Deben Bhattacharya - Asian Voyages Listening Session

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.

Deben Bhattacharya travelled far and wide to record music, sometimes to geographies now rendered inaccessible in the aftermath of global conflicts. In this listening session lasting around quarter to an hour, we shall collectively listen to a selection of his musical recordings to get a sense of the range of acoustic universes that Bhattacharya encountered and archived as part of his field work. An assortment of North Indian classical ragas, East India’s popular Baul music, Syrian Maqams, Bedouin dance songs from Jordan, and folkloric chants from Java and Bali will fill the room alongside other impromptu selections.