Kolkata :
Ahead of his 98th birth anniversary on Saturday, rare recordings of legendary singer-composer Hemanta Mukherjee from Bangladesh have been unearthed by a mathematics professor in the city. The recordings – one which dates back to 1971 and the other being the last ‘basic song’ recorded before his death in 1989 – have perhaps never been seen or heard in India.
Joydeep Chakraborty, the former guest lecturer at Rabindra Bharati Univerity (RBU) who now teaches in Murshidabad’s Nagar College, had earlier collected Mukherjee’s first recording of a Rabindra Sangeet in Pakistan. “The 45 rpm record of ‘Ami jalbona mor’ was made by the Gramophone Company of Pakistan in 1961. It was recorded in cooperation with the Visva-Bharati Music Board. I collected this from a Muslim family in Murshidabad,” Chakraborty said.
Two months back, he chanced upon the rare 1971 video recording from a friend. “After the liberation war of 1971, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had invited Mukherjee over to Dhaka. During that visit, he had performed a Rabindra Sangeet – ‘Tui phele eshechhis kare, mon, monre amar’ – for the state-owned television network in Bangladesh. My friend in Rajshahi sourced the recording for me,” Chakraborty said.
When Chakraborty was teaching at RBU, he came across a student from Bangladesh who wanted his help to covert some recordings in her family’s possession to the digital format. “While doing the work, I chanced upon a cassette that had a recording of a person composing a song. The voice seemed like that of Mukherjee,” Chakraborty said. His guess was confirmed by the student’s grandfather in Dhaka. “The recording was done in 1989 when Mukherjee was in Bangladesh and trying to set to tune the song ‘Lokhi jokhon ashbe ghore’. Nobody apart from that family has ever heard this recording,” he insisted.
During that same time, Chakraborty also chanced upon another rare recording of Mukherjee. “The song was ‘Bhalo kore mele dyakho drishti/Bujhbe Bangladesh bidhatar koto boro srishti’. The song was penned by Abdus Sattar and set to tune by Golam Mustafa. This was the last recorded ‘basic song’ of his,” Chakraborty informed.
However, it isn’t just these recordings from Bangladesh that make his Mukherjee archive interesting. In his kitty are some rare jingles that Mukherjee had recorded for Colgate toothpaste, PC Chandra jewellers and Lipton tea. “I sourced his jingle for Eveready torch from a roadside seller. An old employee helped me get hold of his Bata jingle. I also have a 1958-recorded jingle for Pundinhara that he had sung for Salil Chowdhury. I sourced his 1979-London recording of Ramayana in Hindi from an Anglo-Indian lady from Park Street,” he said.
That apart, Chakraborty also has 200 letters of the legend in his possession, a postcard record of Mukherjee singing for the coronation of the king of Nepal in 1964, recording of a 1973-programme in Rabindra Sadan which had Mukherjee singing live for all the characters in ‘Chandalika’, a harmonium used by Mukherjee during the late 1930s and Mukherjee’s personal collection of books.
Keen to exhibit his collection, Chakraborty will be happy to help if the government plans to host such a show.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> News> City News> Kolkata / by Priyanka Dasgupta / TNN / June 16th, 2018