Contextualizing Regional Specificities in Folk Music: The Legacy of Hemango Biswas The legendary singer Hemango Biswas’ native place Sylhet in Bangladesh is one of the most endowed places with respect to the fakiri, marifati, murshidi and bhatiyali musical traditions. His initiation into folk music began in his early childhood through his interactions with the poverty-stricken people of the locality, many of whom toiled in his own parental house. Over the years, his acute artistic sensibility taught him the inextricable link between the creative endeavours of the toiling masses and folk music. He tried to internalize this fully in his later musical journey. Association with the IPTA movement sharpened this sensibility and put it into a larger historical and cultural context. Last year, as part of Hemango Biswas’ birth centenary celebration, the first volume of his collected works came out which contained among others, his writings on folk music. As one of the editors of that volume I had to read his theories and critiques on folk music closely. His theorization on folk and ethnomusicology is complex, multi-layered and geared towards achieving a purity in folk singing on which he elaborates in very intricate terms in his writings. He firmly believed that folk singing is non-codified. Its sensibility is defined by the specificities of physical ambience, language, tune, phrasing, rhythm of work, styles of articulation and other geographical, historical and cultural contexts of a particular region. In that sense, it cannot have a schooling as in the classical musical tradition. If it has something that is construed, influenced and shaped by the parameters I just mentioned, it would better be termed as bahirana, a mode of learning that draws upon the traditions of a particular region and is firmly entrenched in the cultural specificities of the same. The compulsions of market economy constitute too strong a force that goes directly against the traditional modes of such pure performances. As a student of his classes on folk singing and as his daughter, editing the volume made me share many of his anxieties that have had every reason to get deepened in today’s reality. One way of responding to that, I thought, would be to document and preserve the tradition of which he considered himself an integral part and to which he had actively contributed throughout his life.
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The archive built in Hemango Biswas’ house contains his own collection of rare records, spools and old cassettes of legendary folk artistes like Anatabala Baishnabi, Lalita Debi, Tnepu Mian, Abbasuddin etc. The archive also contains several notebooks where songs collected by Hemango Biswas from various Indian provinces ranging from bhatiali, bhaoaia, kamrupi, bongeet, sari, jari, jhaore, ghumor, murshidi, jhumur, gambhira, bhadu, tusu, kajri, choiti, dhamail, lullaby, hori, bihu and other festivities are present. Within this repertoire, only a chosen few have been recorded in Biswas’ own voice (in the album surma nadir gangchil). Although that gives a fundamental idea about the extremely nuanced and ornate style of bhatiyali and dehatatwa of which he was an exponent, one cannot help having a sense of loss about other unrecorded songs in the collection. Many tunes of him in these collections have stayed in my memory. It is important that this varied and rich collective is somehow brought to general notice and to public access before they get obliterated from everyone’s memory. Recording of these songs in their pure, unadulterated forms is, therefore, urgently needed . One of the most important aspects of Hemango Biswas’ theory on purity harps on using proper instruments in folk singing. He believes choosing wrong accompaniments, deliberately or otherwise, is the easiest way to achieve distortion in folk renditions. Using synthetic chords, keyboards, synthesizers, loud effect instruments even when someone is singing in a traditional style is by now an all-pervasive phenomenon. Added to that is the problem of a lack of comprehension about the significance of genre-specific instruments in creating the proper ambience. Since specificity is one of the most important characteristics that demarcates folk songs from others, even different variants of the same instrument might be completely unsuitable in bringing out the proper mood. I would like to choose songs from his collection and record them with proper, region specific original instruments. I have already done that with some of them (courtesy: Centre for Advanced Study, Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, phase II and Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi).