School of BENGALI ROCK

ONCE A FLAMING PHENOMENON, ROCK MUSIC WRITTEN AND SUNG IN THE LANGUAGE BURNS BRIGHT IN KOLKATA’S CREVICES

- SOHINI DAS GUPTA

Calcutta, 1970s. My father, gripped by the emergence of adolescence, had already left his boyhood days of playing ‘Viet Cong versus America’ in the back lanes of Bhowanipore. Now he’d much rather spend time loafing with slightly older friends, rolls of Charminar (cigarette), and the radical stanzas of the newly arrived rock group Moheener Ghoraguli (Moheen’s Horses) shaping his cool. He didn’t know then that the band, fated to be relatively obscure in its heyday, would be later dubbed ‘India’s first vernacular rock band.’ That the yank of its urbane, often obstinate lyrics would be felt whole heartedly only in 1995, with the release of the collaborative album Abar Bocchhor Kuri Pore (Again, After Twenty Years).

SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

Kolkata, 2009. At 18, waiting on college applications while juggling hormonal stirrings can be a handful. Enter, appropriately angsty strains of “Bhoot Aar Tilottoma” (Past, and the Ethereal City), a youthful ode to an old-soul place by Fossils. And it wasn’t just me. As the Bengali rock band sang, “Shomoy amar kacha/ tobu mone pokkokesh” (I am young/ but my mind, silver-haired), a new wave of almost-adults nodded along, relating.

ROCKIN’ IN THE FREE WORLD