Indian singer and folk researcher Subhendu Maity, who is quite famous as a singer of folk and people’s songs, performed in a solo show at Music and Dance Centre of Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy on Sunday.
The show was originally scheduled to be held at the main auditorium of Bangladesh National Museum, but was transferred to Shilpakala at the eleventh hour due to an accident in the scheduled place.Though it caused a little confusion among the audience, many of whom went at the Museum, a good number of them enjoyed Maity’s short, but rich, solo presentation.
What was attractive of Maity is his commendable flair to engage his audience with the messages and stories of the songs he presented. Besides songs, he also recited poems on the occasion.
Maity, the sixty-nine-year-old young man, began the solo show with a Tagore poem, as he thinks and shares, Bangalees cannot do away with Tagore.
The first song of the show was a riveting folk piece whose first line runs Bakul Phul Bakul Phul. For many young Dhaka audience, this folk song is quite familiar in its revamped version, done brilliantly by folk-fusion band Joler Gaan. But Maity presented the song in its original jhumur taal with befitting music on harmonium and tabla.
The seemingly romantic-sentimental number, Maity said, is not as it looks likes. ‘The song is surely romantic and sentimental, but is informed and charged with mass people’s sentiment’, said the singer.
The second song Maity presented was a shyama sangeet, written and composed during the Second World War, and, therefore, reflected a melancholy in lyric and music.
Maity moved to recite a self-composed poem titled Bonsai. It was a poignant poem giving expression to the fact that today’s people are more like bonsais, than like the natural ones.
In the urban, sell-sale corporate culture, Maity said, it is natural that nothing will be natural. The natural tune is bound to stop if it is to attune with the corporate drums and dins.
Saying this, Maity brilliantly and with artistic relevance, began Kabir Sumon’s famous song Bashuria Bajao Bashi, which expresses exactly what Maity, in his speech, said.
On audience request, Maity presented a very comic but strongly political song. The song, called Thosar Gaan, was sung in the traditional puthi style. The happenings in a family of five deaf members, who always misunderstand one another and act on the basis of whatever they understand, is the substance of the song, which more interestingly ends by equating the character of the government with that of the members of the family.
The short show came to a pleasing end with Maity’s covering of another famous song by Kabir Sumon. The song- Hal Chherona Na- infused a spirit of persistence, of not giving up, into the audience before they left the hall with delight.
-With New Age input
