The World of Salil Chowdhury

I guess since my early college years I have been an addict of Salil's music. Of course in those days buying and collecting records was beyond my means. I started collecting his songs since the early '80s. Since then I have been painstakingly trying to collect Salil's songs, his poems, his short-stories, his plays, all his films in video and anything else I could get hold of, such as articles about him, reviews about his music, interviews with him etc. I met Salilda for the first time in the early '80s and since then I have been quite fortunate to meet him regularly in India and abroad and got to know him quite well. To me he was an inspiration, a teacher, a friend and above all the most talented and complete music director India ever had. He was also a wonderful person to be with. Highly intelligent with a wonderful sense of humour. His music filled my life with joy and made it richer. Salilda has left us now but I tend to believe that he has just moved to a distant address. Seems like I can still communicate with him through his songs and feel that he is still around us.
I decided to create this website in 1998, three years after our Salilda left us. This website is primarily an archive but it also gives me the opportunity to share his music with everybody else. A major update to this website took place in 2000 and since then it has been continually updated.

Recent important updates

From the early '70s till about the end of the '80s he composed some wonderful music for Sachin Shankar Ballet Unit.
Read the full story at

Sachin Shankar Ballet Unit and Salil
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Probably the most candid and frank interview of Salil till date. The original interview was published in the bengali magazine "Kaalpurush" in 1978.

A Must Read
"Few Moments with Salil Chowdhury"
Interview by Kalpana Biswas in 1978
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Newspaper article on salilda.com and
the related controversy

Recently Kolkata's most popular newspaper Anandabazar Patrika and the equally popular magazine Anandalok published two articles discussing salilda.com. It was good to see that 10 years after the launch of this website the West Bengal press has suddenly woken up and has taken notice. As a result I have been inundated with emails from many admirers of Salilda. Unfortunately in the Anandalok article our last 8 years hard work of collecting and trying to publish Salilda's unreleased songs from the '40s and '50s has been strongly critisized by some people. That is really sad. The journalists of both these publications have very kindly sent me the articles and I have decided to make them available for you all to read. Let me know what you think.

The World of Salil Chowdhury

Welcome

Recent important updates