost’ voices were also ‘found’.

In Search of Sawabali

Sawabali of Bake Indien II cylinder 351, like the other seamen on the Streefkerk, was recorded and his disembodied voice was taken to an archive. There it lay for about 85 years. Then I, through a fortuitous string of events, became a vessel for the song to return home.

Tazal Ahmed, Sailor, Gram Ghutia, P.O. Shadar, Noakhali

On 24 November 2016, I went to Noakhali in eastern Bangladesh with sound recordist Ali Ahsan (link to Ali recordings from Kishoreganj in POW chapter), searching for Tazal Ahmed, who had sung two songs for Bake on the Streefkerk in 1934.

Sounds from Fayazullah’s Unfound Village

Fayazullah (stoker) from Damrasari, Hirpur Bazar, Sylhet became a story about a lost place and a found song. Looking for Damrasari, we went from place to place, met a curious bunch of people, almost reached the Indian border at Tamabil and recorded song and dance we weren’t at all expecting to find.

Sushoma Mashima, a Keeper of Songs

I went with the disembodied voice of the seamen, plucked from the sound archive, to the one who keeps songs in her body. Sushoma Das was 90 when I went to her in 2018. She could hear what we can’t.