Ravindra Sangeet Vocalist Debabrata Biswas. Biswas’ music was notable for its exceptional depth of emotional expression combined with an exploration of the subtle dramatic element in Tagore’s lyrics. His early gramophone recordings of Tagore songs brought out in the early 1940s demonstrate soulful full-throated expression of melody with a strict adherence to the rules and norms of tradition, written and unwritten, which he felt obliged to break in the early 1960s – considered by most to be his heyday up to the year 1969.
His renderings in this period show amazing power of voice and modulation, compounded with an overt emotional expression of a kind hitherto unpractised by his contemporaries and even himself. His voice at this period ranged at ease within the three octaves and with varied tempos and rhythms and showed a greater variety of emotional expression from the thunderous and rumbling to the soft and mellow. Somewhat audacious and overpowering in his personal feelings and mores, his enunciation of the words of even the most familiar of Tagore’s lyrics extracted new meanings and freshness from the compositions.
Some of his renditions that go deep into the heart of Bengalis include Akash bhora surjo tara, Purano sei diner kotha, E monihar amay nahi saje, Klanti amar khoma koro probhu, Je ratey mor duarguli, Tomar kache e bor magi, Chokher joler laglo joar, Swapne amar mone holo, among others. Biswas is the only singer who sang Rabindra Sangeet in Sanskrit, English, German, French, and Russian. He got trained at Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Kolkata for learning the rudiments of foreign languages.
Apart from Rabindrasangeet, he is known to have held the masses spellbound with his booming and baritone voice singing Ganasangit or Peoples’ Songs in party gatherings, meetings and plenary sessions up to the mid-1950s. He remains one of the towering personalities of the peak era of Indian People’s Theatre Association(IPTA), as a cultural delegate of which he visited China twice in the early 1950s with other great cultural luminaries from India.
