Deben Bhattacharya - ethno-musicologist par excellence

Songs are the spontaneous human expressions of joy, invocation, sorrow or longing. They are the repositories of human emotions and of diverse cultural histories. One person attempted all his life to collect these fragments of the human experience from the desert, hills and rivers and piece together a shared heritage. He was popularly known as "Deben: The gypsy from Varanasi". He was Deben Bhattacharya, born in December 1921 in a traditional Bengali Brahmin family in Varanasi where he studied in a traditional Sanskrit “tol”. After considerable vicissitudes he was able to travel to London and after odd jobs rose to become an associate producer of Indian music for BBC radio programmes. For the next fifty years he devoted his time and energy to recording the folk music of different countries, from Romania, to Jordan and Syria, Mauritania in North Africa to Rajasthan, Bengal, Assam and Bangladesh on the Indian Sub-Continent.

His area of interest and passion were the songs of the desert, hills and rivers. The range of the work of the late Deben Bhattacharya, as much as an ethno-musicologist as that of a humanist, may be understood from (a) some of his films, e.g. "The Cosmic Dance of Shiva", "Painted Ballads of India, Krishna in Spring", "Faces of the Forest - The Santals of West Bengal", "The Mirror of the Sky, 1969 (the songs of the BAULS of Bengal for UNESCO", "Love Songs of Vidyapati", etc.; (b) the audio recordings - Bedouins of the Middle East 1955-60; Sounds of West Sahara – Mauritania; Maqams of Syria, River Songs of Bangladesh, The Mirror of the Sky – Songs of the Bauls of Bengal and so on. He was one of the first to have recorded the songs of Bauls of Bengal in 1956/57 and of the chants at the Buddhist monasteries. The last Deben Bhattacharya has left an irreplaceable patrimony of intangible heritage of several nations. December 2021 marks the Centenary of Shri Deben Bhattachraya.

Further particulars of his works may be seen at -- https://www.sublimefrequencies.com/products/625798-deben-bhattacharya-paris-to-calcutta-men-and-music-on-the-desert-road https://mubi.com/films/la-musique-selon-deben-bhattacharya https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/859487.The_Mirror_of_the_Sky There are several other sites also featuring the work of the late Deben Bhattacharya. Fortunately his collection of about 400 hours of folk music recording and many thousands of photographs are now housed in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.