Salil Chowdhury

Salil Chowdhury - The Writer and the Poet

Not many people are aware that Salil was an exceptional writer. Even in Bengal, majority of the Bengalees do not know that he was a writer and a poet besides being a composer. When he composed a song in Bengali, he almost always wrote the lyrics. During the '40s and '50s his Bengali songs expressed his anti-colonial feelings, his love for the people of his country and the poor and oppressed landless peasants. His songs were revolutionary. After the independence, his lyrics very often expressed his deep feelings about the social injustice and the unfairness present in our society. He never wrote the typical romantic Bengali lyrics which were quite common in those days. One of his close friends was the then famous poet 'Sukanto Bhattyacharya'. Salil set some of his poems to music. These songs, like 'Runner' and 'Abaak Prithibi' have become part of the Bengali culture.
Salil also wrote poetry. His poems are quite unusual in the sense that they are in one hand quite simple to read and on the other hand they are very direct and really hit you. In fact, his poems are like simple dialogs. He uses the common man's language. No difficult or complex words. Just plain Bengali. But the effect is dramatic. He wrote numerous poems, some published and some not. Often he would write at the back of an envelope and then lose it.

Different situations and events prompted him to write poems. During the 300 years celebration of Calcutta he wrote a poem which questioned and challenged the festivities. It was controversial to say the least. None of the magazines would publish it ! After his death 'The poems of Salil Chowdhury' was published by Sabita Chowdhury. This book doesn't have all his poems, but most of them.
In 1983 his only album of his poems was released. He recites his poems with background music composed by him. A collector's piece.

When he wrote his first Bengali short story 'Dressing Table', it caused a sensation. Since then he wrote several short stories and plays. His other famous short story 'Sunya Puron' was about a midget's fight to overcome his shortness. His first staged play was 'ChaalChore'. Unfortunately the scripts of two of his later plays 'Janaantik'(1948) and 'Sanket'(1949) can't be traced. Salil also translated the well-known Irish play 'At the rising of the Moon' in Bengali. It was called 'Orunodoyer Pathey'. After 23 years he wrote 'Aapni key ? Aapni Ki karen? Apni Ki korte chaan?' - literally meaning 'Who are you ? What do you do ? What would you like to do ?' This was staged by 'Theater Unit' of Calcutta and was directed by the late Shekhar Chattyopadhaay in 1972 at the 'Rangana' stage.

Salil wrote for films as well. His first film script was 'Rikshawalaa' in Bengali. Due to it's success, he was invited by Bimal Roy to Bombay, where he wrote it's Hindi version 'Do Bighaa Zameen'. Later he wrote the stories for 'Pinjre Ki Panchhi', 'Parakh' and 'Minoo' . The Kannad film 'Chinna Ninna Muddaduwe' was later filmed based on one of his stories. In the late '70s he wrote the story of a Bengali film 'Ei Ritur Ak Din' and was about to direct it himself. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.
Salil's poetry and songs became a subject for the post graduate Bengali students in the 'Rabindra Bharati' University of Calcutta. In fact, Salil did give some talks at the university on 'Music and Poetry'.
Salil moved effortlessly between the music and his literature. Equally creative and brilliant.
Narayan Gangopadhaay, the famous Bengali writer once said ' If Salil became a full time writer, we would lose him as a composer and lose his wonderful songs, but we hope that Salil doesn't stop writing'.

Salil Chowdhury was born on 19th November 1922 and died on September 5, 1995, just before his 73th birthday.To me Salil was a true genius. His untimely and sudden death on September 5, 1995 was a great shock to many and a great loss to India.
He was one of the greatest musical talents India ever had, a man of many talents. He was not only an outstanding composer, an accomplished and gifted arranger, poet and writer but above all an intellectual. A master multi-instrumentalist, he played excellent flute, Esraj, violin and piano , with a deep and well-studied understanding of several other instruments as is evident from their creative use in his music.
He spent many years of his childhood in the Assam tea gardens where his father was a doctor. He grew up listening to his father's large collection of western classical music and the folk songs of Assam and Bengal. This influenced him considerably and shaped his musical thinking. Young Salil could sing very well and played excellent flute from the age of eight. In fact his expertise in flute brought him in contact with the outside musical world. He was very fond of his father. Salil remembered how his father once hit one of the British managers and broke his three front teeth after he called his father 'dirty nigger'. Salil's father organised and staged plays with the tea-garden coolies and other lowly paid workers . Salil remembers his father's strong anti-British feelings and his concern and love for the oppressed tea garden workers. After graduating from Bangabaashi College in Calcutta, during his university years his political ideas were fast maturing along with his musical ideas. Living through the Second World War, the Bengal famine and the hopeless political situation of the '40s, he became acutely aware of his social responsibilities. This is when he joined IPTA (Indian Peoples Theater Association) and became a member of the communist party. During this period he wrote numerous songs and with IPTA took his songs to the masses. They travelled through the villages and the cities and his songs became the voice of the masses.These songs were very powerful indeed. Songs of protest, which made people aware of the rampant social injustice which surrounded them. These songs became very powerful and stimulating. In fact, Salil always retained his strong feelings for the social injustice and very often wrote songs which reflected those feelings. He called these songs the 'Songs of consciousness and awakening'.
These mass songs became a part of the independence movement and they are still performed all over Bengal after all these years. In a way they have now become an integral part of the Bengali heritage.
Salil's Bengali songs changed the whole course of Bengali modern music. Bengalees were thrilled and amazed to hear his songs with completely new melodies, new lyrics and totally new musical arrangements. A new wave came sweeping across Bengal in the '50s and continued for at least three decades.
While his musical message reached almost all parts of the country as the multifaceted composer set even Telugu numbers to music, the rest of India was denied access to his poetic abilities.
We can see two main phases of Salil. The first phase starts in the pre-independence era of the '40s and goes up to '54-'55 and the second phase is after that. Basically, the first phase was the non-professional in it's intent. His professional phase started around the mid-fifties. One has to study both these phases to understand and appreciate Salil Chowdhury's music. We see Salil as a brilliant lyricist, a song writer and a poet in his first phase and a very matured and exceptionally talented composer in his second phase. The composer Salil reached the greatest heights in his second phase which basically started when he arrived in Bombay to compose for the film 'Do Bigha Zameen'. This was the Hindi version of the successful Bengali Film 'Rikshawalla' . He wrote the story of 'Rikshawaala' and composed the music as well. It was a tremendous success and so was 'Do Bigha Zameen'.
Since then he had composed for over 75 Hindi Films, around 26 Malayalam Films and several Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Assameese and Oriya Films. He had also composed for several Tele-Films and Tele-Serials.
Salil was arguably the most versatile musician in the world of Indian cinema. To the music connoisseurs he was better known as the non-conformist music composer whose unceasing search for perfection towered above everything else in his life.His meticulous attention to details, a scrupulous ear for musical content, an insatiable desire for improvisation - it all remained with him till his last days. His phenomenal flair for instruments prompted even an expert like Jaikishen to refer to him as a 'The Genius'. Raj Kapoor once said 'He can play almost any instrument he lays his hands on, from the tabla to the sarod, from the piano to the piccolo'. He was in fact a composer's composer, because unlike his market-driven counterparts, he never really set prose to music. To him the melody was sacrosanct and had to precede the words. The situation could then be adapted.
Salil's music was a unique blending of the east and the west. He had once said 'I want to create a style which shall transcend borders - a genre which is emphatic and polished, but never predictable'. He dabbled in a lot of things and it was his ambition to achieve greatness in everything he did. But at times, his confusion was fairly evident - 'I do not know what to opt for: poetry, story writing, orchestration or composing for films'. I just try to be creative with what fits the moment and my temperament' he once told a journalist.
To me Salil was a true genius and I will always wonder at his unfathomable talent. I guess he was much ahead of his time and was never fully appreciated or rewarded.

A talent does what it can, but a genius does what it mus

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Thank you very much for the wonderful articles.

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Did Salilda compose for Madhumati? Ek se badkar ek nagme, Aaja Re Pardesi, Toote Huye Khwaabon Ne, Suhana Safar...

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THANK YOU for the wonderful posts !!!!

I think that SALIL CHOWDHURY died when a bone of a chicken got stuck in his throat and he was choked to death 🤢 🤢

thank u swar ji for posting.......... 👏

Originally posted by: SHUBHAMSG

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THANK YOU for the wonderful posts !!!!

I think that SALIL CHOWDHURY died when a bone of a chicken got stuck in his throat and he was choked to death 🤢 🤢

I think you are confusing Air Chief Marshall Subrata Mukherjee's death with Salil Chowdhury's. Salil Chowdhury died of a cerebral stroke.

We will always remember Salil Choudhury's beautiful songs which had a perfect blend of western classical music and Indian lyrics. When you listen to his songs, the word "genius" automatically comes to your lips.

He could compose simple tunes like "mila hai kisi ka jhumka" or complex ones like "o sajana barkha bahar aayee" and "na jeeya laage na".

Lata Mangeshkar said that his tunes were the most challenging to sing because of the sudden high or low notes. Salil knew how to challenge established singers and make them rise to further heights.

Thanks Swar_Raj 👏 👏 👏

Apart from Hindi Salil / Hemanta combination revolutionized Bengali modern music.

I like his "Ghadi ghadi mora dil dhadke sung by Lata" the most but his almost all songs are by far the best and very well composed compare to all MDs till today...Inall he was awsome..