By S. Mitra Kalita
Growing up in the U.S., when I said I was from Assam, inevitably the most frequent response was, “Where’s that?”
But every now and then, I’d hear: “Like Bhupen Hazarika?”
The legendary singer, composer and director from the northeastern state died Saturday at the age of 86. When my mom told me, I was flooded with memories of his music playing on Sunday mornings as she fried lucees, during long car rides to family friends’ homes, as I learned to awkwardly dance and sing at Indian functions. Suddenly, as it must have been for so many fans, especially those of us with Assamese roots, the soundtrack of my life flashed before me.
I was also lucky to have known Bhupen Uncle, as I called him, in a personal capacity. He met my father during a visit to the U.S. in the late 1970s, and as often happens in immigrant groups, they forged a friendship over my banker father’s ability to help with money transfers. Anyone who knew the singer’s background and my father’s was not surprised they became fast and close friends. Both were born in Sadiya, a rural and remote pocket of the already-remote northeast. Both attended Benares Hindu University, although more than a decade apart. Both loved to read, watch foreign films and listen to music from everywhere, to discuss politics and the state of the world. Back then, both liked to drink.
And so during the U.S. legs of Bhupen Hazarika’s frequent tours in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, our house, first in Long Island, later in New Jersey, became the dumping ground for his suitcases, lyric books, harmonium, plaques and gamochas. Ours became the phone number people were given as they tried to book him for concerts, in high-school auditoriums and temples, veterans’ halls and restaurants. At first, I was starstruck by this man whose face adorned so many of our records, now sleeping in my bed. But among Bhupen Uncle’s best traits was his ability to put people at ease. In our house, he wore a lungi. He joined my mother in the kitchen and made an amazing shrimp curry. He also loved adventure, so we would pile into our brown Oldsmobile and go on long drives of serendipity.
A lover of folk music and the Civil Rights movement, Bhupen Uncle made us take pictures of him standing on Paul Robeson Place in Princeton, N.J. He had met Robeson during study at Columbia University and throughout his life clearly drew a parallel between the political activism of Robeson’s music and his own. Bhupen Uncle loved New York City and he regaled in the throngs of fans who gathered around him during shopping trips to the Indian enclave of Jackson Heights. But he was also just as happy being anonymous and roaming his old uptown haunts or Chinatown. It was with him that I first ate Thai food, a place called Pongsri on Bayard Street that I still love and frequent. He and his partner, the director Kalpana Lajmi, took my elder brother and me to see “Dead Poets Society,” a movie that sparked a discussion about the role of teachers and of following one’s own dreams over one’s parents’. Through his eyes, I realize now I was seeing America and all its plurality and possibility anew.
Yet I didn’t know it then. My appreciation of Bhupen Hazarika, like many Assamese, was perhaps too parochial, too rooted in our common home. And perhaps knowing our needs, he pandered to that role. Translation do not do his lyrics justice, but a song like “Aami Axomiya Nohoi Dukhiya”, which means “We are Assamese, not poor,” helped us stand a little taller. He also connected with the Assamese countryside intimately, despite his fame. During a visit to his native Sadiya in the 1980s, he tracked down my grandparents and visited with them. My illiterate grandmother lectured him and an accompanying politician on all the ways Sadiya and its roads and schools remained too backward—and he was only too happy to listen, just as her own son might have. To us, he remained accessible, simple, common.
He was anything but, achieving fame in multiple languages such as Bengali and Hindi, and adopting a home in Mumbai for the last several years. This truth and transcendence unveiled itself to me as I grew older. When I traveled to Mumbai in my early 20s, we would amble down Chowpatty Beach and not a single vendor charged us for anything. My father’s scratchy records now gathering dust in the basement, I turned to different translations of Bhupen Hazarika’s songs through YouTube and other sites. I came to appreciate a song like “Bistirno Dupare,” (a version of “Old Man River”) as so much more masterful in the Bengali.
In 2007, as my daughter and I settled into watch “Chak De India” in New Delhi, suddenly a special 60th anniversary rendition of the Indian national anthem came on—and there he was. My daughter, then almost 3, yelled out, “There’s that Assamese guy.” He was joined by fellow luminaries such as Jagjit Singh, A.R. Rahman and Lata Mangeshkar.
As a child, my interpretation of many of Bhupen Hazarika’s songs were literal: about nature, rainfall, our mighty Brahmaputra. As an adult, I hear them anew with strains and themes of revolution, suffering, longing, the search for love, the endless hunt for home. Rooted perhaps in our “remote” northeast, they remain universal.
Those of us from Assam might be forgiven for always seeing dear Bhupen Uncle, Bhupenda and Bhupen Mama as “ours,” but in death—and in the reaction trickling in from all corners this weekend—Bhupen Hazarika and his legacy clearly endure as a man and musician of the world.
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