পুজোর গান

The Gramophone Company came to Calcutta in 1901 as the Indian branch of the British firm, and in 1907 it opened a record pressing plant at Dum Dum — the first anywhere outside the United Kingdom. Its label was His Master's Voice. That factory is the reason the Bengali recording industry exists, and it is also why the industry's calendar was set by a Hindu festival: a record company with a local plant, a local repertoire and a market that bought music in one concentrated season built its whole year around that season.

The mechanism was the Puja release. Each autumn HMV issued a slate of entirely new Bengali songs — not film songs, songs written, composed and recorded specifically for the festival — and announced them in an elaborate printed catalogue called Sharod Arghya, brought out shortly before Vishwakarma Puja, a couple of months ahead of Durga Puja. Sharod Arghya listed the year's artists, summarised their earlier work and carried the lyrics, so that buyers could learn the songs before the records reached the shops. The catalogue ranged across Atulprasadi and Dwijendrageeti and the modern Bengali song, and by the middle of the century its lead names were Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, Shyamal Mitra, Manna Dey, Sandhya Mukhopadhyay, Manabendra Mukhopadhyay, Dwijen Mukhopadhyay, and the visiting stars Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar.

Kazi Nazrul Islam was on the Gramophone Company's staff from 1928 to 1932 as lyricist, composer and voice trainer, and much of the vast body of song he produced there — including his Shyama Sangeet — went out through the same seasonal machinery and then onto radio.

The system peaked in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the period usually called the golden age of Bengali adhunik gaan. In 1961 Madhuri Chattopadhyay's Puja release carried two songs by Salil Chowdhury. In 1967, Sudhin Dasgupta and Salil Chowdhury each presented Puja albums of ten songs. Vinyl gave way to cassette in the 1980s, the slate widened, and by the 1990s the biggest Puja hits were coming from playback singers: Kumar Sanu's Priyotoma Mone Rekho, issued by HMV in the early 1990s with music by Arup-Pranoy and lyrics by Pulak Bandyopadhyay and Gautam Saha, was played in pandals for years afterwards. The Gramophone Company of India renamed itself Saregama in 2000. The Puja slate as an annual institution did not survive the end of physical retail.

No other Indian language ever had this. A record label, an annual festival and a reading public combined into a system in which several dozen brand-new songs were commissioned, recorded, catalogued with their lyrics, released on a fixed date, and absorbed by an entire population within about ten days. It is the closest thing twentieth-century India had to a national playlist with a publication schedule, and it ran for roughly half a century.

The consequence is that Bengali popular memory is organised by year in a way that very few musical cultures are. People can date their lives by which song came out in which Puja. The songs themselves are unusually literary, because the lyricist was a named figure with a reputation to keep and the lyrics were printed in advance in Sharod Arghya for anyone to judge.

The system is gone and the habit is not. The same autumn slot is now occupied by Bengali films, which release at Puja and live or die in that week, and by streaming singles timed to Mahalaya. What was a record industry's commercial calendar has outlived the record industry, because the audience never stopped expecting something new in the last week of Ashwin.