How one voice changed India’s grand autumnal festival forever

If you ask Bengalis, across generations and measures of intellectual snobbery, there are few things they agree on.

Not the right preparation of hilsa, the queen of fish; not who is the greatest English poet; not who is the best Bengali actor — Uttam Kumar or Soumitra Chattopadhyay.

But we agree on the voice of a man called Birendra Krishna Bhadra. This slightly-built All India Radio presenter in 1931 voiced a one and a half hour recording of Sanskrit shlokas which tell the mythical story of the rise of Devi Durga on Mahalaya which marks start of the 10-day Durga Puja celebrations, one of the world’s great autumnal fests.

The tale of Birendra Krishna Bhadra is unique in myriad ways. When he was about to embark on his first recording, 16 years before Indian independence, one of his superiors, a twice-born Brahmin no less, asked, ‘But how can you recite Sanskrit shlokas, Bhadra, you are not Brahmin!’ To which, since this is Bengal, the home of the Indian renaissance, some other Brahmins said, ‘This is All India Radio (AIR). India’s BBC. Not a temple. Stick to the best broadcasting.’ It then transpired that the musicians who would have to accompany Bhadra, the best that AIR Calcutta had, were Muslims.

And so it was that a Kayastya (not-Brahmin) man with Muslim musicians recorded what millions of Bengalis have embraced as the greatest, most moving (I have seen grown men and women tear up listening to it each time; I do too) recitation of the Sanskrit sholkas for 83 years. So much so that when AIR Calcutta tried to experiment by getting Uttam Kumar — the greatest matinee idol Bengal has ever seen (though the debate on whether he was the best actor continues) — at the height of his powers to record this in the mid-1970s, Bengalis, always very prickly about tradition, rejected it, with grand, bespoke besuited babus, the powerful bhadraloks at Calcutta Club, no doubt over their crème brûlée, demolishing Kumar’s version with their most debilitating comment, ‘It sounds commercial.’

Chastised, AIR went back to Bhadra’s version and plays it even today, every Mahalaya at 4:00 am, marking the dawn invocation of the Mother Goddess, telling the tale of how the gods, defeated and humiliated by the shape shifting demon Mahishasura, immortal on land, sky or water, impossible to kill when he is in human or animal form by the boon of Shiva, the magnificent Mahadev, god of gods himself, put their powers together and worshipped in the rise of the source of all power and strength — the feminine life force itself. The Devi.

It is unfortunate that all the innate lessons, moral and philosophical, of these myths have been lost in an illiterate, imbecile age but think about the image of the all gods, male forms them all, invoking the rise of the great feminine power to save them.

Think about what that says about the ancient Indian understanding of life. And so it was that the Devi finally annihilated the demon at the intersection of earth, air and water, at the Trishanku position, at the point where the worlds meet, killing Mahishasura as he was changing from bull to human form, when he is half bull, half human.

The moral: the wheel of Dharma turns, even if you are protected by Mahadev. What did Bhadra get for this immortal creation? His petty salary. And in 2006, AIR supposedly sent a cheque of Rs. 50,917 to Bhadra’s daughter as royalty. Think about what that says about us as a people. Happy Mahalaya. May the Devi be with you.