In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Rahul Bhattacharya’s debut novel The Sly Company of People Who Care is one of my favorite novels of the century. Its followup, Railsong, is even more impressive in its epic depiction of one woman’s life in India.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Bhattacharya . . . serves up an illuminating tale about a woman fighting for her agency in India . . . Through Charu’s experiences, Bhattacharya provides a wide-angle view of India’s inequality and patriarchal gender roles, all while depicting in intimate detail how his protagonist struggles to live on her own terms.”
In his own words, here is Rahul Bhattacharya’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel Railsong:
As I compose this piece on a long train journey, it occurs to me that the rhythmic, occasionally juddering, song of the rail below me is in spirit a musical companion to my novel. Beyond that – unlike my previous Largehearted Boy playlist, defined by music of the Caribbean – the music in and around Railsong is tremendously diverse. Western pop, old Hindi and Bengali songs, Hindustani classical, psychedelic jam, Afro-crossover. I embark on this playlist, therefore, with the trepidation that it will resemble those absurd platefuls one ends up with at a mixed-cuisine buffet. Then again, I’ve relished some of those plates. In order to minimise chances of indigestion, I’ve kept the list tight. In particular, I’ve left out those Hindi and Bengali songs where knowledge of the language feels essential to appreciating them.
“Karma Chameleon” by Culture Club
I have a soft spot for misheard lyrics. A lot of us in India grew up with garbled words to English songs because we didn’t know better and there was no internet to tell us. In the book, I put this mis-comprehension to comedic use. (While potentially saving myself from bankruptcy at the hands of Big International Labels.) “Karma Chameleon” – Come a Chameleon in the novel – appears in a party scene where my protagonist, Charu Chitol, gets drunk and meets an intriguing fellow. She can’t get the song out of her head, misheard words and all. When I wrote the scene, a sucker for the ’80s that I am, neither could I.
“My Name is Anthony Gonsalves” by Kishore Kumar feat. Amitabh Bachchan
Done right, I’m all for deliberately nonsense lyrics, too. “You see the whole country of this system, Is juxtaposition by the hemoglobin in the atmosphere, Because you are a sophisticated rhetorician, Intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity!” The superstar Amitabh Bachchan rises out of a giant Easter egg with this declamation. But quite apart from the mad lyrics, and my love of the 1977 blockbuster film that is its home, I adore this song also for its joyous, jazz-inflected musical arrangement. The composer Pyarelal was paying homage to his old guru, a violionist and arranger called Anthony Gonsalves. In Railsong, one of Charu’s love interests, a talented mimic, entertains her with his renditions of this song (and dance).
“Angeleyes” by ABBA
I took “Angeleyes” out of the novel in the final draft and I’m still surpised that it isn’t there, so woven is it into my memory of a scene where Charu and her room-mate break rules to drink up on the terrace of their working women’s hostel in Bombay. It is 1980, the year after Voulez-Vous released, and the girls are in their early 20s. Few things would have cut deeper than love and heartbreak as sung by the ABBA women. “Cause he always used to look at me that way …”
“Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan” by Mohammad Rafi and Geeta Dutt
Seventy years after it was composed this remains the quintessential Bombay song. Recomposed would be more accurate. The music director OP Nayyar lifted the melody from “Oh My Darling Clementine”. There the similarities end. This one is not a tragedy; rather it is a playful warning about the big city (the song title translates to “This is Bombay, My Love”). The lyricist Majrooh Sultanpuri’s lines are razor-sharp – “You get everything here, except the one thing, a heart” – but the lilting musical arrangement and the airy delivery by two of India’s greatest playback singers can’t fail to lift one’s spirits. In Railsong, we encounter it at a singing competition in Charu’s railway office, which has the employees – who work in the Bombay Division, after all – “swaying, screeching, croaking, weeping in their seats”.
“Oi Je Sabuj Bonobithika” by Madhuri Chatterjee
I’ve picked this Bengali song over others more thematically resonant with Railsong because (I hope) Madhuri Chatterjee’s ethereal voice and the composer Salil Chowhdury’s genius make it universally accesible. Chowdhury’s arrangement here has, I’ve just learnt, has a touch of Beethoven’s Pastoral thrown in, while his poetic lyrics evoke the natural world. The title tranlates roughly to “There, that green forest path”. A refrain in the song goes, “There lives my beloved”. The composition has a tremendous joie de vivre yet is shot through with longing. In the novel it runs through a character’s mind in a sad scene.
“Scarlet Begonias>Fire on the Mountain” (Cornell 5/8/77) by Grateful Dead
Discovering Grateful Dead in my late teens was like entering a fourth, fifth, sixth dimension. The Dead gradually seeped out of my life, but when I was making my final revisions to Railsong, in a library in Bombay, on a roaring, honking, drilling main road, I took on-loop-refuge in the legendary Scarlet>Fire from Cornell 1977, so that I now believe the novel couldn’t have been completed without it. I’m in awe of Jerry Garcia’s talents. I’m amazed that a piece this long can sound this tight, this right, every little phase perfectly setting up what’s to come (the ace soundboard recording helps). If any Deadheads happen to be reading this, look, we are brothers and sisters, but I can’t accept the band has ever played a greater 27 minutes, OK?
“Soukora” by Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder
This gorgeous collaboration between the mighty Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder from Talking Timbuktu is one of my favourite songs of all time, even though I don’t understand a syllable of Bambara. I wasn’t surprised in the least when I learnt that the word Soukora means “night” and this is a simple love long: the softness, the sweetness of the composition and the playing tell you. I didn’t listen to much music while doing the actual writing of Railsong, but there was a phase when I had this in my ears a lot. It makes me want to be better.
Raga Bhairavi by Vilayat Khan and Bismillah Khan
Only appropriate that dawn follows night. Bhairavi is an early morning raga. Yet it is also played to conclude a concert, no matter the time of the day. So to close off this playlist, another duet (a jugalbandi in the Hindustani classical terminology), this one between the great sitarist Vilayat Khan and the great Bismillah Khan on the shehnai. I don’t name them in the Railsong recital scene – in order not to be fact-checked by aficionados pointing out they did not play that venue that year, etc – but it is very much these incomparable artistes and their intricate interplay I had in mind. Among the audience is Charu. “Was it, in fact, divinity she experienced in the music?”
also at Largehearted Boy:
Rahul Bhattacharya’s playlist for his novel The Sly Company of People Who Care
Rahul Bhattacharya is a writer, journalist, and editor. His first novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care, won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Pundits from Pakistan, his first book, was a Wisden Cricketer top ten cricket book of all time. He was born in Bombay and lives in Delhi with his wife and two daughters.