Standing in an unmarked lane amid a cluster of areca, jackfruit and mango trees, the red and black concrete building is unremarkable. Unless pointed out, you wouldn’t even notice the half-erased name on one side that spells out Lalan Academy in Bengali.
“It’s our little sanctuary,” says singer, song writer, music director, folk artist and music teacher Suvendu Maity, the man who set up the Academy. He introduces the Academy matron, well-known folk singer Tapasi Roy Chowdhary.
“What he means is it’s an old age asylum for people like us,” she giggles.
“Mental asylum, actually,” her guru guffaws in unison.
The place is indeed a sanctuary, for men and music alike.
The building used to be Roy Chowdhary’s family home, but the widowed singer isn’t left with much of what is commonly called family. In her words, “the decision to make this the Lalan Academy came easy”.
Named after Lalan Baul, the Academy’s ground floor houses a library of obscure books on Bengal’s cultural history. They are restored by hand by the Academy. I randomly pick one that has been rebound and it reads “Charnel Grounds of Bengal and Their Role as Cultural Arenas”. Another is about the technical differences in the various songs boatmen sang, depending on which part of the delta they were rowing in.
Around 4,000 very rare long-playing records sit on one side, in the company of nine hand-wound gramophones. The residents have taught themselves the art of repairing and maintaining these. Two rooms on the ground floor have been converted into a sound-proof recording studio with a music room, where CDs of unknown singers are cut.
The Academy’s members travel to the innumerable gaan melas that dot West Bengal in the winter months. And if they chance upon a new talent, they offer them a ticket to come to Naihati. The singer stays at the Academy for a few days, first spending some time in preparation and then making a formal recording under Maity and Roy Chowdhary. Once recorded, the CDs are sent to the professional music circles. All expenses are borne by the Academy.
“We try to balance costs by renting out the studio at Rs. 300 a day, but customers are hard to come by. It’s a labour of love,” says Maity with a shrug. “Arjun Khyapa is a product of this place,” he says, face lighting up. He’s referring to the now very famous baul singer discovered and nurtured by Lalan Academy. Besides Roy Chowdhary and Maity, three other people live in the house: Anju Mandal, who doubles up as the family cook, her very shy, school-going son Bhaskar, and a daughter who is in college.
“Anju was a mess when she came to live with us,” Roy Chowdhary tells me that night over a dinner of rotis and potato curry. “She was literally battered; beaten by her drunkard husband everyday, even through her pregnancy.”
“We are all broken souls,” Maity says, “Broken in different ways. Marx said religion is the opium of the masses. For us, it’s music”
“But do you still think Marxism will deliver us all?”
“Of course I do. Marxism is the steel that holds working class movements in place. It’s not just song and dance, is it? You can’t have a people’s cultural movement that doesn’t talk of people’s economic plight, can you?”
“Then what’s your problem with the Marxist party?”
“They are a bunch of idiots parroting things they learn by rote from the West. Someone translated the term ‘have-nots’ as sarbohara — meaning one who has nothing and noone. And now they keep going sarbohara sarbohara . Arey baba, nobody is a sarbohara . Was the boy who made our tea today a sarbohara or the man who plied our rickshaw sarbohara ? Even the poorest man on earth has some root to which he’s linked — if he was born, he had an umbilical cord attached to a mother. If you want that man to listen to you, tug at that cord.”
“What’s a better word for have-nots?” “Dalit, of course. Dalit means the ones being crushed… that captures the essence. A Dalit may be a victim but he is not a nobody. He has his language and his culture. He has roots. Unlike a sarbohara, he is not some insentient, poor devil waiting to be liberated by someone who’s read all the books there are to read.”
“But obviously, the urbane and genteel leaders of Kolkata won’t ever use that word,” he adds, with a half-smirk. “It’s too laden with caste for them to use. The leaders need poor devils, whom they can be seen liberating.”
“What about Mamata Banerjee? She is all about mass culture.”
“She’s all about exploiting the absence of culture.”
“The rural economy is in a shambles. People migrate to the cities and end up in slums. They get some food, some clothes, a semblance of shelter. But then they need culture. That’s a basic need too. Robbed of the earth in which their words and tunes were rooted and kept out by the elite from their fine arts, they grope for something to fill the gap with. People like Banerjee give them mass-produced thrills. That’s not culture. That’s just consumption.”
Maity was a leading man in the Indian People’s Theatre Association and a full-time member of CPI(M). But he was expelled for being vocally critical of Hope ’86, a a jamboree of cinema stars who sang and danced in a state-sponsored programme to bring in investment for the Tollygunge film industry. Mithun Chakraborty, who now campaigns for the Trinamool Congress, was the brand ambassador.
“Why do you still campaign for CPI(M)?” I bring up the troubled relationship.
“CPI(M) expels every artist at some point of time. They expelled Ritwik [Ghatak]! What am I worth?”
I ask him about the Academy’s future.
“I don’t know of the Academy, but our way will survive. Without fear or favour. There is no genuine folk artist in Bengal who hasn’t come to this little stage of ours. They — the little team I have built here and the people who love earthy songs — they will keep it alive, like they kept the songs alive.”
Maity does not take funding from just anyone. “If a company somewhere is killing farmers and then forms a charitable trust and offers money, would I use that and write the songs of the revolution,” he asks.
“Your idealism is a big weight on the Academy,” I say.
Maity takes a long drag on his cigarette and eyes focussed on a distant gaze replies, “This is the way of Lalan. He sought no acceptance from anyone and owed no explanations to anyone save truth and his sai , Siraj Sai.”
Siddharthya Roy is a freelance journalist
