About A Song: The Use And Abuse Of ‘Shopno Dekhbo Bole’
Moushumi Bhowmik On 27 August I was at a workshop on copyright and the traditional arts at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) on our E.M.Bypass. They wanted me to take part both in my capacity as singer and writer with some published work, and as someone who has been involved since 2003, in a field recordings-based project in Bengal, covering parts of eastern India and Bangladesh, called The Travelling Archive, with sound recordist Sukanta Majumdar. There is our non-commercial website based on that project and we are responsible for all the material that we put up on it. Besides, we also have our own record label now, which we call Travelling Archive Records, and which gives us another set of experiences and entrusts us with another set of responsibilities as producer/publisher. Legal matters are not easy to deal with. Questions of tradition, rights, protocol, cultural expression and cultural expectation, communal (meaning, of the community) ownership, acknowledgment and so on can be extremely complex, and they vary from place to place, and from situation to situation. I told Ruchira Goswami, sociologist and one of the workshop convenors, that I could only talk about my experiences, as I could not always understand legalities, nor did I necessarily live by them. If there was anything which had a more abiding role in my life, then it was a personal politics—my own sense of what is right and what is not. Of course it isn’t something exclusive to me, there are others too who live in their little worlds guided by similar principles. We know and know of some; others we have not yet met. Ruchira said that that was apparently what they were expecting to hear from me. I was a bit wary of what would happen at this meeting but the night before, I looked through my writings, our field recordings, my field notes, my own albums—the original ones and the bootlegs—our records from Travelling Archive Records, old emails, remembering forgotten details of things which have happened over the past two decades of my active working life. At the workshop the next day, to my pleasant surprise, there was much that we learned from one another, and shared, and I came home feeling quite stimulated. I had my own stories to tell and some of my most interesting ones are about this song which I wrote a long time ago—a song (in fact, often the only song) by which many people identify me—which is ‘Shopno Dekhbo Bole’, beginning with the line ‘Ami shunechhi shedin’. Or, they do not know me at all, but know the song. My friend and colleague Oliver Weeks had once told me, this song is a bit like Elton’s ‘Candle in the Wind’; just that you haven’t earned as much money from it! And we had laughed. So I told them at this workshop about how I might be calling someone and then I hear my own song playing as the ringtone, and it is a funny feeling. And we laughed again. I said, maybe I could do something about it all, but then I don’t really have the wish or the time. My priorities are different. I could have won a case perhaps, but that would mean I would not be doing all these other things which matter to me. They understood, but then Anirban Mazumder, Intellectual Property Rights specialist at NUJS, said later that maybe we also need to take up some issues in order to create a precedence. Well, to me I think it depends on who is standing on the other side of the battleline. I did confront Tara Muzik once for a telefilm in which Parambrata goes about singing my song, which I do not mind, then he messes up the words, and even that is pardonable. But then there is not any credit given to me. I complained, and the director did respond with grace and humility. Actually, not every gain can be quantified. Once in 2008, we were waiting for the boat in a small and old river-port called Markuli Bazar, in Habiganj district of the Sylhet region of Bangladesh. In that tiny market by the old ghat, as we sat and sipped sweet tea thickened with condensed milk, we heard ‘Shopno Dekhbo Bole’ playing on the radio in a shop across the road. Did that make me think of my rights as an artist or about unholy transactions? Wasn’t there more to the story than that? There is another one very dear to me. This was around 2002 or 03, in London. Srikanta Acharya and Arna Seal were visiting, as Srikanta was giving a concert at the Bhavan, which is an important Indian cultural centre of the city. So, I went to listen (I was based in London at the time), as they are very old friends of mine. There was to be a dance by some local talent before the actual concert. So I sat there with my friends—Arna’s mashi, her friend, their daughters and so on. Now, the curtain begins to part in slow motion and there is smoke on the stage. Clouds filling up the space. And I hear the strumming of the guitar. It sounds kind of familiar. The more the curtain parts, the more familiar the music sounds but I just can’t place it. I have heard this music, I tell my friends. What is it? There half-hidden in the clouds, is a girl dressed as an apsara in white, dancing away. Then of course it predictably begins, ‘Aa, aa aa aa. . .’ And one of my elderly friends becomes super excited! Hey, that’s your song! I understand the reason behind the clouds—it is a song about dreams and dreaming after all! The question indeed is one of who is standing on the other side of the battleline. By a strange coincidence, only five days after this consultative workshop at NUJS, I had a phone call from