Nabanita (Noya)
“Is he not the same artist who sang Ya Ali?” I thought to myself, staring at the television set in nervous trepidation. It was just another day: performing our daily chores, doing homework, and listening to songs my father played on his DVD player. The daily dose of Rafi, Lata, Manna Dey, Mukesh, Kishor, and Pratima Barua, chugged in with locally produced music albums he had purchased from stores in our suburban village, located on the outskirts of Siliguri, was a staple of our diet, especially on weekends. I had screamed in joy after a glance at the poster; it was, in fact, Zubeen Garg singing “Kande Kanai Bajeya re Shanai”, a song written and composed by Gidal (singer) Nazrul Islam for the album Moner Aina (2006). The melodious vocals of Rahima Begum Kalita, the powerful lyrical cadence of Nazrul Islam, and the sheer brilliance of thought to bring together Zubeen Garg and Krishna Moni into one frame have immortalised the album. That same year, Zubeen Garg was all over television and FM channels; his “Ya Ali” was an overnight hit. Awe-struck, my excitement flickered: how could a mainstream Bollywood singer feature in a Goalpariya Bhawaiya album at the same time of the year with regional artists? Was not singing in a dialect some kind of pollution to his newly found fame that could possibly taint his repute? Or was this just a remnant of his struggling days? I thought to myself, “Perhaps he would eventually give up singing Bhawaiya after his deserved recognition.”
Seeing Zubeen Da, as he is endearingly called, in Moner Aina was unbelievable back then, at least for a very young practitioner (my talim in ‘folk’ was intimidating to my convent-educated self, and not many family or friends knew, heard, or appreciated it). Indeed, my lessons started roughly around 2001, at a time when Deshi/Rajbanshi language, land and identity movements, both in their moderate and radical forms, were at their peak in Bengal. Indeed, Rajbanshis were easily frowned upon as ‘lower-caste’, ‘barbaric’ and ‘cessationists’, and singing Bhawaiya in an ethnically mixed para (neighbourhood) in a postcolonial suburb of Siliguri reeling with the effects of Partition (and consequent displacements and assimilation) as well as a hope for new beginnings, screamed ‘propagandist’ for some or at least ‘uncouth’ or geyo for many. I would continue singing Bhawaiya at festivals in quaint villages and still later wherever I travelled for my education.
Callow as I was, little did I know that Zubeen Garg was already a beloved artist in Assam and had recorded a bunch of songs in Mumbai since the mid-nineties, while Rahima Begum Kalita was a successful playback artist in Assam for her Goalpariyal lokgeet (Goalpara, a district in lower Assam, is widely accepted as one of the major cultural hub of the Bhawaiya tradition, and Goalpariya is the locally prevalent nomenclature for the Deshi or Rajbanshi language/dialect). The more dizzying fact, however, was that he never stopped singing Bhawaiya. His famous duet with Rahima Begum Kalita, “O Boideisha Pran Bondhuya re”, and the brilliant covers of legendary Pratima Barua Pandey’s “Baron Mashe Tyaro Phul Photey” and “Aga Naoye Dubu Dubu” remain some of the most loved songs for people who cherish his small but remarkable presence in the world of Bhawaiya or Goalpariya.
Bhawaiya is a folk music genre practised in the Teesta-Torsha-Brahmaputra floodplains, which is mostly passed down orally. Sung predominantly by Deshi/Rajbanshi speakers, it is popular in Rangpur-Bangladesh, Goalpara-Assam, and the adjacent districts of North Bengal bordering the plain. Bhawaiya is not only a regional folk genre narrating the plight, desire and everyday life in a language tainted as the ‘dialect’ of Bangla and Axomiya (hence impure), but also a genre that encompasses the ‘regionality’ of Rajbanshi identity- giving voice to the ‘marginal’ and marginalised living across this partitioned borderland who have been mostly ‘studied’ as representationally queer, racially dubious (the disgust of the anthropologists for groups showcasing ‘racial admixtures’ rather than ‘purity of breeds’ finds succour in their description of us folks) linguistically ambiguous and caste-wise backward (mostly poor lads). However, Bhawaiya is not the only genre popular among Rajbanshis, but has sustained as the more widely practised musical form; Terai, where I live, has its own folk variants sung in a somewhat similar language. Thus, to witness Zubeen Da share space in the melancholic hinterland of Bhawaiya, more so, with local yet popular artists, was delusional because who in their senses could forgo these differences or facts? Not many have done it before. My delusion was not just a state of mind but an empirical response of a historical kind.
Moner Aina album was a milestone in itself. It included great playback artists: Rahima Begum Kalita, Nazrul Islam, Krishna Moni (whose Sadri or Nagpuri hit Chal Gori album released in 2003 had taken most parts of North and North-East India by storm), and, yes, Zubeen Garg. A collaboration between Bengal and Assam, the album was an outright display of the sheer power of music to transcend borders and identities, as well as shape new ones. Indeed, the album was the first of its kind to spearhead a form of ‘musical’ and cultural kinship for those separated by borders and religion, yet imagined as one through Bhawaiya. Indeed, Assam has had a tradition where artists of repute share platforms with Bhawaiya or Goalpariya artists, which is sparse in Bengal. Perhaps, owing to the geographical contiguity and closeness of speech between Rajbanshi and Axomiya! Zubeen da’s presence only added to my wonder and appreciation. Indeed, I was naïve to have considered Rahima Begum Kalita’s ‘fame’ in terms of Bhawaiya artists and composers in Bengal who remain the perpetual shadow figures in the ever-expansive array of Baul and Bhatiyali practitioners, with their fates sealed in the recognition bubble; they are maestros caught up in the conundrum of regionality and, at times, dire poverty. Indeed, as a ‘dialect’ of the Assamese, Goalpariya/Deshi has historically been received with more dignity, and speakers of this ‘dialect’ hardly meant racially inferior ‘stocks’. Legendary singer Bhupen Hazarika’s contribution to Goalpariya Bhawaiya is well-known and is popularly acclaimed; many of us have grown up listening to his Goalpariya songs and collaborations with Pratima Barua Pandey in Hastir-Kanya and Mahut Bondhure albums.
Bhupen Hazarika and Zubeen have bejewelled this tradition, transcending caste-class-religious barriers to infuse dignity amongst artists of these lesser-known dialects. Not that singers of repute have not lent their magical voices to dariya or chatka (types of Bhawaiya based on rhythm and tempo); melody queen Lata Mangeshkar’s rendition of “Phande Poriya” in O Amar Desher Mati, a 1958 Bengali film, is one of its finest. Kalpana Patowary’s Goalpariya covers, and Papon’s cover of Pratima Barua Pandey in Coke Studio India has immortalised ‘Dinae Dinae’. Similarly, Ripon Kumar Sarkar’s exceptional cover of “O ki Ekbar Ashiya” for Coke Studio Bangla (Bangladesh) with Arnob was a heartwarming performance. However, what set Zubeen da miles apart from his contemporaries, and perhaps even his predecessors, was his simultaneous appearance in regional and mainstream albums with lesser-known artists of Bengal, Assam and other parts of North-East India singing folk songs in ‘dialects’ of minorities; as if differences did not matter! I presume it was his expression of solidarity beyond all social and cultural reservations for the resilience that the artists and their art embody. Zubin da was one of them and yet not one among them. He was a maverick of some sort. He could fit in, mould into an ‘other’, sing songs in both languages and their dialects. I have never stopped being grateful to him.
Bhawaiya, like other folk genres, sews in a different aesthetics, one that is interspersed with ethics: to sing the uneventful lives of the ‘lowly’ subaltern enduring the whip of compliance and a tenacity to stick to our ‘otherness’. And if so, Zubeen Da was and will be one of the shimmering lights at the end of the tunnel of fear, detestations and disgust- the shadow world of divisions; his messianic halo burning equally on the other side, touching lives.
That moment is still preserved; memory-waves crashing against the shore of mind’s mystical membrane as I remember Zubeen Da a month after his death, and likewise my father, whose loss in 2019 also meant a break in discoveries like these. I owe to memory, to have separated this episode from the slurry of epiphanies; time has chiselled it into a nebulous sculpture with few but weathered edges. To our collective memory, though, Zubeen Da is the North Star, effacing the grim orthodoxies of unequal social life, and his legacy shall continue to do so.
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Nabanita (Noya) is from Siliguri. and at present teaches at a degree college.
