Sushanto and the Stories from his Music Room
Explore the world of Sushanto Kumar Chatterjee, a passionate collector of gramophone records and a living encyclopedia of Bengali recorded music. Saptarshi Roy Bardhan steps into his Kolkata apartment and discovers a treasure trove of over 3,000 records, each one telling a unique story of the rich musical heritage of Bengal.
Colleen Murphy, the screenwriter and host of the BBC Radio 4 audio series “ Turntable Tales” once said, “ My record collection probably tells the story of my life better than I could in words”. Colleen’s words would surely reverberate once you step into the 4th floor room of the apartment, located in the northern suburb of Kolkata, where lives Sushanto Kumar Chatterjee, the connoisseur, and collector of gramophone records and a living encyclopedia of Bengali recorded music. As a perfect host, Mr Chatterjee would usher you in with a warm smile. But then you have to meander your way through the narrow passage between the racks, which hold the cardboard boxes full of shellacs and vinyls to reach the furthest corner of the room and finally perch yourself precariously on the corner of the bed which is swarming to the brim, with turntables of varied size and shape, speakers, gramophone records, audio cassettes, CDs, books, catalogues, pictures so on and so forth. On the wall, the HMV logo of Nipper, the dog, listening to a wind-up disc gramophone and tilting his head, is a symbolic assertion of the man who lives by music, finely grooved on the shining faces of 3000 plus gramophone records, his present collection. Born in 1949, in Kolkata (then Calcutta) Mr Chatterjee developed an ear for music from an early year. His grandfather, Dr M.N Chatterjee, the famous eye surgeon, and philanthropist, after whom Dr M N Chatterjee Memorial Eye Hospital is named, was himself a music lover and a musician who played swaraddhya vina and published few gramophone records during 1905 when William Sinkler Darby, sound engineer at the Gramophone Co Ltd.( later HMV), and his team visited India in search of oriental music repertoire. Later his father and uncles also carried forward the tradition of listening to gramophone records on mechanically wind gramophone, a prized possession in many of the Bengali homes of that time. As a child, Mr Chatterjee had his own world around him – flying kites, reading story books, especially, detective novels, and last but not the least playing records. “ We started living in our Ritchie Road (south Kolkata) home since 1954-55. A 102 model gramophone built by Gramophone Co Ltd. became a family member since 1944. Beyond my study time, my responsibility was to play records on that robust machine as per request of my dad and uncle” ! quips Mr Chatterjee, “during those days names like Kanan Devi, Saigal, Robin Majumder, Asit Baran, Bharati Devi, and many others were already known to me” Friends and family members knew about the passion of the little boy and gramophone records used to be a staple gift on the occasion of birthday or any festival. “This gramophone, the pricey possession of my grandfather, travelled to Darjeeling and Puri with us”, reminisced Mr Chatterjee, “ at the dead of night I played a Pankaj Mallick or a Saigal by the beach at Puri – and that’s a feeling I can’t ever forget !”
After passing out from St.Lawrence High School, which almost coincided with the Chatterjee family shifting to a new address at Rajabazar, Sushanto Babu got himself admitted at Goenka College for a graduate course and also landed up with a job at Calcutta Electric Supply, the power utility company. While he managed his career and studies with dexterity, now he had enough money in his pocket to pursue his passion. In between, the playback technology was also fast changing. The late ‘60s saw the gradual advent of slick turntables in the market with electricity driven motors and shellac made discs giving way to lighter vinyl with longer playing time. Mr Chatterjee’s search continued across the city for the 78 rpm records which were recorded and published since the beginning of the twentieth century. The list got longer by the days. His treasure trove was already filling with records of varied genres of Bengali songs composed and sung by artists of yesteryears.
This hunt for vintage records also had interesting anecdotes and coming across people of diverse hues. Mr Chatterjee started visiting places like Sealdah market, Chandni Chawk, and Kidderpore where several vendors used to congregate with their stocks and wares. “I met Haru da, the renowned record collector, better known as Surajlal Mukhopadhyay, Santosh Babu, and Nanda Babu – who were authorities on old gramophone records. I received immense help from these people in building up my collection bit by bit.” As an outdoor executive of the Calcutta Electric Company, Mr Chatterjee’s roaming around the nook and crannies of the city on duty call also helped him discover many a valuable records and vintage gramophone machines. He remembers an old Muslim lady in his Rajabazar locality, who gifted the old gramophone, a prized possession of her husband, to Mr Chatterjee. In return, she requested him to donate some money to the mazzar around the corner on the main road. On another occasion, he reached the Putiram Sweets building in north Kolkata on an official visit. The landlord, a very old man in his eighties, was so impressed by his humming of a Bengali oldie, offered him two / three records from his ancestral collections. “These people came from nowhere and enriched me”! says Mr Chatterjee.
When asked about the most valuable record in his collection, with a twinkle in his eyes he refers to the twin records of his grandfather Dr Chatterjee – one single sided and the other with double sided recording, published in 1905. Other than these first recordings of Vande Mataram, sung by Narayon Ch Mukherjee on Nicole Records, National Anthem of Provisional Govt of Azad Hind, sung by Lt.Ram Singh Thakur ( as per Wikipedia “Thakuri”), a private recording of Bhajans by Ghanasyam Das Birla, a Pathe record manufactured by H Bose & Co containing a song by D L Roy, a Beka Grand Record, made in Germany having “Bidhir badhon katbe tumi”, a Rabindrasangeet ( then called Rabi babur gaan), a Bengali song cut by Babu Satya Gopal Ghosh and Miss Kiran on Nicole Records – are all part of his treasured chattels.
Mr Chatterjee is not only a collector and connoisseur of gramophone records but also a living encyclopaedia of Bengali songs. He has, on his fingertips, detailed information not only about a particular song or the record label or the artist – but also about the lyricist, composer, arranger, film director, actor, as the case may be, who were associated with it. For him, the chemistry of Uttam Kumar, the Bengali matinee idol, and Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, the redolent voice that had the highest number of playbacks for the actor to its credit, was inimitable and unique. His collection speaks of his passion for the duo.
During this long journey Mr Chatterjee, a member of The Society Of Indian Record Collectors, befriended with Michael Kinnear, the Australian discographer and private researcher who worked extensively in the early recording industry of India, Asia, and the Middle East. He also collaborated with Michael on the discography of artists like Krishna Chandra Dey, singer, composer, and actor of the 30’s and 40’s. With the advent of cassettes and CDs, recording companies in Kolkata gradually phased out the production of gramophone discs. Record collectors like Mr Chatterjee, nevertheless, continued to be a source of the older recordings, long gone into oblivion of the listeners and extinct from the archives of these companies. Even, there was a time when All India Radio used to borrow records from his collection to play the golden oldies on its weekly broadcast.
“All these show that gramophone records still hold an important position in the music industry. On the one hand, we should have more listening sessions where we play records, discuss music, and relive the bygone time, on the other, we try to create an infrastructure for the proper preservation of the records as well as documentation of the related information for the posterity”, says Mr Chatterjee who writes extensively on various topics about gramophone records and has very recently published Bengali Film Almanac (A Study Of Gramophone Records Vol 1 1932-1950) with co-writer Sanjay Sengupta.
A conversation with Sushanto Kumar Chatterjee would never be complete without listening to gramophone records. For the next one hour or so he joyfully regaled me with Bengali songs of different genres. As the metallic pin touched the rounding grooves, the mellifluous tune and the hissing noise admixed to create an ambiance within the four walls of his music room – and I could see the septuagenarian’s face lit up in candid bliss, a tell-tale of his heartfelt liveliness, which is as precious as his prized possession of shellacs and vinyl.
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