Deben Bhattacharya - Asian Voyages II

Curated by Arindam Sen

Deben Bhattacharya’s work as field recordist and musical archivist has few parallels in the 20th Century. Born in Varanasi in 1921, Bhattacharya moved to London in the 1940s. In 1955, he set out on an iconic, one year 12000 mile journey, traveling through Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, all the way to Calcutta and back, tracing the living traditions of ethnic music.

Bhattacharya wasn’t a musician: his instrument was a 35 kg GB-Kalee spool tape recorder. He is globally known thanks to the numerous vinyl records found in “World Music” sections. Less is known about his filmmaking, which unlike his work with indigenous music and photography, is more accidental. Offered financial assistance by David Attenboroughwhile traveling to India in 1962, he brought back footage shot on a 16mm Bolex camera and musical recordings which were later edited into the documentary films Kathakali and Storytellers from Rajasthan. Buoyed by the success of this venture, Bhattacharya finished over twenty films, produced by the BBC, UNESCO, and other record and film producers for a largely western audienceHis cultural-anthropological and ethnomusicological pursuits resulted in a mode of filmmaking that lies between the Newsreels of British Pathé and the documentaries of Alan Lomax or John Cohen.

With two programs on consecutive evenings comprising a total of six films, Asian Voyages seeks to place Bhattacharya’s filmmaking into the spotlight for the first time. (AS)

With many thanks to Jharna Bose, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), and Sushrita Acharjee.

Arindam Sen is an independent film curator and critic  He co-founded the Brussels based platform for Experimental film programs, Cinema Parenthèse. His writings have appeared in Millennium Film Journal, Senses of Cinema, Lumière and Marg magazine among others.

The Land of Smiles: Thailand
Deben Bhattacharya, UK, 1973, 26 min, English

The Island of Temples: Bali
Deben Bhattacharya, UK, 1973, 27 min. English

Silk and String: A Tale from Taiwan
Deben Bhattacharya, UK, 1973, 25 min. English

With the aid of a voiceover in these three essayistic films Bhattacharya weaves together narratives on nature, indigenous artisanship, agrarian labour, and marginal traditions of music and performance arts that are brutalised by globalisation. The quasi-romantic tenor of these films, that sometimes betray the objective authority of the voiceover narration, eschew a postcolonial analysis in favour of a morphed colonial version of sensory anthropology, uneasily straddling Western ethnography and developmentalist nationalism without entirely embodying either. The politics in these films, if any, is the politics of absence(s). Infrastructural investments in Thailand, the meteoric rise in tourism in Bali, and Taiwan’s political situation all deflect our experience of these films in the present day. Looking at them while ruminating on the peripherality of the depicted cultural traditions, the charged histories of these landscapes are activated. (AS)