“Tumi Panchamer bhakta, tai na? (You are a fan of Pancham [R D Burman], aren’t you?)”, Pintuda asked, his lips slightly curved in a smile. “Tumi jano je Pancham Salil-dar bhakta chilo? (Did you know that Pancham was a huge fan of Salil-da?)” It was the turn of the millennium and the world was only just opening up. The era of information abundance wasn’t yet there, but Pintuda’s facts were stated with a conviction that could never be feigned.
Pintuda was a resident patron of the canteen in National Library, Calcutta. One could almost always find him there occupying different tables on different days. Pintuda was many things pleasant but most of all he was a great admirer of admirable things. He could inspire fondness in people for anyone or anything without causing them to dislike others. He believed our lives could be so full of joy if one especially embraced pluralism in what one liked. He was the eternal fan who had no heroes to worship.
And yet, each time he spoke of Gandhi or Gary Sobers or Tagore or Salil Chowdhury one could sense that his words deferred very slightly more than the usual.
One bar joke Pintuda had made, suffixed with a disarming smile, went thus: “It was a large group. A revolutionary, a freedom fighter, a music composer, a poet, a songwriter, a story-writer, a playwright, a music arranger, a filmmaker, a flautist, a pianist, an esraj player, a sitar player, a violinist, a tabla player, all walked into a bar. Their name was Salil Chowdhury.” “Polymath” was the word Pintuda used when he referred to Salil-da, right alongside other great art polymaths of modern India such as Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray, B. V. Karanth and P. L. Deshpande.
Musical genius
The journey into the world of Salil Chowdhury has since then been a long and rewarding one. Just as friendships deepen with each well-spent moment, love and admiration for Salil-da grows one song at a time, one written word at a time. What fascinates about his music the most is how variations are its only constant. His average song is like the mighty Ganga — capricious, unpredictable, avulsing through crests and troughs, finding newer vistas while enriching every bit of soil and vegetation in its way. The tonic changes and melodic variations in many of his songs to a lay listener would seem erratic and yet ensconced in elegance.
The glorious Lata Mangeshkar song in Bangla, “Keno Kichu Kotha bolo na” which later became Kishore Kumar’s “Maujon Ki Doli Chali Re” from the film Jeevan Jyoti instantly comes to mind. The notes seem disparate, fluttering high and low like a butterfly but never beyond the garden that is the song. Another classic example is the iconic ‘Runner’, originally a poem written by the revolutionary poet Sukanta Bhattacharya, which was set to tune by Salil-da. Through the length of the almost seven-minute song sung by the fabulous Hemant Kumar, there are six changes to the base note Sa and the song doesn’t follow the typical Mukhra, Antara, Sanchari sequence returning to the Sthayi. Every note of the song is a point of no return just like the Runner described in the song who is only running ahead driven by his duty to deliver letters and money orders. The varying moods and tonal changes give the feeling of having many little songs within one song akin to a Russian doll. In the haunting and atmospheric ‘Aaja re Pardesi’ from Madhumati, Salil-da has used the seventh chord in the basic melody which is inherently considered incomplete making it a metaphor of the sense of insufficiency the girl [Vyajantimala’s character in the film] feels.
The revolutionary songwriter
This apart, Salil-da’s rich use of harmony and chorus especially in what he called “Jana chetanar gaan” (songs of social consciousness) created in the choir mode add a completely different and rich dimension to his repertoire. Many of the Bangla choir songs from the 1940s which were lost in time were revived in Hindi such as ‘Chalo Bhor Ke Raahi’ or ‘Tumhein Watan Pukarta’, translated by the inimitable Yogesh, in the 1980s which have since become really popular.
Salil-da’s music was nothing short of a melting pot of contrasts — where the West met the East, the classical fused with the folk, an outward simplicity masked the inner complexity, the massy equalised itself with the elite and the conventional co-existed with the disruptive. These contrasts in his works were reflective of the disparities prevalent in those times, in his own life. His social privilege by birth gave him access to education, western music, intellectual capital but his formative years also brought him in close contact with the working classes, exposed him to the brutality of engineered famines, imperialist exploitation and ruthless censorship. And as communists believed (Salil-da himself was a card-carrying communist in the initial years), these dialectics, these mutually irreconcilable elements would clash and result in revolution and change. Salil-da’s works of music and poetry initially inspired this change in others and eventually became the very embodiment of it through its varying, contrary elements that gave birth to new sounds and harmonies.
As a result, the classicists often rejected him for not being conservative enough and the radicals cancelled him for his moderation. No one could call his work their own, his music didn’t give in to tribalism and remained exclusive in its inclusivity.
In one of his iconic Bangla compositions, an acutely self-aware Salil-da writes,
“Aami jhorer kaache rekhe elaam amaar thikaana
Aami kaandlam, aami hashlam, ei jibon jowarey bhashlam
Ammi bonnyar kache ghurnir kache rakhlam nishana”
(I left my dwelling, my whereabouts near the storm
I wept, I laughed much too, and drifted in the high tides of life
Leaving evidence of my being near floods and whirlwinds)
And just like that, in this conscious act of incessant gliding and belonging to no one, Salil-da ended up belonging to everyone.
Beyond melodies
No written piece on Salil-da is complete without referring to his flourish and effulgence as a man of words. He has written over 400 songs and poems in Bangla. He also wrote stories which were made into films such as Do Bigha Zamin, Parak, and Naukri (1978) and he also directed a film Pinjre Ke Panchhi. He was truly a Renaissance man.
While every work of Salil-da’s is one for the ages, his works, especially his music, have never been more relevant than today. The world today is more divisive than diverse, any form of pluralism is feared, we are willing to go a mile long, but only an inch deep in pursuit of anything. It’s hard to say mediocrity from excellence, there is profusion of information and abuse of knowledge. In all this, Salil-da’s notes and words stand out as the epitome of syncretism, adding meaning and depth to their narrative, standing out in their musical and poetic magnificence while holding the promise of being ageless and enduring.
“No one has quite used the obbligato like Salil-da,” Pintuda had said once. A short walk across the National Library lawns to the Encyclopaedia Section of the majestic old Reading Hall revealed its meaning. An obbligato was an essential, mandatory part of a musical piece or a song usually played with flutes or violins or oboes that ran obliquely or as a counterpoint to the main melody thus embellishing the melody itself. The opposite marking of obbligato in musical notations is the Latin ad libitum more commonly known as ad lib. There are many instances of obbligatos in Salil-da’s music. In the soulful “Zindagi kaisi hai paheli” from Anand there is an understated string section acting as the obbligato; in “Kai Baar yun bhi dekha hai” from Rajnigandha a soft flute and violin obbligato accompany Mukesh’s voice sensitively reflecting the inner turmoil of the characters.
It’s been years since Pintuda was last seen. He must be nearing retirement age now, if he did any work at all. In this day and age, all one can wish for is that the likes of Pintuda have the will, energy and the safe confines of a library canteen to proselytise rigid, unbending people and get them to see the love, dignity and beauty in things around them.
Over time, the maturity to appreciate many other composers has come, and the ardent fandom of Pancham remains as strong as ever. Regardless of whose music one seeks to be the soundtrack of life in good and bad times, Salil-da’s will be the singular and eternal obbligato to it. Exquisite and indispensable, as it ought to be.
Happy 100th to you Salil-da!
Kalyan Sundareswaran is an IT professional working with Infosys.