Masadda, Birbhum. 24 July 2004. Kalpana Dasi

1. boli eke eke mile gelo

Artist:
Kalpana Dasi
Composer:
Jadubindu
Form:
Baul
Song region:
Birbhum

I met the Baul couple, Shyamsundar Das and his khepi or partner, Kalpana Dasi, at Bolpur station. It was Nimai Chand Baul, the dotara player and singer, who had told me about Kalpana; he said she was one of the prominent women singers among the bauls now. I was interested, because you don’t get too many women singers amongst the bauls. Kalpana and Shyamsundar were busking on a train coming from the direction of Sainthia and when it reached Bolpur, Nimai asked them to get down. He introduced us and I explained I was looking to record folk singers on the theme of biraho and they invited me to go with them to their home. We took a train back to a place called Batashpur, then a van rickshaw to Masadda, about 1.5 km from the station; Nimai Chand came along.

Kalpana Dasi

The village roads were muddy and slippery in that monsoon season; the pond at the entrance was filled to the brim with water. Then it started to rain. We had our hour-long recording session in the veranda of Kalpana Dasi and Shyamsundar Das Baul’s mud hut.  I used my old Sony Walkman WM-D6C professional cassette recorder and Sennheiser E-835 microphone—although the IFA grant had come through, the field recording equipment hadn’t yet been bought.
Kalpana is the second wife of Shyamsundar, his young singing partner. She is unlike her elder co-wife, who manages home and the children, even Kalpana’s, when she goes out to sing. The two wives have separate homes. However, Kalpana’s early return from work that morning had brought her little boy running and he clung to her even while she sang songs about Radha’s love and longing for Krishna and dehotattva songs about the need to cleanse the human body and soul in order to house the divine ‘Ras er manush’. These were old poetry of Haripada Gonsai  and  Jadubindu as well as songs of contemporary composers like Jiban Khepa. Kalpana sang, plucking on her ektara, while Shyamsundar played the khamak or gubgubi and tapped the rhythm with his ghungur-strapped foot. Nimai’s dotara remained silent as it could not match Kalpana’s pitch. She sang in her typical Birbhum voice—voices that need to rise above the din of running trains and crowded melas in order to be heard.

The men sang too,  but I was more affected by Kalpana’s songs. I was not just listening to her but also watching her, thinking how she balanced her life between the songs and her domesticity. Her situation was different from that of Nirmala Roy of Saptiguri, because what she sang was not about her everyday life. Did she then remain external to the songs, despite stretching her voice beyond its outer, upper limits? Could it be that she was more concerned with form than content, with the act of singing which gave her a space beyond domesticity and also a special place beside her husband?

The clip here is from a composition by Jadubindu.

Written in 2010.

For songs of Jadubindu see:
Chakraborty, Sudhir, Gobheer Nirjan Pathe. Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 1989
Urban, Hugh, The Economics of Ecstasy: Tanta, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal. New York: OUP, 2001