The World of Salil Chowdhury

My sincerest thanks to everybody who helped me over the years to build my collection of Salil Chowdhury's songs, his poems and his other writings and interviews. So many people sent me notes, comments, cassettes with rare songs and other material. My biggest thanks are to my dear friends Ranabir Neogy and Sandip Chatterjee of Calcutta. Two totally committed and very knowledgeable Salil-collectors. Without their help I would have very little.
Ranabir has been the most consistent, knowledgable and commited Salil admirer and afficionado I have ever met. Besides, his memory is formidable. He can recall nearly every song Salil ever composed and any other version of a song in any other language. He is also a mine of information on Salil. On numerous occasions he had helped me to remind, collect and advise everything related to Salil. It is well known that HMV has benefitted from Ranabir's massive record collection. Over the past 10-15 years HMV has re-released several cassettes and CDs of Salil's songs. This was made possible by Ranabir who was kind enough to lend his records to HMV (who had misplaced the original masters !). I think all Salil admirers must be thankful to Ranabir for this.
Without Ranabir's help this website wouldn't exist.

Sandip on the otherhand is a highly qualified linguist (masters in Bengali and Sanskrit) and is totally obsessed with Salil's music. He was the first Salil collector I met back in the early eighties and had helped me a lot to start my first collection of Salil's songs. Sandip wrote a wonderful article once which interpretaed and analysed Salil's bengali songs and the lyrics. Even Salil was quite impressed although he did say that Sandip was probably being a bit far-fetched when he analysed and compared some of Salil's songs being inspired by thoughts from the Veda's and Rigveda's.

I also thank Dulalda (Utpal Chakraborty) of The Melody in Calcutta for all the rare information he supplied over the years. The Melody has always been a mecca for the musicians since the '50s. Dulalda had encyclopedic knowledge of the music industry and some wonderful stories about Salil. Ranabir was also very close to Dulalda. Dulalda advised HMV often and helped them to bring out special rare compilations of songs for artistes ranging from Renuka Dasgupta to Salil. His collection was formidable and so was his knowledge. Sadly, Dulalda died on December 10, 1998 and with him we lost a dear friend, a music-lover and his 40 years of knowledge in the music industry.

Thanks to Vinod Sonthalia of Calcutta who gave me some extremely rare songs. Sadly Vinod left us in March 2007 - a great loss to music lovers all over India and abroad.
My sincerest thanks to Vish Krishnan of California, a man I most admire and one of the most important and knowledgable contributors to RMIM. Vish compiled all the Hindi Film tables within 4 days flat and saved me considerable time.

Thanks to Dr. Chandrasekhar of Dubai, another very knowledgable RMIMer and a great collector for sending me  excellent recordings of some old songs.

Since my knowledge and collection of Malayalam songs were quite limited I had to visit Kerala three times to collect all the records by walking arount second hand record shops along the streets of Ernakulam and Kochi. This would never have been possible without the help of Babu Pulikkal my dear friend in Kochi. My sinserest thatns to Babu and his family.

Thanks to Kalyan Dutta of California for the excellent translation of two wonderful Bengali articles. The first one written by Salil - 'Evolution in Modern Indian Music'  and a must read for everybody. The other excellent article is 'Runner will return no more' by Sandhya Sen. Kalyan is busy translating other articles at the moment and hopefully we will be able to upload them soon.

Sambit Basu from USA has kindly sent me the excellent article 'Salil Chowdhury: A Phenomenon in Modern Bengali Music' written by Suman Chattyopadhaay and published in the Bombay based Sangeet Natak Academy magazine.

"Few Moments with Salil Chowdhury" - Many thanks to Arindam Banerjee of Boston who completed this brilliant English translation for the rare Bengali interview of Salil Chowdhury taken by Kalpana Biswas in 1978. It is a long interview but it is probably the most candid and frank interview of Salil and should be a must read for all his admirers. The original article in Bengali was published in the Bengali magazine "Kaalpurush" in 1978.

Rammyageeti - Around 2009 I was very pleased to get to know a young man named Satyaki Sarkar who is besotted with Bengali songs and specially Salil's songs. He had been tirelessly collecting old second hand records and recording All India Radio broadcasts. He is also very generous and because of him I managed to collect several quite rare Rammyageeti composed by Salil. These songs were never released and for all of us Salil admirers they are like gold dust.

Ayonanto - In 2010 my old friend Khokan Mukherjee, a brilliant guitarist (sadly passed away a couple of years ago) played regularly with Salil and often talked very enthusiastically about the superb Title music for the Bengali film "Ayananto" (1964). He did not remember the complete piece but could play only a few bars. Since the film was never available we could not hear the Title music. He suggested that I should ask our common friend Y.S Moolkay the brilliant accordionist and a regular with Salil's orchestra for the complete piece. It took me nearly 5 years to find Moolkay who did remember the complete piece and wrote down the notaion for me. I could then re-create the music by re-recording it.

Roopali Soikate - Our friend Mahadevan a very dedicated admirer of Salil recently informed all of us in our Salilda Fans group in Facebook that the film "Rupaali Soikate" is available online. It turned out that one Mr. Ahsan Rafiq had shared this rare film made in Bangladesh. Thanks to Mahadevan and Ahsan Rafiq.

Many thanks to Rahul for the help he provided with his knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and his design concepts. Without his help this site wouldn't be here. Anyone interested in his work can write to him.