∺nd they were turbulent times,of the Naxalbari uprising and the decline of the Congress influence. For what had been festering inside Suman was the awareness that his music,his khayal,wasnt speaking to his time and his life. I heard a nasal voice singing Oh,where have you been,my blue-eyed son? And I thought,this man has done it,he has shown me the way, he says. It was at a friends house and I had never heard Dylan before. I was also bound by music, he says.Īnd yet,in 1973,two records of Rabindrasangeet under his belt,he stopped singing. Everything in my life was pushing me towards becoming a professional vocalist.
When I was 17,I became a regular singer at AIR stations. By 14,I was being trained in the great classical tradition of khayal. I got a rigorous training in Indian classical music from the age of eight. My father Sudhindra Nath Chatterjee was an eminent singer,so was my mother. Since a child,music was the mesh of Sumans life,the future that had been decided for him. His music doesnt fall into any category its a niche of its ownSumaner gaan (Sumans music). He brought a new sound,and most importantly,good poetry. He brought about a renaissance in Bengali music. Karim,chief manager,content,Saregama,who was associated with the release of Sumans first album Tomake Chai in 1992. He was Suman Chatterjee then,a bearded,balding man in his 40s,in jeans and a shirt,guitar strapped on his shoulder,the harmonica hanging from his neck and the keyboard in front of him,playing,singing and performingone man against the darkness of the stage,changing forever the tradition of Bangla Adhunik Gaan (Bengali modern music),at the time,anything but modern and stuck in an awful rut. But it drove the fear out of me, he says thoughtfully.Īnyone who saw Suman perform on stage in the early 1990s had never seen or heard anything like that before. I pissed six times in my pants,so did my friend. As part of the training,Suman and another journalist were asked to cross a field riddled with mines. Unlike in a war,a journalist has to be trained to survive a combat zone where guerrilla warfare is on because you dont know who your enemy is or your friend, he says with a puff on his cigarette. The Sandinista Liberation Front had just overthrown the dictatorship in the Central American country and Suman was among the handful of journalists in the combat zone. But the eyes look steadily at you and the voice is still rich with vigour as he takes you back to that time in 1985,when as a broadcast journalist in America,he travelled to Nicaragua to see what revolution looked like. At 61,his frame is a little bent with age,his hand trembles as he lifts the cellphone to his ears.
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