When AR Rahman made Buddhadeb Dasgupta change his opinion about '90s Hindi film music

Music composer Alokananda Dasgupta with her late filmmaker-father Buddhadeb Dasgupta, presenting their film 'Tope' at Toronto International Film Festival in 2016. (Photo courtesy Alokananda Dasgupta)

It was a snowy November morning, last year, in Toronto. Alokananda Dasgupta was back at her alma mater, York University, guest-lecturing a course in film-music scoring and composition, and was about to meet the person whose name had filled up her childhood days, shaped her musical instincts, understanding and career. A name both she and her late filmmaker-father loved. Back in the day, Buddhadeb Dasgupta strictly ensured that his daughters weren’t exposed to the ’90s commercial Bollywood, chitrahaar-type, songs, which went against his ruchi (interest) and style of music. AR Rahman made him sit up and take note.

The parallel-cinema great, who would have stepped into his 80th year today had he not died in 2021, would often go to Toronto, take his films to the world cinema section at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Alokananda Dasgupta last accompanied him there in 2016 with Tope, scored by her.

Last year, when Alokananda, who was still grieving her father’s loss, got to know that Rahman was in town — with his directed, co-produced and scored virtual reality-cum-sensorial thriller short film Le Musk — she found a way to go meet him.

There he was, in his hotel’s suite, “this humble, small-structured man, sitting in the corner of his study, working away”. He looked up, with a big smile. “He knew me, he knew of my work,” says Alokananda. The two bonded over their respective losses. Rahman, too, had lost his mother in 2020. “Losing a parent changes your life, your reason to work, your entire creative drive,” she adds, recalling that Rahman, a man of few words, expressed to her how much he enjoyed the Sacred Games (2018) score, “its sound, style was so fresh, I have never heard background score like this,” he told her. And even tweeted about the Sacred Games background score, a huge validation for Alokananda, who, last year, was also one of the 10 BAFTA Breakthrough Talents, where Rahman was on the selection jury. In 2016, she was a Berlinale Talent.

Soon, it was time for Rahman’s flight’s departure. Alokananda walked out of the hotel, still overwhelmed, dumbstruck, and helpless that she couldn’t call her father or mother Kuntala Dasgupta, who passed away in 2009, to tell them that she had finally met the Rahman. She stood on the streets crying. Passers-by assumed her to be begging for alms, someone even gave her a Canadian $1.

Rahman’s music entered the Dasguptas' Kolkata household with a “nerd” uncle of Alokananda’s who’d bring along a cassette “every time he heard something new. He brought Kabir Suman, Nachiketa into our lives. So, he brought home the album of the Tamil film Pudhiya Mugam (1993). We sat around our cassette player, Ma, Baba me, Kaku (uncle), Didi (lyricist Rajeshwari Dasgupta).”

Composer Alokananda Dasgupta with music legend AR Rahman in Toronto last year. (Photo courtesy Alokananda Dasgupta)

“As Netru illatha maatram played, I remember exchanging glances. Baba looking at Ma, Ma looking at me, me looking at Didi…and we were like, ‘what is this?’ In the same album, there was another song, July matham vanthaal…. which had a beautiful interlude, almost jazz-like edited rhythm, its meter was complex and beautifully played, and Baba was like, ‘Who is this? Who is this, in India, who’s writing music like this, this thing on piano?’ After that, we discovered Roja (1992). We had never heard anything like that sound or production before in our lives. We were listening to a Mozart of our current times,” says Alokananda, 39.

Both their father and mother, latter the granddaughter of poet-composer Rajanikanta Sen (aka Kantakobi), raised the Dasgupta sisters on a dose of Rabindrasangeet, Rajanikanta Sen’s works, and Western classical music. “Baba would allow us to listen to Carpenters, Beatles, Pink Floyd, and to ’50s and ’60s Hindi film songs. Baba was a huge fan of SD Burman and Salil Chowdhury. On our own, we discovered the RD (Burman) era. And, also secretly watched the forbidden ’90s songs when Baba was not at home or we were at our cousins’ house. I remember we rented the VHS of Hum (1991), and when he found out later, he was really upset. But I’m glad the friction happened because it created a new dimension, a new curiosity in us, it made us watch and listen to everything and that shaped us,” she says, “I also like Saat samundar paar (Vishwatma, 1991) besides classical composer Leonard Bernstein, Carter Burwell and Ennio Morricone, he’s the one I’ve grown up listening to.”

Buddhadeb supplied a regular dose of world cinema to the girls. “We grew up watching foreign films, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990), (Roman Polanski’s) Frantic (1988), (Wim Wenders’) Paris, Texas (1984). And the whole idea of scoring came from Morricone, Theme of Ali (The Battle of Algiers, 1966) to Frantic. I heard Bernstein’s complicated, amazing orchestrated music first in West Side Story (1957), my mother’s favourite,” says Alokananda.

On one of his return trips from a Polish film festival, Buddhadeb brought home Frantic’s VHS. A very quiet, five-year-old Alokananda sat watching him watch the film. She could neither understand English nor read subtitles, and had no clue about what was going on in the film. But what stuck was a song from a scene. Grace Jones’ I’ve Seen That Face Before. Cut to 2007-08, when she was studying tango music in York, Alokananda would come across Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango (1974) and realised that Jones’ song was inspired from that. “Watching world cinema created an indelible impression on me. I could make these song associations. We didn’t have internet back then, so, I kept hunting for more work by Morricone,” she says.

The composer-daughter would assist her filmmaker-father only from 2012-13, on Rabindranath Tagore’s Shey/Woh (2013), Trayodoshi (13 short film/story series based on Tagore’s poems), Anwar Ka Ajab Kissa (2013), Tope (2016), Urojahaj (2020). Her sister wrote for Buddhadeb, too. “We knew what he was going to say, we knew his extended realism, his detachment from reality, his dreams, and exploration of his dreams through cinema, we knew what he was chasing, his instincts. We knew his poetry in cinema. It was very easy to know what he’s feeling, what he wants…,” says Alokananda, “but it was extremely difficult to work with him.”

With late father Buddhadeb Dasgupta, lyricist-sister Rajeshwari Dasgupta (left) and nephew during the scoring of 'Urojahaj'. (Photo courtesy Alokananda Dasgupta)

She recalls toiling very hard on Trayodoshi, she experimented and used the electric guitar for one of the episodes. But “it was very difficult to please Baba. He liked very little, though what he liked, he really liked,” she says, adding, “I was very technologically involved…software, DAWs (digital audio workstations), Plugins, all of that was very difficult for me to explain to Baba, because he didn’t understand that. There was a lack of communication. And, he was a hard taskmaster. I had almost finished my work, but before submission, he just said, ‘it’s all rubbish…you are not understanding what I’m trying to do. It’s not going with the poetry. Scrap it and redo from scratch.’ That was hard. He was one of the hardest directors I have worked with in my life. He’d be angry when I was late, he’d keep a watch on whether I was shirking work.”

Buddhadeb was big on discipline, “No matter what stage of life he was in, he always woke up at 4 in the morning, always worked every single day of his life, we’ve never seen him laze around,” she says. He also taught them to “work smarter, not harder. To understand the rhythm of the director’s thoughts, and the pace of the images.” To learn the “poetic way of bluffing”, to “bring yourself intelligently to the table without making others feel you’re negating their ideas.”

Nepotism didn’t figure in her case. She primarily worked in Bombay, where, she says, “I don’t bring anything to the table musically as Baba’s daughter, where very few even know of his work or of him as this veteran, prestigious, respected, world-famous filmmaker, whose work is very popular in Europe…I wish globally people would know more about his work. While people of Kerala do know of his work...Not always do the right kind of art and artists, for the right kind of reasons, get recognised,” says Alokananda.

Was that a remark about the current Indian musicians winning globally? She says, “My sister and I are huge fans of MM Kreem (aka MM Keeravaani), we love Chup tum raho (Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin, 1996)…what beautiful melodies! Naatu naatu (RRR, 2022) is definitely not a song that we like, but we love that it has got this recognition (Golden Globes award, Oscar nomination). So, there’s always an irony. Jai ho (Slumdog Millionaire, 2008) is definitely not AR Rahman’s best work, but he deserves an Oscar. Naatu naatu is not MM Kreem’s best work, but he deserved that award. Ricky Kej winning the Grammy, his is not my kind of music but it is getting so much attention and it’s such a proud moment. We are happy so long as good work is being acknowledged,” says Alokananda, whose latest work is the Neena Gupta and Anupam Kher-starrer Shiv Shastri Balboa, which released in theatres on Friday, and for which she has both scored and composed, with lyrics by her sister.

Among her upcoming projects are Vikramaditya Motwane’s Prosenjit Chatterjee-starrer series Jubilee (formerly Stardust), the Amazon series Ladies Hostel by Sanjay Routray, who’s produced Buddhadeb’s films like Kaalpurush (2005). She’s scored Vijayeta Kumar’s documentary Kicking Balls (2022), on abused girls of Rajasthan who play football. Her maximum share of work has been with Sacred Games and Trapped (2016) director Motwane, they share a creative chemistry, “that guy really gets me, gets my liking for imperfections, need to experiment, to get all my demons out first and be myself. You change a key by one semitone, or a tiny instrument, the tempo by one bbm (chord), he’ll know, he has very keen ears,” says Alokananda, who finds music in anti-musical zones, tones in atonal, and chords in discordant music, and who is waiting for a film like The Banshees of Inisherin to come to her.

“Baba’s thing,” the daughter recalls, “was melody, melody, melody!” and she’s into a lot of electronic music…Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor. In his last years, Alokananda made her father listen to everything, from hip hop to rap and hardcore electronic: Mark Lanegan’s Looking for the Rain to Organs by Pussy Riot, “the latter isn’t discordant, but there’s no melody. It’s just the groove. He liked it, he didn’t love it. To Justin Bieber’s song, he exclaimed: kharap noye (not bad), he also loved the keora (lowbrow) Bengali Tumpa Sona song, he liked the fact that it’s very intelligently done, it’s catchy. But what he’d remember are Badi sooni sooni hai (Abhimaan, 1973), Suhana safar aur yeh mausam haseen (Madhumati, 1958), Mozart’s Funeral March and Requiem. That is where we are different. He’d say, your ultimate goal should be to create an unforgettable melody.”

When a moving piece of music touched a deep chord, both teared up. If Buddhadeb bawled to the Alokananda-composed, Rajeshwari-written and Shilpa Rao-sung Shabh from Ba.Pass (2012), which the Dasgupta sisters are planning on re-releasing, the theme of Dooratwa (1981), scored by Buddhadeb on the harmonium and guitar, leaves Alokananda misty-eyed.