100 Years Of Salil Chowdhury: Returning To The Songs That Raised Us

One of the first songs my six-year-old niece Totko learnt by heart was about a goofy fly named Panchi (“Ak Je Chhilo Machhi”) who would dart about pell-mell, land in odd places and have bizarre adventures. The lyrics of the song, apart from its catchy rhythmic melody, rely on words with different onsets but a common rime—those that rhyme with machhi (fly). Totko nods to the beat as she sings the song, joining a long lineage of children who grew up with the songs written and composed by Salil Chowdhury (1925-1995) and sung by his daughter, Antara Chowdhury.

Incidentally, the first song I ever memorised to perform at a cultural event in our neighbourhood was “Runner” (sung by Hemanta Mukherjee; composed by Chowdhury)—a song about a valiant mailman who runs on foot, braving every peril, to keep the thread of communication from snapping. Long before the British Empire, runners delivered mail through a relay system: each man ran a stretch of the route before handing the letter over to the next, until it reached its destination. As my late grandfather once explained to me, the song achingly captures the pathos of a man who spends his nights running to deliver other people’s letters, even though no one will ever read the letters he might have wished to write about his hunger and exhaustion.

What connects Totko’s experience with mine is the way Chowdhury seeped into our childhoods—into our memories—long before either of us recognised his genius, and by extension, into the childhood memories of Bengali kids across generations, up to this very day. If you grew up surrounded by relatives speaking Bangla, it’s almost impossible to escape the children’s songs he wrote. Pieces like “Aye Re Chhute Aye Pujor Gondho Esechhe” (sung by Antara Chowdhury, written and composed by Chowdhury) still herald the beginning of Durga Pujo for us. It would be difficult to find a millennial growing up in Bengal who hasn’t come across songs like “O Shona Byang”, “O Kola Byang”, or “Aye Brishti Jhepe”, “Bulbul Pakhi Moyna Tiye”. On Chowdhury’s 100th birth centenary, as I return to his songs on loop, I am struck by how he managed to smuggle complex ideas of class privilege and political consciousness into children’s music, shaping the childhood of generations—something that is unprecedented in Indian music.

Children’s Songs Forming Political Consciousness

Let’s take “Aye Re Chhute Aye” as an example. The song—part of Chhotoder Gan, Chowdhury’s collaboration with his daughter Antara—embodies the spirit of October, when Bengal transitions into Durga Puja mode. The track begins in the voice of a child, soaked in the giddy anticipation of the festival, asking her mother to deck her up. And then comes the final verse, where she decides to give away all her new clothes and jewellery to a girl from Moynapara, who has none. Looking back, one recognises that songs like these were, through their narratives, instilling in children the idea that sharing is the most meaningful form of care in a world where abundance and scarcity coexist so starkly.

Perhaps the most scathing example of Chowdhury’s songs that shape the political imagination of children is “O Mago Ma”, written and composed for the same album, Chhotoder Gan. A child, bored with tales about kings and queens, turns to her mother with harder questions—why a neighbour’s child died of fever, why a city dense with houses still has so many people sleeping on the pavement. In its gentle way, the song ushers children into the politics of the society they’re raised in, long before they have the vocabulary for it. She asks why her classmate Anjana was expelled for not paying school fees, why faces line the streets to beg each day. And finally, she ends her litany with the stinging question: why her two elder brothers, despite excelling in their studies, remain jobless.

While discussing the album Chhotoder Gan, one cannot overlook the song “Teler Shishi”, composed by Chowdhury, that is originally a poem by Annada Shankar Roy, in which a child asks elders why they get angry at children for breaking a jar of oil when, as adults, they have been shamelessly breaking India and Bengal into fragments. Many songs in this album adopt a child’s perspective, with children posing scathing questions to adults, thereby exposing the hypocrisies and contradictions of adulthood.

These songs never dismiss the child’s inner world as trivial. Chowdhury, in fact, wields the child’s gaze like a mirror, reflecting the tinsel trappings of adult pretense. Take “Kanamachhi Bhon Bhon” (Blind Man’s Bluff) —a game in which the blindfolded person tries to tag others. In the song, a father ruefully confesses that adults, too, are playing the game: blindfolded, stumbling, and trying not to be disqualified while navigating the uncertainties of life. The song reveals Chowdhury’s lyrical brilliance, transforming a familiar children’s game into a meditation on adulthood—a realm where the grass is rarely greener.

“Aye Brishti Jhenpe”, sung by Sandhya Mukherjee and written and composed by Chowdhury, is also a significant song that begins with the joyful tune of wishing for rain. Soon, however, the melody shifts, revealing the song to be written from the perspective of a farmer, who is helplessly pleading for rain, as his charred land has barely produced any harvest and hunger has left him devastated.

If one were to discuss Chowdhury’s association with IPTA or his songs on people’s movements, the Bengal famine, and the Tebhaga movement, one might mention an arsenal of songs, including “Bicharpoti Tomar Bichar”, “Hei Samalo Dhan”, “O Alor Pothojatri”, and “Ei Adharer Ratey”, to name a few. He singlehandedly shaped not only the political imagination of listeners, but also the very conception of political songs in times charged with the urgency of nation-building. Thus, it is heartbreaking to learn that when he returned from Bombay to Kolkata, despite his searing success in Bollywood and multiple other film industries and the establishment of the Bombay Youth Choir (India’s first secular choir), he struggled to keep a studio running.

The man who, through his songs, taught generations of children to give away new clothes to the Moynaparar meye; or showed them that there is no such thing as a “dushtu chhele” (a “bad child”) when one learns to empathise with everyone (“Ak Je Chhilo Dushtu Chhele”); and who gave voice and tune to collective rage lashing out against institutional injustice struggled to get along with the State government. His studio, Sound on Sound, shared its premises with a medicine factory, the constant clatter of which hindered his recordings. He sought help from the government for intervention, but to no avail.

In such circumstances, one is compelled to ask: when will we ever learn to value an artist? How long will the State continue to celebrate culture only in retrospect when it demands nothing and risks nothing? Why must we always fail to pay our dues to artists whose work we posthumously show up to claim as our own? The shame is not merely institutional. It is historic, and heartbreaking as it is ongoing.

Sritama Bhattacharyya has an M.Phil in Women’s Studies from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She is currently an English Teacher based in Washington.