The World of Salil Chowdhury

songs
Basic Songs in Other Languages

Salil composed non-film songs nearly always in Bengali. Obviously this has to do with his associations with IPTA. This is when he composed some of the most memorable songs. How does one categorize these songs? I asked him this question once. He replied that this was the most important time of his life. His political consciousness and his involvement in the political movement challenged and encouraged him to compose these songs which he called the 'songs of consciousness and the songs of awakening'. Later he started composing popular bengali songs and composed songs for nearly each and every well-known and less-well known singers. However, there are quite a few songs I have unearthed which he had composed in other language including Hindi, Assameese and Malayalam. Below is the list of all his non-film basic songs. I do not promise that this list is complete. I only discovered a few months back that 9 malayalam non-film songs were released in the early nineties. Aparently there's also an album called 'Shivashruti' released in Kerala sometime ago but I haven't been able to locate it yet. It sounds rather non-Salil type. I mean Salil composing Shivashruti ?
I found some other songs recorded by Lata, Kishore etc which seem to have been recorded for hindi films but they never made it to any film.

"ab machal uthaa hai dariyaa" is an IPTA song which was frequently performed by Bombay Youth Choir. This is the only recording of the song released by HMV on a 78rpm record in the '50s.The lyrics of Song#OB4 starts exactly like that famous Kishore song from the film 'Kinaara' (MD: RDB). The lyrics of both these songs are by Gulzar ! Salil composed two Bengali songs with the same melody as Song#OB4. One was sung by Sandhya Mukherjee (SM7) for the All India Radio but no records were released for this song. The other by Sabita (SC13) was released as a record.
The songs OB22 to OB26 were released in a cassette published by Salil's own company, CMR. The title of that cassette was 'New Hindi Film Songs of Salil Chowdhury'. Some excellent songs and excellent recordings. A collector's item indeed. No film names were given and no lyricist's names either. I could associate most of the songs to film names, except the song# OB22 to OB25. Hence they are listed here. Interestingly, 'Humko kisne dekha hai' is the only song Amit Kumar ever recorded for Salil, except that it never made it to a film and it hasn't done poor Amit Kumar any good. It's not one of Salil's better compositions.  May be he had a bad day. 'Moina re moina', on the other hand is a brilliant composition and one of Asha's finest Salil songs.It's Malayalam version in the film 'Raasaleela'  (RL1) is equally good and more varied. The bengali version (SR3) in the film 'Sister', although well led by Manna Dey, doesn't have the same punch.
The last 9 songs in the table (OB27 to OB35) are quite a surprise to me. After visiting Kerala and talking to some diehard Salil fans in early 2001 I discovered that these songs were produced by O.N.V.Kurup in an album called 'Suvarnarekha'. O.N.V.Kurup was close to Salil and he wrote the lyrics of most of Salil's Malayalam films. Basically all the songs of 'Suvarnarekha' are all well-known Bengali songs. It seems that Salil didn't spend much time in arranging the orchestration. Here and there one hears the imbalance in the mixing and in general it's not his best arrangement. I must say that the singers Unni Menon and K.S.Chitra did a fine job.