Memories Come Alive
manna dey
Penguin India, Rs 450

His childhood and youth were filled with pranks, from stealing sweets with a fishing rod, to flying kites across North Calcutta skies, and then to training as a wrestler with enough seriousness to get to the state wrestling finals. He very nearly took up law as a profession. He even thought of joining the anti-colonial underground resistance and becoming a “terrorist”.

It was only a sequence of chance events, then, that led Prabodh Chandra Dey to take up music as a career and to go on to become Manna Dey, one of the best-loved singers of his time.
This memoir was first published in Bengali as Jibaner Jalsaghare; this English translation by Sarbani Putatunda does justice to the dense, layered narrative.

In an age of celebrityhood and narcissism, the strikingly remarkable thing about this autobiography is how little of it is about Manna Dey alone, and how much of it is about the friendships and relationships with others that have shaped his life over the decades. It is not just about the relationship with his mother Mahamaya Devi, his uncle and first guru Krishna Chandra (Keshto) Dey, his wife Sulochana Kumaran and his illustrious contemporaries, but also with the listeners across the country who found such wonderful pleasure in his songs.

Like the little Santhal girl who brought Manna Dey a single red rose. The Sardarji cabbie who begged him to come to his house for a cup of tea. The garage mechanics who repaired his car in no time at all and then touched his feet. The boy in Kashmir who, noticing that the singer was numb with cold, stepped on the dais and offered him a woollen cap to wear on his head.

... contd.