At 77, Kabir Suman’s firestorm years as a singer-songwriter through the 1990s are a matter of the past. The man whom iconoclastic author Nabarun Bhattacharya once called “the last street fighter of our times” raged into urban Bengali consciousness with the 1992 album Tomake Chai (I Want You). He ushered in the era of singer-songwriters in the tradition of Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, a loose scene in Kolkata that led to the explosion of Bengali rock bands through the 2000s concurrent with the rise of private FM radio stations.
Right from the beginning of his career, Suman set about puncturing his stardom by refusing to collaborate with or support the ruling Communist party, whose members often heckled him at live concerts. Born Suman Chattopadhyay, he then offended his bhodrolok fanbase by converting to Islam in 1999 to protest the murder of Christian missionary Graham Staines by Hindu extremists in Odisha.
Suman later created music to support Maoist militant Chhatradhar Mahato, right after he became a Lok Sabha MP from Jadavpur for the Trinamool Congress in 2009. During his five-year term, he publicly spoke of his dissatisfaction with his party and then chief minister Mamata Banerjee, losing another leg of support. In 2022, Suman got into trouble again when Republic TV shared a phone conversation with him where he abused the journalist, referencing his disgust for Hindu right-wing politics.
Somewhere down the line, Suman’s craftsmanship and his influence on the Indian urban singer-songwriter tradition disappeared, which is what Jaideep Varma has intended to resurrect in his 138-minute documentary Bare Voice this year. Varma’s film shows Suman living a quiet middle-class life in south Kolkata, busy crafting Bengali-language khayals—a form of Hindustani classical music that doesn’t exist in this language.
No more the rakish young man who jolted post-liberalisation Kolkata out of slumber with his lyrically robust romantic and political songs, the patriarch of Bengali pop now seems to be returning to teenage years, when his music teacher first taught him khayals.
Suman practises these Bengali khayals with his music students for whom he is a benevolent grandfather and not the next-door-dada who inspired generations of urban Bengali youth to write and sing their own songs loudly on the streets. “Without Kabir Suman, who was the first massively successful artist of his kind, we wouldn’t get the singer-songwriter tradition in India,” Varma explains. “There would be no Lucky Ali or Rabbi Shergill.” A journalist in the film observes, “Before Suman, Bengali youth in Kolkata either grooved to Amitabh Bachchan songs in Laawaris or Pink Floyd. Suman got everyone’s attention and brought the entire household together.”
Filmed mostly in English, Varma has thus far screened the film privately in Mumbai and Kolkata this year—he plans to release it theatrically in all metros. True to his form of being a controversy-courting raconteur, Suman, who used to be an English-language journalist in the US and Germany in the 1970s, drops pithy lines like, “If everyone calls me a womaniser, all the women who loved me must have been Sumanisers.”
Varma got the film’s title from Suman proclaiming his fascination for Dylan’s self-expression using just the guitar and his “bare voice”. The interviewees include composer Shantanu Moitra, popular Kolkata band Chandrabindoo, and journalists Avijit Ghosh and Soutik Biswas. Saregama let Varma use their entire Kabir Suman catalogue. Suman’s success on the Saregama label right from his debut, opened doors for urban Bengali artists like Nachiketa, Silajit and, of course, Anjan Dutt, who switched from acting in Mrinal Sen films in the 1980s to becoming an urban folk musician in the late 1990s.
But unlike them, Suman managed to consistently prickle Bengali middle-class sensibilities throughout his nearly four-decade career. It’s like he did draw the free-spirited pulse of Dylan, Guthrie or Seeger, with whom he performed in Kolkata in 1996 and whose praise for Suman features in the documentary, but his followers picked up the pop-star routine and not the political edge.
Varma, who wrote extensively on Indian pop and rock music over through the 1990s and 2000s for Gentleman magazine and directed the 2010 documentary Leaving Home, about the band Indian Ocean, in addition to filming acclaimed documentaries on Sudhir Mishra (Baavra Mann, 2013) and the then-rising Indian urban standup comedy scene (I Am Offended, 2015), knows the right rhythm to begin a film.
The profane with the sublime
Bare Voice starts with Suman saying, “As I approach death, there is no flashback… after a lifetime spent in blasphemy, I wish to die with an erection, but not because of any woman.” Suman’s 1997 song Jaatishwar—about the Buddhist concept of the one who recalls all past lives—follows. “I was born many times, and died in your arms,” Suman’s lyrics crisscrossing Bengali folklore and Buddhist myths. “The only thing that kept me here was the need to see you again.” A 2014 Bengali musical of the same name, composed by Suman, would later fetch him a National Film Award for Best Music Direction.
“Many were offended because I began the film with such words,” Varma says. “But with Kabir Suman, the sublime coexists with the profane.”
The film, too, is neatly divided into a first half explaining the beauty and significance of Suman’s music, and a second half delving into his chaotic public persona. It was Suman’s reputation that Varma’s well-wishers warned him about when he decided to visit his childhood hero’s home in Kolkata. The 58-year-old filmmaker’s fascination with Suman began in the 1990s, when he discovered a rare contemporary and superhit musician making songs about a villager walking 25km for a job interview and dying from heat (Sanjib Purohit Hatlen); and children dying from mistakenly picking up an explosive close to Bengal state elections (Howzzat).
“I totally did not expect such a frail figure when I met him in the winter of 2023,” Varma recalls. “He was evidently ill. When we began speaking, he suddenly got up and started searching something. I offered to help, he declined, and then found a rug and offered to rest my feet on it saying, I’ll otherwise catch cold.”
A one-hour meeting stretched to seven hours. Suman cancelled his evening classes. By the end Varma knew he had to make the film. When Suman fell critically ill soon after, Varma was even more determined. When his attempts to raise funds for securing rights to Suman’s songs were failing, Saregama’s Siddharth Anand Kumar, the head of its filmmaking arm Yoodlee Films, came to the rescue.
“Coincidentally, he was one of the 250-odd people in the entire country who had seen Leaving Home when it released in theatres,” Varma says. “What are the odds?” For Bare Voice, Varma knew he needed the songs to sell the film. It’s the lyrics, composition and Suman’s voice Varma wants to draw attention to, which is why the passages in the film featuring the songs are almost all single-shot, sans cuts, featuring English translations in the subtitles by Durjoy Chowdhury. Varma’s operating principle is visually representing each song in the simplest manner.
For example, Varma zooms in on the wheels of a running rickshaw and doesn’t cut away, against Petkati Chandiyal (1992), Suman’s song about a rickshaw-puller. “The vast majority of my audience in my screenings so far have been non-Bengalis,” Varma scoffs like his muse. “They were all blown away and puzzled that they never knew this guy. Perhaps, it’s a Bengali problem. They don’t value their artists unless they are dead.”
Devarsi Ghosh writes on films, books, and music from Kolkata.