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There is a fascinating habit that almost all of us as Indians possess. Our affinity for finding some kind of correlation between our country and everything successful. Any betting man would put a serious amount of money on the fact that every Indian who grew up listening to rock music in the 70s, or 80s, has two factoids sitting deep in their heart. The first one is the Queen frontman Freddie Mercury going to school in Panchgani, Maharashtra, and the other is The Beatles recreational trip to Rishikesh. In a way, it’s quite endearing how we connect ourselves to the outer world; how we look at an artist or idea, and make it a part of ourselves. That quality is what brings me to another deep relationship, one that has a lot of unconfirmed stories, but the overall plot is as real as it gets. It is the surprising, somewhat inspiring relationship between rockstar Bob Dylan and the seeped-into-art city of Kolkata.
In 1913, poet and lyricist Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in literature for Geetanjali, which literally translates to song offerings. According to the jury, Tagore won the prize “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.” Unlike Tagore who had songs and poems in his work, Dylan was technically an out and out songwriter, but his lyrics made such an impact that 103 years after Tagore’s famous win, Dylan was awarded with the coveted prize and that too in the same category. That makes Tagore and Dylan the only two lyricists to have ever won the prize in literature, and it sure must be lonely at the top.
But Dylan’s connection to Bengal and its identity as a state, doesn’t just end there. In fact two men in 2019 set out to create a visual love letter to Dylan, where they talked about Kolkata’s love for the artist and how he was connected to one of the most important artists in the history of Baul music.
IT consultant Vineet Arora and singer/songwriter Jaimin Rajani are both huge Dylan fans, even though Vineet admitted that he found himself mesmerised by the ubiquitous personality of Dylan much later in his life. In 2019, the two of them came together to make a short documentary celebrating the 78th birthday of the artist in question, titled ‘If Not For You’. In his own words Vineet, “doesn’t remember” how he started listening to Dylan. He said that he discovered the troubadour by sheer luck while he was grinding it away as a cog in the machine of the corporate world. Jaimin on the other hand discovered the artist because of a failed Google project and a Dylan song that didn’t make any sense to him.
The project was Google Real Time, which gave you instant and ‘real-time’ results as you typed away your query. Through this Jaimin found the track ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ from the album Bringing It All Back. “It was gibberish.” recalled Jaimin. He said, “ I mean I couldn’t understand any of it. He was essentially rapping, and the track can be considered as sort of a precursor to rap. You couldn’t really understand him, but you couldn’t ignore him either, because no one else was doing anything like that.”
However both men were hooked, and just a year after meeting each other, they decided to make the documentary. Recalling the pre-production phase, Vineet said, “No one told us that it was a great idea, and no one was dying to talk to us. But there was one person who really loved the idea, and that was the narrator of the film Dhritiman Chaterji.” Yes, Vineet is talking about the iconic actor who worked in Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi and Aparna Sen’s 36 Chowringhee Lane among other notable works. Vineet said that they had no prior connection to the actor, but a simple message on Facebook was enough to convince him for the project.
Apart from talking heads like filmmaker Anjan Dutt, professor Dr Ananda Lal (who has taught Dylan’s lyrics as part of the curriculum), singer Usha Uthup, and other greats such as veteran journalist Nondon Bagchi, the documentary also had the legendary Baul musician Purna Das Baul. The most striking and surprising detail of this entire story is that Dylan and Das were managed by the same person, Albert Grossman, who was played by actor Dan Fogler in A Complete Unknown. The two even featured on the album cover of Dylan’s eight studio album John Wesley Harding.
In the documentary, Purna Das himself talks about his relationship with Dylan, even though Jaimin and Vineet recall that Das wasn’t very keen on talking about his friend from the west. You see Das knew Dylan all too well and he knew that the musician doesn’t like to be talked about or decoded in front of people. After a lot of convincing, Das told the story of how he used to jam with Dylan in Bearsville, USA. He also recalled how Dylan would call himself the “Baul of America,” a title that did not only seem worthy, but also made Das chuckle a little bit while reminiscing about it.
It is so strange to think that arguably the most prolific songwriter of all time, and according to Jaimin the greatest melody maker alongside Paul McCartney would have such a connection to Baul music. A connection so deep that he entrusted himself with the responsibility of being a part of that identity, that culture. However our two Dylan aficionados in question are somewhat doubtful regarding the kind of love that the city of Kolkata has given back to Dylan.
Except for his alleged 1990 visit to the city (which still can’t be proved), Dylan’s only tangible connection to Kolkata is Purna Das, his love for Baul music, and the fact that him and Tagore won the same prize a century apart. However Jaimin and Vineet argue that Kolkata, and Dylan’s fans in general have disappointed in their quest of truly being his followers. They say that too many people still think of Dylan as a folk artist, but he is “as rock as it gets,” and this sentence was delivered with much more certainty and clarity in real life. They say that even some of Dylan’s most ardent fans from the City of Joy, have only ever cracked the surface, and Vineet was sending lesser known Dylan songs even 48 hours after the interview to prove his point.
Well maybe its true, even in the documentary, one can see that the songs that are being mentioned are ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ ‘The Times They Are A Changing’, and ‘Blowing in the Wind.’ Maybe it is true that we never appreciated Dylan for so much of his discography, because we refuse to look past the folk-singer, harmonica wielding, troubadour image he had. Maybe the world never truly accepted him for picking up the electric guitar, even all these years later.
Yet, Kolkata’s obsession with Dylan (no matter how surface level) is something out of the blue. Maybe its in our idolatic nature, but it is still difficult to explain why an entire city decided to choose Dylan as their idol and messiah. Maybe there is hope for the next generation, maybe they will take Dylan’s legacy forward. Because he truly was more than a troubadour. Born more than 12000 kilometers away, he taught an entire city the right way to listen to both rock and folk music, and it doesn’t matter whether you know 3 or 300 of his songs, because some ways are never changing.
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