How Radio Quarantine builds solidarity in difficult times
Asamayer Katha, Samayer Gaan Untimely Talk, Timely Songs on Radio Quarantine. courtesy radio quarantine kolkata
Asamayer Katha, Samayer Gaan Untimely Talk, Timely Songs on Radio Quarantine. courtesy radio quarantine kolkata
At the end of an hour-long radio episode on Bengali protest songs, the singer and oral historian Moushumi Bhoumik performed a song written by Birendra Chattopadhyay, a twentieth-century socialist poet. A witness to the 1943 Bengal famine, Chattopadhyay wrote the lines “
Anna bakya, Anna pran, Anna-i chetana” Rice is language, rice is life, rice is consciousness. Like several other shows on Radio Quarantine, Bhoumik’s programme is concerned with building an archive of regional narratives of political resistance and cultural histories. She interviews folk singers and friends from as far afield as Purulia and Sylhet, and recollects her travels through the Sundarb