Remembering music composer Salil Chowdhury Ji 1922-95

Salil Chowdhury was born on 19th November 1922 (although his year of birth is disputed and often published as 1923 or 1925) in a village called Gajipur in south 24-parganas in West Bengal and died on September 5, 1995.
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.
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 Salil wrote numerous songs and with IPTA comrades took his songs to the masses. They travelled through the villages and the cities and his songs became the voice of the masses. Songs of protest, which made people aware of the rampant social and political injustice which surrounded them.
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.

He arrived in Bombay to compose for the film 'Do Bigha Zameen'.  Since then he composed for over 75 Hindi Films, around 45 Bengali Films, 26 Malayalam Films and several Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Assameese and Oriya Films. He also composed some memorable background music for a number of documentaries produced by Films Division of India and other independent Film Producers such as Dr. Krishnaswamy of Chennai. Besides all this Salil has also composed music for a number of TV-Serials and TV-Films.
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.

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