Music from Jaidev to Gurudev proved that a complete musical composition with great lyrics has the capacity to render happiness and cheer to our body and mind. The book is a testimony to the thirst of an ardent music lover. Having received taalim and lesson from his legendary father Late Ramkumar Chatterjee and many more musical exponents of the contemporary era, the author has written this book for the new generations to evaluate the values of Bengali literary music in times when our society is experiencing tumultuous changes of its own.
This concise compendium of Bengali lyrical compositions is the fruition of a long sustained ambition of the author to encapsulate in a rapid sweep the old musical heritage of Bengal. It covers a pretty time-frame between twelfth to twentieth century. In other words it is a brief and popular documentation of an evolving cultural tradition which prevailed in the Bengali musical arena spread over this huge chronological order.
Pandit Srikumar Chattopadhyay is himself a celebrity in this cultivation of musical excellence by way of carrying a family lineage on the one hand and rejuvenating the parampara of this tradition being himself an eminent performing artiste. He has justifiably expressed his serious concern in this discourse about the emerging tendencies of multiple negative factors vitiating the vitality of our age-old treasure of such lyrical expositions. His diligence in appending a long repertoire of various compositions along with their notations has no doubt heightened the level of this valuable publication of The Asiatic Society.
In the established scaffolding of culture, the recent trends have been instrumental in bringing about a sea change. Although the extent to which such an overhaul would be acceptable to a certain section of people remains uncertain, it is however, welcomed with open arms by the modern populist rhetoric.
In the current context, as a practitioner of music, I consider this an imperative to preserve the valuable musical imprint which served as a watermark to sketch the later developments of culture. For instance, Lalon's compositions touching upon the themes of spirituality, non-attachment and the body-principle (Dehatattwa) are remodelled into westernised fusion forms, drawn away from their original earthy essence and metaphysical realisation of higher order. The world-acclaimed, internationally-revered Hindustani classical genre has also occasionally succumbed to fusion.
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