Virginia Woolf, in her essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown wrote: “On or about December 1910 human nature changed.” Woolf was philosophically referring to the experience of modernity but functionally to a culture quake: the 1910 London exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, which caused a great convulsion in the understanding of how art should represent modernity. Woolf was, of course, overstating the case by putting a precise date to what could only have been a gradual and subliminal shift. But what attracts us here is not the correctness of philosophy but the provocation of preciseness. This is because we are referring to April, 1992 when something changed forever in the life of Bengali music. In that month arrived Tomake Chai (In Want of You), an album of urban ballads that caused a “culture-quake” in Bengali music; 80 years since Manet did the same in England. This is the 30th year of that quake.
Tomake Chai was an ensemble of 12 distinct compositions, all of which were written, composed, and sung by Suman Chattopadhyay who later became Kabir Suman. He was that single, guerrilla troubadour against prevailing templates of music, a former Voice of America journalist, who has had long training in classical forms and who now, just after turning 40,…
