6 The case of the irritating song

Suman Chatterjee and modern Bengali music

Sudipto Chatterjee

 

 

 

The modern Bengali song is a relatively recent phenomenon. It cannot be dated to much earlier than 150 years or so ago, although its content is variably defined by much older traditions. This explains why, in musical terms, it has always boasted a rich spectrum, chromatised with presences and traces of many other musical traditions — classical and folk, devotional and secular, Indian and Western. The modern Bengali song has much to do with the growth of Calcutta as a metropolitan city in British India. The birth of the Bengali modern song can be traced to the appearance of individual musical artists who entertained and thrived under the semi-feudal patronage of the nouveau riche intelligentsia (better known as the bbus). These artists created a popular form of salon music that drew freely from the tradition of North Indian classical music.² Although its target audience was the upper class, Bengali salon music did not hesitate to synthesise the expressions of existing folk forms that were immensely popular among the lower classes. With the birth and subsequent expansion of the middle class, the salon music ‘tradition’ expanded too, entertaining a larger audience. But towards the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a generation of bbu lyricist-composers came forth, aiming to free Bengali music from the bane of low culture, take the entertainment-based salon music out of its decadent ‘idle-rich’ setting, and charge it with new aesthetic/philosophic meaning. Heavily inspired by Western musical forms on the one hand and Orientalist³ constructions of a certain Indianness on the other, these new lyricist-composers wrote and composed ‘serious’ songs that addressed lofty themes, from devotional songs to dainty love songs, from soft satires to songs depicting nationalist sentiments. The major contributors to this genre were poet-musicians like Rabindranth Tagore, Dwijendrall Ry, Rajanknta Sen and Atulprasd Sen (most of whom are still regarded as the masters of the Bengali modern song, especially Tagore, who later became an institution in himself). Parallel to this ran a sub-tradition of popular songs in the public theatres of Calcutta. As an offshoot of the older popular tradition smoothed over by bbu sensibility, this sub-tradition enabled playwrights to write songs that would have a life outside the plays and make the audiences return to the theatres. There were also chap books in the pulp literature market that carried the lyrics of popular songs — elite and popular.

With the turn of the century came the technology of recorded music and its mass distribution, first through the radio, next movies, and finally gramophone records. This had a tremendous impact on the Bengali modern song which could now live on its own. Singing and song-making now provided lucrative professional opportunities. Bengali music, thanks to the radio and cinema, had already been given a semi-democratic listening base. Records and gramophones, by introducing the element of choice and control — the ability to choose what and when to listen — turned music into a whole industry. Bengali music had become more dependent on the listener than ever before by the first half of the century. With commercialisation came the fetishisation of music as an object/commodity made possessable by the exchange value of money. This fed directly into the producer-consumer loop of the market economy system of distribution, subjectifying music to the vagaries of commercially determined taste, business ‘risks’ (more than aesthetic ‘experiment’), and popular fashion and entertainment.

But an alternate mode of musical dissemination was waiting in the wings. In the 1940s, in the wake of the Communist Party of India's rising political prominence in Bengal, came the Indian Peoples' Theatre Association (IPTA). Although initially a party organ created expressly for agit-prop theatrical performances, the IPTA soon branched out into making gana-sangt, or mass-music — sung en masse, chorally, mainly in order to mobilise the masses. IPTA had as members a number of talented singers, composers and lyricists who served the party's purpose. IPTA was a nationwide organisation, but the Bengal sector was particularly known for its musical talents, best seen in composers like Salil Choudhury (Bengali Caudhur) and Hemga Biws and singers like Hemanta Mukherjee (Bengali Mukhopdhyy), Debabrata Biws and Sucitr Mitra.

Although gana-sangt continued to survive as an inspirational propaganda weapon for the Communist Party of India and also the factions it came to breed, it had little or no effect on the commercial Bengali song that continued the salon tradition, except that the salon had made way for the studio and the stage. This transformation became more evident with developments in recording technology in the West throughout the 1950s and 1960s, which constantly informed its counterparts in the East. Patrons were now many, divided almost in the manner of a pseudo-assembly line. They were the record companies, the state-run radio, concert sponsors and the educated middle- and upper-class Bengali who listened to the radio programmes, went to the movies and to concerts, bought records, or even sang the songs. It certainly looked as though the listeners were deciding what music was to be created/ manufactured for them. But in fact the record companies were the biggest players in the process of manufacturing taste by not only feeding and pandering to the tastes of their customers, but also by giving them an excess of it and taking, from time to time, calculated business risks — pseudo-experiments on aesthetic lines — to keep their enterprises going. ‘Thus’, Theodor Adorno says, ‘although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery’ (Adorno 1975: 12). This marketing process results in the fetishisation of the work of art as commodity. And, ultimately, ‘[t]he fetish character of music’, Adorno suggests, ‘produces its own camouflage through the identification of the listener with the fetish’ (Adorno 1982: 288). The commodification of the Bengali song had turned it into a casual artefact, a ‘thing’ divested of any great aesthetic value; a quotidian thing that could be easily understood, admired, loved and enjoyed, something that would sit on the shelves to be played on the gramophone at will or heard on the radio at the turn of a knob, something the listener could somehow control, be proud of as a possession and ostensibly decide the future of.

This does not necessarily imply that there was no aesthetic value in the work the artists, the creators of the modern Bengali songs, put into each number. Indeed, there is a huge body of songs by certain artists rendered unforgettable by the merit of their compositions and/or the virtuosity of their performance. Very often one finds these songs to be stellar examples of masterful distillation of a deep understanding of musical expression, despite how artfully they might have been fashioned to fit the bill of the fetishised normative expectations of the listeners. Fortunately, even before its mass distribution, the Bengali modern song tradition had established conventions out of both intercultural hybridity and syncretism of traditions. Consequently the music — in spite of the market's sway over it — retained a certain artistic probity. What suffered most, initially at least, was the quality of the lyrics. While musicians had no alternative but to adjust from being patronised by the feudal bbus, to an industry run by the radio and the gramophone companies, lyricists went to the world of poetry and publishing for more autonomy. Also, as intellectuals and propounders of high art, it was not fashionable for literary savants to traffic with the lowly philistines of the commercial world — art and commerce could not share habitats. Therefore the first limb to be amputated from the body of the modern Bengali song, with its growing commercialisation and resultant fetishisation, was the hand that wrote.

Two kinds of music, more or less, had managed to stay out of this circle of commercial fetishisation — classical Indian music and gana-sangt. But that too changed rapidly. Classical music, for long a preserve of the cultural elite, was beginning to find a gradually expanding commercial market — on the stage and in the studio. Gana-sangt, on the other hand, remained for a considerable length of time, outside commercial ambits on the merit of its political alignment with the activities of the communist parties. The gana-sangt situation began its transformation with the gentrification of the communist movement in Bengal, when large factions of the once-united party decided to participate in the democratic political system. Gana-sangt became a device for mobilising the masses to put their stamp, not on revolution, but the party symbol on the ballot paper.

By the early 1970s gana-sangt records were up for sale in the Bengali music market, as several groups sprang up, offering their professional services to election campaigns and college campus festivals as well as paid stage concerts. Revolutionary slogans and the vanguardist position of the intelligentsia, with their tendency to speak on behalf of the subaltern, had become profitable material for gana-sangt. Gana-sangt had been co-opted by the music industry and was now ready for the listeners to fetishise. Erstwhile revolutionary slogans turned into peddled wares, rendered meaningless in a dangerous inversion, neutering both the songs and their politics. This turning point in the nature of dissemination of gana-sangt happened at the time of the election of the Left Front government — a coalition of several leftist parties led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) — into power in West Bengal in 1977. Hitherto struggling Marxist artists were now on the right side of political power which, in turn, was tied to a largely capitalist system of production in which music had also been industrialised. Protest had been co-opted into the market economy. Salil Choudhury, for example, the former IPTA activist turned Bombay film music director, reissued several of his older revolutionary numbers as new, technologically more sophisticated, re-recorded, reorchestrated albums. Other choral groups too, like the Calcutta Youth Choir, started releasing gana-sangt records. Individual artists began singing revolutionary songs too.

The most noteworthy singer-songmaker among these individual artists was Bhpen Hzrik, an Assamese songwriter fluent in Bengali as well. Hzrik, hitherto a moderately well-known music director in the Bengali world (although he was very well known in his home state of Assam⁴ as an intellectual, filmmaker, writer and musician), became one of the biggest contributors to the new trend of progressive songs for commercial consumption. A graduate of New York's Columbia University, he had met Paul Robeson during his student days in the United States and was influenced greatly by the American civil rights and desegregation movements, especially its protest music. He had composed an Assamese version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein number, ‘Ole Man River’, from the hit musical Showboat. The song had gained much popularity in Assam, but its Bengali version took Calcutta by storm. Other songs by Hzrik gained tremendous popularity as well, including one called ‘Dol’, on the rewardless lives of palanquin-bearers and their exploitation by the rich. Hzrik's songs were very much in the IPTA mode, especially in the concern they expressed for the downtrodden. Hzrik's politics did not, however, have an obvious party alignment. In this his affinity was more with the semi-partisan leftist activity of a number of American artists. Adorno cautions against the consequences of such individualisation of the collective spirit of mass music that is contaminated by commercial co-option:

The dressing up and puffing up of the individual erases the lineaments of protest … just as in the reduction of the large scale to the intimate, sight is lost of the totality in which bad individual immediacy was kept within bounds in great music. Instead of this, there develops a spurious balance which at every step betrays its falsity by its contradiction of the material.

(Adorno 1982: 283)

Bhpen Hzrik's immense popularity in the 1970s, however, did not outlive that decade (although, he has recently staged a comeback with remarkable success in Hindi film music). While the legacy of the gana-sangt survived in its commercial incarnation with direct governmental support, the purely commercial modern Bengali song survived on its own, with generous help from film albums. The lyrics did not matter so long as the music was attractive. But by the 1980s the Bengali modern song's existence was seriously threatened by the rising hegemony of Hindi film music that prevailed over the young music listeners of Bengal. There was a void and older listeners watched their progeny moving away from what was once the infallible modern Bengali song.

The much needed remedy was nowhere in sight, until the sudden arrival of a new voice (not quite new really, as would unfold soon after) — Suman Chatterjee (Bengali Caopdhyy⁵). In 1989, when Suman Chatterjee returned to Calcutta from almost a decade and a half of life in exile to resume his career as a Bengali music-maker, he did not think he was destined for super-stardom. He had ended his second contract as a broadcast journalist with German International Radio and returned to Calcutta to make a final, somewhat desperate, attempt to present before the Calcutta listeners the Bengali songs he had been composing in exile. Having realised the personal nature of his songs, and equipped now with the newly mastered classical guitar, he had decided on going solo. Tomke Ci (Want You), his first solo album, was released by HMV in 1992. It was an instant hit. Suman's number of stage concerts grew exponentially. Journalists were suddenly running after him. Business Standard, an English daily from Calcutta, cried in an elated headline as early as 1991: ‘The City Finds Its Chansonnier’. Loud speakers in neighbourhood social gatherings played his songs in loops. T-shirts, carrying lines from his songs, were up for sale. Excerpts from songs were cited like proverbs. Suman's second and third albums did not belie the expectations of the first and he continued to top popularity charts. Very soon he had bagged a gold disc for record sales figures. Bootleg recordings of his concerts circulated among his young followers, many of whom he had weaned away from both Hindi music and the standard Bengali modern song.

Suman has wrought distinctive changes on the physiognomy of modern Bengali music. The freshness of his lyrics, their poetic beauty, economy of expression and, in some cases, biting satire — coupled with the syncretic quality of his music, assembling traits from music all over the world — have made for a new kind of song. Much in the mould of the Latin American nueva cancion, his songs offer a platform for the lay person to express her/his innermost thoughts and feelings. Suman's songs encapsulate and are nurtured by the cultural nuances of life in Calcutta, its pedestrian tragedies and catastrophic trivialities. In an urban musical tradition that has emphasised melody over lyrics, where the normative expectation of traditional aesthetics keeps the so-called ‘prettiness’ of song lyrics immune from the dissonances of daily life, Suman's arrival was a major rupture in the status quo.

In his earlier attempts with choral groups Suman had tried to move down the beaten paths of gana-sangt. His initial efforts were not very successful. Perhaps the listeners were not ready for the kind of self-critical stance his songs adopted, or maybe it was because Suman refused to tow the party line and proclaim self-aggrandising slogans that salved the political conscience of the Bengali middle class. Even in his early phase, Suman was writing against the romantic strain of gana-sangt.

Here is an example from a song entitled ‘Song of Flies and Dead Faces’:

The song ends on the following note:

Informed largely by the Frankfurt School — mainly its theories of culture and aesthetics — Suman's songs from the very beginning were bitingly satirical, critically trenchant, romantic or simply comic. Despite their obvious Marxist orientation, they differ considerably from the venerable gana-sangt tradition in many ways, but mostly in their self-reflexive quality. Suman's songs are not the utterances of a vanguard of the proletariat, nor do they ventriloquistically project the imagined voice of the oppressed subaltern in musical rhapsody. This is music for/by/of the urban middle class that stands its ground by simultaneously celebrating and critiquing its contradictions, ambiguities and paradoxes. Suman's songs are not mere messages of social equality. Rather they map a social text that attempts to create a complex, ambivalent discursive space that has to be engaged by his listeners. It is ironic to note that gana-sangt as a mode of musical communication was based on direct contact between the artist(s) and the masses, until it was co-opted by the mediating music industry through mechanised commercial reproduction and rendered void. Suman Chatterjee's music, on the other hand, emerged from within the confines of the recording studio and was made popular by the same music industry that neutered gana-sangt. Historically, then, Suman's music has traversed an almost reverse path, since it was only after his popularity was established by recorded albums that he could use the stage to work both within and outside the music industry. In fact, it can be argued that Suman's music is all that gana-sangt today is not, but could (or for some, should) have been. Just as the turncoat hypocrisy of mainstream left-wing politics in West Bengal has rendered any kind of ideologically realised art an impossibility, it is the same failure of leftist politics that has enabled Suman to speak from a ‘more-left-than-the-Left’ position located beyond the spectrum of the official left. However, gana-sangt and Suman's music have much in common.

Suman's songs, like the gana-sangt, claim a communist utopia, but in a clearly different context. While a gana-sangt song would generally proclaim the utopia by announcing the simplistic, wishful, fantasised death of capitalist exploitation — ‘The wheels of exploitation will turn no more! No more!’ says a song by Salil Caudhur, a stalwart of the gana-sangt tradition — Suman's songs would talk, instead, of the reality and perpetuation of exploitative capitalism, thereby showing the need for utopia. Suman's communist utopia, then, is more a check on reality, a radar that detects the ills of exploitation and engages the listener to reckon with the social and political conditions, not wishing them away with a slogan or the excitement and glory offered by a certain ideological position. In certain cases Suman applies the same technique where the utopian dream line comes after a series of quotidian images — pristine nostalgia, childhood or even natural beauty:

But Suman is acutely aware of the contradictions of being a professional music-maker in a society that sees music as a profitable corporate industry, where the co-opting of political voices for commercial gains is normative. He says in a song about ‘selling out’:

Effectively, Suman was doing more than making and inspiring new music. He was shattering the traditional notion of the singer as a benign social entertainer. He revealed himself to be a scathing social critic, an intellectually exceptional, erudite artist who spoke and argued well, with and occasionally without social grace. From almost the onset of his arrival he interlaced his songs on stage with provocative polemical utterances, which included sharp criticisms of the powerful Left Front government of West Bengal, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (a.k.a. CPI(M)), which he had supported not too long before, as well as of the right-wing religious fundamentalist parties. His aggressive stage sermons augmented the protest inherent in his songs with direct calls for action and the condemnation of social ills. Suman has written, composed and publicly sung numerous songs on the ills in Bengali society, and has spoken out against the so-called Marxist government — its policies and wrong-doings — very openly in concerts and interviews. In a remarkable song on Anita Dewan, a social worker who was raped and brutally murdered by hoodlums in suburban Calcutta, Suman criticises not only the crime but also the society and government whose lack of conscience not only allow crime to happen but also let the criminals go unpunished because of party connections.

This song and others have created confrontational scenes between the singer and party goons, who, Suman told the author in an interview, ‘openly said they were of the CPI(M) and came, armed’ to threaten the singer. But perhaps the biggest blow to Suman's steadily souring relationship with the party and the government was his active participation in the directly anti-government Kanoria Jute Mill agitation in 1993–4.

In December 1993 Kanoria Jute Mill, on the banks of the river Hooghly, a little north of Calcutta, had been closed by its owners. The official explanation was that the mill could not afford to run its business and make a profit large enough to pay the employees. A majority of the employees thought otherwise, although many of the party-based unions agreed with the owners. A non-partisan union was established, which most of the workers joined. The new union disobeyed the court's injunction and forced the mill gate open to resume work. The mill was closed down again. Negotiations continued, but there was no resolution in sight. No one got paid, yet the workers continued to resist. They built community kitchens to feed their families with support from local farmers and the middle class. The support grew with newspaper coverage and direct encouragement from leading intellectuals extending their hands from Calcutta. Kanoria became a subject of great discussion among the urban intelligentsia. Then the situation took a critical turn when a group of mill workers went on a hunger strike. Suman Chatterjee came forward to urge people to continue to support and participate in the Kanoria agitation. He sang for days near the mill premises to motivate the workers, and at street fairs and public gatherings to raise money. The Bengali daily Pratibedan (Dispatch) reported on 19 December 1993:

Music, too, is a weapon for struggle. That is exactly what Suman Chatterjee proved, standing by the side of two members of the Kanoria Struggling Workers' Committee. By taking a stand in front of the Kanoria Jute Mill gates Suman declared his wholehearted support for this ‘real’ workers' struggle. The way Suman usually extends his anger towards decaying values and a worm-ridden establishment, was the modus operandi today when he expressed resentment at the corrupt political parties…. Cautioning [workers] against the so-called progressive parties, he said, ‘Stay away from them. And keep yourselves united. Or else, they’ll create differences among you on lines of caste and religion and lead the agitation astray’…. Thanking the local farmers who have helped the workers with food, Suman said, ‘You can find me in any of your struggles. When you need it, my voice will always deny the lures of slavery.’

(Kanoria Jute Workers' Revolutionary Union 1994: 51)

On 26 December the Sagbd Pratidin (News Daily) reported: ‘Suman Chatterjee said that the way the Kanoria Workers are conducting their agitation is nothing short of a revolution. So, I will write a song about it. That's all I am thinking about these days amidst all my other chores’ (Kanoria Jute Workers' Revolutionary Union 1994: 52). In a few days Suman had, indeed, come up with a new ballad, where the river laps its own banks to tell tales:

On 3 January Suman raised funds for the Kanoria workers at a concert in Calcutta. The Sagbd Pratidin reported it in the following words:

For the first time Suman Chatterjee has, transgressing preventative governmental sanctions, raised funds for the Kanoria Jute Mill. All proceeds, after production costs, will go to the Kanoria funds. On Wednesday Suman announced from the Biwarp stage, ‘If there are any people from the party or the government among the audience, do not try to stop the concert. I won't stop singing’…. When representatives of the Kanoria workers showed up in the auditorium, he said to them, ‘You are re-writing history …’.

(Kanoria Jute Workers' Revolutionary Union 1994: 55–6)

On one occasion Suman Chatterjee performed at one of the busiest street crossings of downtown Calcutta, Mayo Road and Park Street, to raise funds for the Kanoria workers, singing before a thousand people who gathered spontaneously. The arrangements were meagre, the sound system being no more than a basic microphone better suited to neighbourhood political rallies. It was during the evening rush hour and armed police sergeants intervened, trying to prevent the workers from collecting money from the audience. Suman interjected at this point saying, ‘What do you have against the workers? You, too, can starve to death tomorrow. Why are you doing this? Why don't you help instead? You’ll see the workers will help you'. And the workers did help. In just a few moments the situation was reversed. The young armed sergeants were seen encouraging the audience members to donate money while a number of workers got busy managing the rush hour Calcutta traffic! ‘And there I sang. It was a good three to four hours' concert, with at least a thousand people around, who were constantly singing along’.⁶

The Kanoria situation put political activism on a different footing: a non-partisan group of workers claiming what rightfully should have been the job of the left-wing party-backed unions, who the workers thought had sold out. The workers needed a better alternative, and this led to the formation of a new union which, despite its nonpartisan orientation, was an ultra-left organisation whose position was being defined not merely by its ideological orientation but by the fact that existing leftist parties had moved closer to the centre. It reflected the quizzical, if not hypocritical, turn leftist politics had taken in West Bengal since perestroika and the fall of the Soviet bloc. In the specific labour situation in Kanoria, at least, the leftist parties had decidedly chosen to stand by the seat of capitalist power rather than champion the rights of the workers. While the workers expressed their disgruntlement at this reversal of ideological position, the party administration applauded their own restraint in not letting this turn violent as, according to them, may have happened in a number of other states. Kanoria offered an alternative to the traditionally party-based workers' union politics where the issue of workers' rights were the reason for a change, not the party lines. It was a metaphor for the larger political theatre of West Bengal where the Left Front was in power largely by default, because none of the opposition parties were viable alternatives.

The situation had drawn Suman Chatterjee's studio and stage-bound music — playable comfortably on Walkmans and stereo systems — to the streets, working as an active agent in creating a progressive public opinion. Salon music, studio music and stage performance finally had its interface with the street. The stage and the studio had, in a manner of speaking, been ‘streeted’. Suman confessed in an interview with a representative of the Kanoria Revolutionary Workers' Union:

I am not really a worker. I sell songs to live. But, when I see a group of workers uniting to make their demands — I want to be a part of it … A number of people coming together — without shouting any religious fundamentalist war-cries, without raising political flags of any particular color — to make legitimate demands. I don't have a stake in their demands, since I don't live their lives, I don't live in their homes. But I'm putting myself in that space because their demands are human demands. I cannot deny the demands of the times. That's all.

(Ry 1994: 21)

In one of his best-known songs, Suman summed up the dogged spirit of Kanoria:

It was not just Suman who inspired the Kanoria workers; their grit and determination inspired him. Suman said in the same interview with the Kanoria representative:

I have participated in the revolution in Nicaragua … That's where I learnt about the structure of a revolutionary organization … I even had to learn combat … I know how it feels to walk through a mined area, how a man could shit in his pants … I know these things first hand. I have seen mechanized warfare…. And I am somewhat bull-headed, which is why I can even think of making a living out of singing/making Bengali songs at 40 something. But here [in Kanoria] I saw people whose bull-headedness was of a better kind … without any restlessness, devoid of histrionics. Here I learnt something new, the strength of satygraha … the strength of non-violence…. I went there to see, to be a supporter-spectator, but I ended up being their student.

(Ry 1994: 23–4)

Suman served the Kanoria agitators with his music; not only his own songs but songs from older writers and composers, even songs that were once the rallying slogans — now sanctimonious passwords — of the same Communist Party of India that opposed the Kanoria workers' struggle. Suman also sang traditional love songs with a broken harmonium into a street-vendor's bull-horn outside the factory gates (since only employees could enter the premises), as the workers re-ignited the furnace. ‘At times’, he said later, ‘love songs can inspire more than protest songs!’

But Suman's relationship with Kanoria too became tenuous when the middleclass leadership of the workers was eventually co-opted by the CPI(M). When he realised that

Blessings [were] being sought from the same person in whose regime factory workers can't find work. When I heard that the middle class leader — he is not a worker, he had nothing to do with the movement, he had really gate-crashed into the movement (which I learnt later) — and his people [were] saying, ‘Our respected leader, et cetera, et cetera …’ To hell with our respected leader! I realized the workers did not have any say anymore.

The workers' lack of agency was the question for Suman. He would not make any assumptions about what they had to say. He would not speak for the subaltern. He would not transgress his limitations as a performer to set foot in a political space that would require him to adopt even the slightest hint of a patronising position, or even the slightest support for such a position. Explaining how the Kanoria workers were almost coerced to follow the path of middle-class leadership, he said,

The workers feel kind of intimidated. They're always worried that if they say no, maybe these [city folks] will go away. I don't know. I don't want to underestimate their sagacity. I think they're wiser than all of us. They are the ones who suffer most. They are the ones who toil. They are the ones who are really oppressed and repressed. So … what I had told them is that as long as the workers would continue their movement independently, independent of any middle class leadership, I will be with them, not as a vanguard, but as someone who happens to make music and who's there to entertain them during their struggle.

The Kanoria affair, initially at least, was in total harmony with Suman's politics when it showed the potential for an alternative left-wing movement that exposed the sanctimoniousness of the ruling left parties. But his opposition to the hypocritical politics of the left movement in West Bengal was only one side of the coin. The other side has not only been asserting his own class limitations, but also confessing its complicity in perpetuating socials ills. ‘I am not [Swm] Viveknanda or Che Guevara’, Suman told Swdhn Bngl (Independent Bengal) in 1995,

I am just a member of the privileged class. I can't even eat heartily when I am outdoors. Feels like there are so many unfed eyes staring at me. I feel an impotent rage, an emasculated frustration within myself. I sing, but all the time it seems I am stuck in the same place!

Along with this has come his scathing criticism of the right wing, especially the growing fascist tendency in Indian politics that is marked by divisive communal sentiments: rising Hindu fundamentalism and its intolerant anti-Muslim agendas. While creating room for critical discourse around these ideas, Suman's clearly nonpartisan, non-aligned position has put him in an unfriendly middle ground, between the extreme right and the so-called left.

In the spring of 1993 a big procession had been planned in Calcutta by a coalition of Hindu fundamentalist parties. A chariot symbolising the mythic vehicle of the Hindu god Rma was to traverse the city, with volunteers shouting anti-Muslim slogans. This was part of a nationwide project undertaken by Hindu fundamentalist parties where chariots (or raths) were taken in procession to signify the journey of Hinduism to Ayodhy, Rma's supposed birthplace. Not all Indian states had agreed to give the procession free passage, since it was expressly unsecular and designed to denigrate the minority Muslim population of the country, but the Left Front in West Bengal had. Suman Chatterjee showed up to protest:

[W]e formed a cordon. People came down from their houses, from buses. Not many. But at least a good 50 people. They gathered. It was also not without hazards, because the procession was headed by armed hooligans, you know. Armed with lathis, batons. Wonderful, isn't it!? In a democratic [country]. You can't even imagine … what I experienced that day. And … not one party belonging to the Left Front government opposed the procession [or got] involved in a resistance.

Among the songs sung on the occasion was Suman's adaptation of Bob Dylan's ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. The performative circumstance here was even more basic — plain human voices, singing in unison. The resistance was finally broken down by the police and the crowd dispersed. ‘And naturally … there's no point in bloodshed. No point in martyrdom. So we withdrew. But at least we put up a resistance for a good three to four hours’. Suman's political position thus puts him between the recognised ‘extremes’ of Indian politics — the official left and the right — and places him beyond its visible margins. In fact, however, Suman proposes an alternative route of political activism that does not tout political colours hypocritically.

Suman, especially after Kanoria, has been a consistent cause of government embarrassment, and his songs cause for irritation. The government has made all kinds of attempts to curb his wagging tongue, from trying to grease his palms to direct death threats. Cultural organisations wanting to hire Suman to sing for them have been threatened, and state-owned auditoriums have on many occasions refused to let Suman perform in their spaces. But Suman's immense popularity among the people, especially the youth, of West Bengal has made it difficult to silence him. Suman continues to keep his music close to the pedestrian life of Calcutta, even while his albums hit the commercial market through regular HMV releases. And although lately he has had to cut down on public appearances — on both stage and street — his songs continue to engage life in the Calcutta streets. A solo album, released in late 1996, for example, despite HMV's initial opposition, contains a song about a group of children who, on the morning of election day, faced dire consequences while playing with what they thought were cricket balls. The ‘balls’ were in reality bombs that detonated, killing two and blinding one:

The same album also contains a song on pointless public lynchings which happened frequently in Calcutta streets, bringing the listeners' conscience to task. The song builds itself on the almost unmusical harmony between the cold, graphic description of gross acts of physical violence performed by various people on a dying youth, on the one hand, that is set to a tune, on the other, in a menacingly haunting melody, with the plucked guitar strings playing a threnody of repressed anger. These are ‘irritating’ songs that do not make listeners comfortable. On the contrary, they question and even deny the very comfort, the ‘listening pleasure’, that the consumer of the audio tape wishes to possess through the act of buying it. As a result, Suman's songs, for a large number of people in Calcutta, have turned into social irritants. Suman's music, intent on assaulting complaisant consciences, continues as always to face/address, even ‘stage’, the life of Calcutta streets.

Initially, both press and public lauded his frankness as heroic, timely and much needed. But the position has shifted radically in less than two years. Whatever positive response he received initially has been outweighed by negative criticism thereafter, not so much of his music, but of his personality and behaviour on stage. Responding to Suman's stage polemics the Sunday Statesman reviewer wrote in April 1993:

Quite frankly, HMV hadn't bargained for quite the kind of excess the singer allowed himself when he was given a golden disc … Suman is the singer-showman making no bones about his intention to whip up emotional frenzy. Were there children in the audience? He couldn't care less as he used the choicest expletives to denounce the ‘enemy’. That's part of the package.

Suman retaliated by including the press in his list of ‘enemies’, frequently launching verbal opprobria against how the press manipulated or manufactured public opinion. ‘They have nothing to say against the obscenities shown on television or Bombay films’, Suman said in the same interview to Swdhn Bngl (see above), ‘Their invectives are all fired towards specific people, yours truly being the chief target.’ Suman even built his critiques of the press into some of his songs.

One by one, the very newspapers that had once hailed Suman as the best thing to have happened to Bengali music were now either slandering him whenever possible or ignoring him altogether. The conflict reached an almost farcical height in July 1995, when an attempt was made to frame him with a charge of making a ‘prank’ phone-call which also involved the Calcutta police! The Statesman, among other English and Bengali newspapers, published a cover story with the following headline: ‘Singer Suman interrogated for “making” abusive calls’. The Bengali daily JKL did a front-page story too, but also added a photograph of Suman being escorted out of a police station. Cartoons depicting Suman in chains have appeared in newspapers. Even pulp monographs lampooning Suman and his contemporaries were circulated. Suman has retaliated in song, saying:

In the mean time, side by side with more attempts at deriding the singer, there have been attacks against the so-called jban-mukh gn movement. They initially came in the form of a single obsessive question, circulating doggedly amongst both press and public — ‘How long will it last?’ The question is almost invariably pitted against the enduring quality of the older Bengali modern song that talked little about social situations and were mainly about musical beauty and dulcet melodies, mood and maudlin emotions. In the general public discourse, this older tradition is now being recognised as ‘eternal’ while the ‘new’ song is cast in the pall of transience. The tacit argument is that all singers of the older generation had a certain kind of regimented training in Indian classical music that the jban-mukh singers lack. Suman is loath to be identified as jban-mukh, and rightly so, for he hardly fits either of the two kinds of singers described. He is a trained singer of Indian classical music with a deep understanding of Western music, just as he is well versed in the newer tradition (of pre-jban-mukh) modern Bengali music. So are some of the other jban-mukh artists (although not as extensively as Suman). In fact, some of the older-generation singers were just as untrained as the new ones, but reached heights of great fame nonetheless. But the stigma lives on. Although one cannot but admit that the general mediocrity of most of the so-called jban-mukh singers has helped the movement rapidly to come to a point of natural liquidation, the fault cannot rest with Suman, for his music cannot simply be contained under a subheading like jban-mukh. His songs may have helped crack open the floodgate of jban-mukh songs, but his music stands out uniquely because of its superior individuality and sophistication — on the merit of its ever-alert social insight, critical seriousness and disciplined prolificacy — as a nursery of multitraditional, transnational music that continues to graft newer branches and deliver the gift of efflorescence to the older stalk of modern Bengali music. The listening public, with generous help from an antagonised Calcutta press, has learned to turn a deaf ear to Suman Chatterjee's music, despite paying lip-service to his contributions, by lumping it together with the convenient category of jban-mukh. Some ardent fans of Suman are now claiming the artist has disillusioned them — that he has not delivered on the promises his songs made not too long ago.

The most recent aspect of this problem finds expression in the re-recordings of older Bengali songs rendered by younger artists which are topping the charts, ousting the singers of the ‘new’ song, including Suman, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Recently, young singers like Indranl Sen and Riknta Crya, have released ‘new’ albums of ‘old’ songs which are currently selling in record-breaking numbers. In a way, the progressive advantage that Suman's music offered is being substituted by the very past which Suman's songs had tried to outgrow and let evolve.

While all this certainly confirms the tremendous impact Suman Chatterjee has had on the Bengali cultural front and further afield — acknowledged alternately, through reception and then rejection, commendation followed by condemnation — it does not explain why the controversies have waged in such obsessive ways in public discourse, and in such chimerical changes of musical taste. Why, or even how, could a singer-songmaker have rankled a society to this extent? Suman Chatterjee has no doubt performed some sort of unspeakable outrage by putting the normative conception of the Bengali singer as entertainer into quandary. By overstepping the boundaries of what a song, or even a singer, can do in/for society, Suman Chatterjee — his music and its effects — has wreaked a kind of ontological, if not epistemic, violence on the social psyche of the urban Bengali. His work and personality has, in one way or another, challenged the normative aesthetics of music that has long been grounded on a hitherto unchallenged notion that music is generally a passive form of art, and musicians pacifists. In this, Suman fits Theodor Adorno's appraisal of Gustav Mahler:

They call him uncreative because he suspends their concept of creation itself. Everything with which he occupies himself is already there. He accepts it in its vulgarized form; his themes are expropriated ones. Nevertheless, nothing sounds as it was wont to; all things are diverted as if by a magnet. What is worn out yields pliantly to the improvising hand; the used parts win a second life as variants. [They] … arrive at places which the approved musical language could never safely reach. Such music really crystallizes the whole, into something new, yet it takes its materials from regressive listening.

(Adorno 1982: 298)

Add to Adorno's description of Mahler, Suman Chatterjee's on-stage belligerence, his pugnacious critique of the state of affairs (and affairs of state) in West Bengal. Suman's vociferous, if not over-zealous, diatribes against the establishment have more often than not been seen as part of a ‘package’ (see above) that sells well. After all, anti-Suman critics have claimed, he continues to release albums through an outfit as corporate as HMV.

But Suman's music, despite its participation in the commercial mode of production, moves through several modes of dissemination, working at times through the industry, at times without. More than the urban folk (song) hero that his politics can easily make him out to be, Suman Chatterjee is a professional musician who produces and sells his craft to earn a livelihood out of an industry that has built itself on the commodification of music. But Suman's diffidence to the system, however small, is exemplified by his conscious efforts at trying to reach his audience without help from his recording company, through direct communication from and off the stage, and on the streets.

However, despite its clear and critical incision into public culture, its deeply unsettling effects on the listeners of Bengali music and the interface it has managed to generate between art and social action (albeit at a limited scale), one cannot ignore the long-term effect of the artistic versus commercial production loop to which Suman Chatterjee's music must submit itself. Theodor Adorno, in his seminal essay ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, does not express much hope for progressive ‘mass music’ to escape the inevitabilities of the market. He has doubts about attempts that strain to balance art and commerce.

[T]echnically consistent, harmonious mass music purified of all the elements of bad pretense would turn into art music and at once lose its mass basis. All attempts at reconciliation, whether by market-oriented art-educators, are fruitless. They have accomplished nothing more than handicrafts or the sort of products with which directions for use or a social text must be given, so that one may be properly in-formed about their deeper background.

(Adorno 1982: 297)

It is not up to the present writer, or anyone for that matter, to gauge the level of immunity Suman's music has or will have against the incursive ways of the music market and/or its longevity in public memory. However, it is a fact that Suman Chatterjee's popularity is currently waning, at least if one is to set much store by the hit charts flashed daily across the newspapers. But Suman continues to straddle the middle of the political spectrum, moving between expressed wrath or determined ignorance on one side, and, adulatory fans, on the other. The former, however, seems to have gained more ground in recent times, as best indicated by the recent revivals of older Bengali songs sung by new singers (see above). This returns us to the question posed earlier on in the chapter: What has Suman Chatterjee done to deserve the ire of such a large music-consuming audience? Surely it would be simplistic to say it is only his anti-establishment repartee and, from time to time, direct support of people and movements that critique the establishment and government. Indeed I have heard more expressive critiques of the government in the buses of Calcutta. Here again let us momentarily return to Adorno, to his ‘regressive listeners’, who

… are not childlike … they are childish; their primi-tivism is not that of the underdeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded. Whenever they have a chance, they display the pinched hatred of those who really sense the other but exclude it in order to live in peace, and who therefore would like best to root out the nagging possibility.

(Adorno 1982: 286)

If this is an acceptable explanation, then the Bengali listener's partial rejection of Suman Chatterjee's music is a result of his/her own inability to deal with the over-conscientious (read preachy), often direct (read brazen), erudite (read pedantic), anecdotal (read ostentatious), honest (read scurrilous) meta-text implied in his songs, that is often spelt out directly in his spoken interludes between songs in concerts or in interviews. Effectively, then, the audience has regressed from the very person they had once welcomed when they were exhorted to do more than listen to the music, and instead had to face it. Back to Adorno:

The regression is really from this existent possibility of a different and oppositional music… . They are not merely turned away from more important music, but they are confirmed in their neurotic stupidity, quite irrespective of how their musical capacities are related to the specific musical culture of earlier social phases.

(Adorno 1982: 286)

One would hesitate to disagree with Adorno in his downright disregard for popular culture and his high-brow snobbery towards the lay listeners of popular music. However, there is wisdom to be found in his theoretical postulations on how the market controls — through production, repetitious commodification and ultimate fetishisation of the musical ‘object’ — the public reception of mechanically produced music. Suman Chatterjee's music, despite its uneasy alliance with the market and recently decreasing popularity, continues to retain a certain degree of independence. He asks pertinently in a song:

But if one were to go by what the reclaiming of a musical past ‘of earlier social phases’ is expressive of in the case of the Bengali modern song, one cannot but see traces of prophecy in what Adorno has to say about the ‘regressive listener’. In the Bengali context it expresses itself as an almost desperate bid to banish the new song by breathing new life into the nostalgia of the easy-to-digest, more ‘musical’, conscience-less older Bengali song. Effectively, Suman's songs, for a large number of people in Calcutta, have turned into social irritants. But his music continues to face/ address, even ‘stage’, the life on the streets of Calcutta.

In December 1996, the Left Front administration launched its ‘Operation Sunshine’ — an urban ‘clean-up’ project for Calcutta. One of the aspects of this operation was a crackdown on the street hawkers/vendors — erstwhile unemployed people who had found a living through setting up shops on the sidewalks of the city. The hawkers' hatches were to go. They were issued with warnings, but without tangible rehabilitation arrangements. Calcutta had to be cleaned up, since its decrepit looks were turning corporate investors — domestic and foreign — away. Turning the hawkers out was an easy way to let the sun gleam on the streets. In response Suman Chatterjee has done what he has always done — written a song.

This song — quite literally, about life in the streets — and the corpus of Suman Chatterjee's work as a whole, palpably connects the Bengali music production industry in an ambivalent, though polydirectional, loop of Salon–stage–studio–street that is still playing on. Suman's music moves through these four modes of dissemination in multifarious ways, working at times through the industry, at times without it. A number of his songs which have never been recorded on albums (and perhaps will not be in the near future) manage to reach his listeners directly through concerts and subsequent ‘bootleg’ recordings. Suman has never claimed or threatened to take legal measures against illegal recordings of his concerts. In fact he is known to have said publicly that he would like his songs to be recorded by audience members if/when his recording company declined to publish some of his more directly political songs. Is there a meta-industrial aspect to this? Is this a way in which Suman manages to thrive both within the industry and outside it? Is this his way of not letting, while he can wield that power from his seat of popularity, the commercial caprices of the recording industry control his music?

There are no easy answers to these questions, for the sociology of music in the neo-colonial capitalist market is vexed with numerous unanswered (unanswerable?) questions, especially with the ideological alternative of Marxism being a jaded and faded entity in most of the neo-colonial world. Adorno had argued for a chain of production where the artist would initiate the process of music re/production under pristine circumstances by creating the work of art. But the logic of the late capitalist and neo-colonialist condition dictates that the media and cultural industries situate artists in market economies in such a manner that there is little that is ‘pristine’ or untainted by the ‘production’ loop. The artist who has once participated in the system is premediated to ‘create’ a product that will invariably be up for sale. The situation indeed is larger than the individual artist for, as Fredric Jameson has argued, ‘Multinational capitalism … is a concept that has to include within itself reproduction as well as production’ (Jameson 1995: 49). Suman Chatterjee, as an individual working within this capitalist set-up is not simply an artist working through genius and inspiration, but is already subjectified as a re/producer of art as a commodity for market consumption. More than the urban folk (song) hero that his politics can easily make him out to be, Suman Chatterjee, as a professional musician, has to produce and sell his music to get a livelihood out of an industry that builds itself on the commodification/fetishisation of music and regressive listening. But Suman's indifference to the system, however bantam in weight, is exemplified by his conscious efforts at trying to reach his audience without help from his recording company through direct communication from and off the stage and on the streets. Also, very much like the persecuted Cuban singer Carlos Varela, Suman often introduces new songs in concerts that his audiences ‘record’ (or even ‘learn’). Despite the fact that they are never released through any means of mass reproduction these songs are on the lips of thousands in no time. These songs do work, even in their small way, meta-textually against the other ‘industrialised’ songs co-opted for regressive listening, creating a site for resistance close to the street, or even a site for an alternative history, the possibility of a paradigm shift. However minuscule that site may be, it is crucial that it be sited beyond the panoply of the neo-colonial capitalist market and regressive listening. Thus, even while he works within that larger-than-the-individual cultural industry, the tenacity of Suman Chatterjee's liberatory politics is certain. The question, I guess, is how long will he or can he persist with such autonomy?

Notes

1 From Suman Caopdhyyer Gn (Songs of Suman Chatterjee) (Chatterjee 1996: vol. III, p. 1). All translations, songs and prose passages, from Bengali sources are mine unless otherwise indicated.

2 See Banerjee (1990) for more information and detailed analyses of nineteenth-century Bengali music in Calcutta.

3 I am using the term here in the way in which Edward Said has deployed it, where Orientalism is not just a genre of scholarship, but also a political organ that aided the imperialist venture in the East.

4 Assam is a north-eastern state of India, sharing borders with West Bengal on its west and Bangladesh to the south. The Assamese language has affinities with Bengali, and Assam had a large Bengali presence for centuries until the violent ethnically based agitation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Bhpen Hzrik has for a long time straddled the awkward gap between the two ethnicities because of his close ties with both.

5 In this chapter Bengali words from the North Indian group of languages have been spelt using standard international transliteration conventions.

6 From a private interview conducted in March 1997. All unreferenced interview quotes are from the same interview.

7 A traditional vote of appeal for the dismissal of a batsman made by the fielding team (usually shouted in unison) to the umpire in a cricket match.

8 Unpublished as text, but featured in Suman Chatterjee's 1996 album Cichi Tomr Bandhut (HMV).

9 Printed in a protest pamphlet circulated by a citizens' group opposing ‘Operation Sunshine’.