Exhibition on Pancham, Kolkata, India

Don't miss this opportunity to attend...

: Book review in India Today on RDB :

This is an excellent review from India Today that nicely outlines the goodness of the newly arrived book in the world market.....


If any Bollywood music director's biography can bring tears to the
eyes, it can only be that of Rahul Dev Burman, merely a commercial
composer in his lifetime but an icon after his untimely death in 1994.
Biographers Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal have done wonders
with Pancham's life and times, bringing to bear their extraordinary
knowledge of Indian classical, Jazz and Western pop with a gripping
narrative style.
They never get maudlin, capturing RD's chequered career as composer
and human being in an almost prosaic way but leave the reader touched
to the core. Pancham's humiliation at the hands of unclassy producers,
greedy associates and progressively dumbed-down tastes of listeners,
makes the reader feel the pangs almost as if he were Pancham himself.
So, when the magnificent swan song, 1942:A Love Story, comes as the
grand finale to the creativity of a man ahead of his times, one cannot
but feel moisture on the eyelids.

Personally speaking, I was lukewarm to RD in his heyday like many in
my generation. Having grown up with O.P. Nayyar and Shankar-Jaikishan
in the main, and keenly followed the seesaw battle between Laxmikant-
Pyarelal and RD on Binaca Geetmala every Wednesday at 8 p.m., I always
felt S.D. Burman's maverick son was too experimental and inadequately
hummable. But now that the generation after me has discovered RD and
incessantly plays his compositions on fm channels, I realise how
tuneful and original even his mediocre scores were.

On the subject of originality, RD was the first Bollywood music
director to be seriously assaulted by purist music critics for
"lifting" tunes from Western sources. The biography addresses this
charge squarely, with RD quoted as saying that every composer is
influenced or inspired by others' compositions. Shivaji Chatterjee,
singer of the Hemanta Mukherjee-esque Yeh safar bahut hai kathin magar
(1942), recalls how RD subjected him to various strands of Western
music for seven consecutive hours once, and "I was struck that he knew
all the songs by heart".

But then, Pancham was mostly inspired by the legacy of great music,
rarely a deliberate copycat unlike the music directors he lost out to
in his later years. In an interview, Asha Bhonsle told me some years
ago that she would often return late at night after a song recording
to find Pancham sitting before a record changer, cigarette between his
fingers, oblivious to the world, listening to a bewildering array of
Western and Indian classical numbers. Music throbbed in his veins; few
Indian composers knew music as well as he did, it was kalaa, not
commerce for him.

The book chronicles RD's journey from childhood, his fascination with
music-a trait that ran in his genes thanks to the genius of SD and
Meera Dev Burman. What raises the book above the mundane is that
Bhattacharjee and Vittal deconstruct almost each and every
composition, analysing whether Komal Ni or Pa have been infused into
the tune structure in an unconventional way. What struck me, for
example, was the similarity of tune the authors point out between Ek
ladki ko dekha (1942) and SD's Phoolon ke rang se, Hindi version of
the original Borney gandhey.

Challenged by mediocrity and worse, the composer of timeless hits of
the 1970s, RD fell back on rehashing his own earlier numbers or
lifting much more directly than ever before during the 1990s, but
refused to acknowledge that he could be outstripped by the disco
dancers. The man who gave such immortal yet varied music as in Teesri
Manzil, Jawani Diwani, Apna Desh, Amar Prem and Parinda, to name just
a handful, fell drastically to life's many betrayals, which robbed him
of his incredible creativity.

This is a truly authoritative biography, feast not just for RD's
myriad admirers, but also an entire new generation of Hindi film music
lovers in India and abroad. He fashioned our tastes for decades after
him and this biography is a genuine music lovers' tribute. Embellished
with an amazing array of anecdotes, interviews with almost every
living industry person associated with RD, apart from incisive
observations by his contemporaries and even competitors (like
Pyarelal), the book deserves all the praise it gets.

Most importantly, it lists all his musicians, arrangers and the
unsung, unheralded men and women who bring us such magnificent
melodies even today. The authors also recall tensions within the
group, particularly the widespread dislike of Sapan Chakraborty on
whom RD came to depend heavily in his frustrated later years. Pancham
was extremely mindful of his associates and his biographers have been
true to the icon's beliefs.

Pancham's new biography tells endearing tales

IANS, Apr 12, 2011, 12.47pm

His hit songs flooded the box office; he was the quintessential romantic hero with heartaches, longings and beach-side philosophies. Yet celebrated musician-composer and song-writer Rahul Dev Burman took time to flower into a Bollywood phenomenon.The oft-repeated question: Why?

Despite the moderately successful launch of his career, "Pancham", as he was lovingly called, was unable to leverage the clout that his surname carried in the rather conservative film fraternity in Mumbai.

Producers always wanted Sachin Dev Burman (S.D. Burman), but nobody was willing to experiment with his son, writer Aniruddha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal says in a new biography, "R.D. Burman - The Man and Music" published last week (Harper-Collins India).

However, Pancham tasted success with " Teesri Manzil" - a pathbreaking thriller with memorable songs he composed at a time when whodunits were yet to capture moviegoer's psyche.

The biography, which throws light on the musician's meteoric career in Bollywood and popularity worldwide, reveals little-known facts about R.D. Burman, including his childhood.

A few months after World War II broke out, Rahul Dev Burman was born to the rising star in the musical firmament, S.D. Burman, and Meera June 27, 1939, at their Gariahat Road home in Kolkata.

Rahul Dev's grandfather Nabadwipchandra Dev Burman was an erstwhile king of Tripura.

Rahul was first nicknamed Tublu. The nickname "Pancham" came some years later. Apparently, as a child, he wailed at the fifth note of the saptaswara, the seven notes.

There is another story. Rahul would invariably sing the note "pa" whenever his father sang the note "sa". Thespian Ashok Kumar gave him the name, "Pancham", the book notes.

Incidentally, five proved the lucky number for him in his early career - "Teesri Manzil" (1966)', his first major hit, was R.D. Burman's fifth film as a composer.

Pancham was one of the earliest composers in Bollywood who was influenced by Latino music, according to the book.

Bossa Nova is a form of music which finds inspiration in the Brazilian samba. It is mainly played on classical guitar with gut or nylon strings and uses unconventional and complex chords that add colour to the basic jazz-based patterns.

Exposed to Latino music in Kolkata, Pancham, over the years, developed a fondness for its vibrancy.


"He soon made Bossa Nova form his very own, literally bringing it across the globe from the beaches of Rio to the studios of Mumbai where he dovetailed it to create a pentatonic tune for a song in 'Kati Patang'," the book says.

Bollywood scripted fame for Pancham, but it was Kolkata, where he let his nostalgia erupt unbridled.

Pre-Durga Puja 1965, public attention was focussed elsewhere as the country gathered itself in the immediate aftermath of a war with Pakistan. A ceasefire was announced three weeks ahead of the Puja.

"The soldiers rushed back to their families leading to the reinstatement of the Puja spirit. Musically, the puja of 1965 aroused the curiosity of spirit when news got around that Rahul Dev Burman was making his 'debut as a composer of Puja songs.'" his biography says.

This was a chance happening for Burman "too rebellious a name for the common Bengalis, whose musical taste were limited to sombre and solemn".

It turned out that Bengali lyricist Pulak Mukherjee wanted to produce a few songs with S.D. Burman, who refused and passed the assignment to his son.

An unwilling Pancham expressed his discomfort in composing in Bengali, but assured of Lata Mangeshkar's voice, he offered eight tunes to Mukherjee, who selected two.

His next round of Bengali compositions came in 1967.

R.D. Burman's best-known Bengali song solo, "Mone Pore Ruby Ray" - incidentally the song he released first as duet with Kishor Kumar for one of Guru Dutt's projects - has an interesting story, the book reminds the reader.

Scenarist (the one who visualised the locales) Sachin Bhowmik (actor) had lost his heart to a certain lady, who unfortunately spurned his affections. "Her name was Chhobi Ray and she was immortalised as Ruby Ray in the song which Pancham coerced Bhowmick to write. It was loosely based on Rag Kirwani and Rag Mukhari," the book says.

Ruby Ray, which was branded as "degenerate westernisation in music" took a long time to be accepted.

The Hindi version of the song, "Meri Bheegi Bheegi Si..." was released in 1973 in the movie "Anamika."

R.D. Burman died Jan 4, 1994.