Today, December 30, is Abbasuddin Ahmed’s death anniversary.Cooch Behar: Sixty-six years after his death, Abbasuddin Ahmed’s voice still travels with buses, boats and border trains across north Bengal and beyond. In the tea gardens of Jalpaiguri, in the haats of Cooch Behar and Alipurduar, in Assam’s chars and across to Bangladesh, people hum melodies he once carried to the gramophone, often without knowing they are singing the work of a single, epoch-making artist.For the Rajbanshi community in particular, Abbasuddin remains a living presence. His Bhawaiya songs, rooted in their dialect and lived experience, are still sung as if they were composed yesterday. Yet while his legacy thrives in the voices of ordinary people, the material memory of his life is crumbling.“Far from any official study or honour for him, his songs are still being branded as religious songs or the songs of the poor,” lamented radio artist and gidal (folk singer) Muktaq from Cooch Behar. “If the government wanted, a Bhawaiya practice centre or a museum could have been established at the birthplace of this celebrated artist of the subcontinent. In reality, the abandoned house is now a venue for criminal gatherings. It is painful to witness this.”Born in 1901 in Balarampur village of Tufanganj in the then princely state of Cooch Behar, Abbasuddin came from the Nossyo Sheikh community, part of the wider Rajbanshi Muslim social landscape of North Bengal. A conservative Muslim village upbringing shaped him as both deeply religious and yet irresistibly drawn to music.He was never a product of any formal music school. Abbasuddin would later say that his musical alma mater was nature itself, the chirping of birds, the roar of monsoon waterfalls, the sounds of rural life in undivided North Bengal. He sharpened his art at local cultural programmes in schools and colleges. A short phase of training under Ustad Jamiruddin Khan in Kolkata added a thin layer of classical polish, but his core remained folk and instinctive. Yet, he was an outstanding Sanskrit student, earning the title Kabyaratnakar. This unusual combination foreshadowed his ability to move across linguistic, religious and cultural boundaries.Abbasuddin’s abandoned house in Balarampur. Photo: Joydeep Sarkar.In 1931, Abbasuddin arrived in Kolkata’s music scene at the invitation of Kazi Nazrul Islam, which was dominated by the city’s Hindu bhadralok elite. The gramophone, controlled by companies such as His Master’s Voice, was seen as modern and metropolitan, and folk music from the northern mofussil districts barely registered.He began recording modern Bangla songs for HMV but from the outset he challenged the system’s unwritten rules. At that time many Muslim singers took neutral or Hindu sounding pseudonyms to avoid prejudice, like Kasem Mullick shortening himself to “K. Mullick” on records. Abbasuddin refused.He insisted that his full, unmistakably Muslim name appear on the label. Company officials were reportedly alarmed, fearing it would hurt sales, but he did not back down. The records went out into the world with “Abbasuddin Ahmed” printed in full.The song of the people“Two things must be remembered – at that time, he popularised the songs of the most marginalised people through gramophone records. And this duo, Abbasuddin Ahmed and Kazi Nazrul Islam, made a unique effort to break all superstitions in rural Muslim life using song. We must also consider the context of their time,” reflected Tapan Ray Pradhan, Abbasuddin’s biographer. This quiet act of cultural defiance, a way of asserting that a Muslim name and voice had every right to define modern Bengali music fed into a broader movement of cultural Muslim rejuvenation in Bengal. This visibility had a direct impact in conservative Bengali Muslim households, where music was often viewed as a Hindu practice or even as religiously forbidden.“When Abbasuddin’s wedding night took place, his friend set up a musical adda with a sitar,” recalled researcher Ferdousi Rahman. “His relatives and religious leaders ordered the music and musical instruments to be stopped, saying it was an anti-Islamic act. Abbasuddin silently left the house after hearing the instruction.”By becoming a celebrated Muslim singer without hiding his identity, and by taking his music to mehfils, melas and gramophone records, Abbasuddin helped make music more acceptable in conservative Muslim society and expanded the space for cultural expression.His strongest musical legacy lies in Bhawaiya, the melancholy, long drawn rural music of cart drivers, lovers separated by distance and workers who live by the river. Sung in the North Bengal dialect, Bhawaiya often uses a stretched, breaking vocal line that mirrors the emotional strain.Cooch Behar. Photo: Joydeep Sarkar.When Abbasuddin first asked HMV to record Bhawaiya, the company flatly refused. “Regional songs won’t have a market,” executives told him. By then his recordings of modern Bangla and Nazrul songs had already become widely popular. The breakthrough came with a compromise, a song about the river Torsha titled ‘Torsha nadir parey parey o’, set to a Bhawaiya melody but using standard Kolkata Bengali – referred to as the ‘bhadralok‘ Bengali – rather than the local dialect.The record’s success proved that the tune, even if wrapped in a seemingly more respectable language, could sell. On the strength of that success HMV agreed to record Bhawaiya in its full rustic form.What followed were the classics that still define the genre, ‘Phande pariya baga kandey re’, ‘O garial bhai’ and ‘Ki o bandhu kajal bhomora re’. These songs crossed North Bengal’s boundaries and took their place beside other major folk styles such as Bhatiali, Murshidi and Jari.For contemporary folk star Swapan Basu, Abbasuddin’s continuing relevance is inseparable from the nature of folk music itself. “Folk song is not like other songs; that is one thing,” Basu said. “Most of it is created from the soil. Phande Pariya Boga Kandey Re’ is about the exploitation of that era, sung by the folk artist with a tune. Those were the songs Abbasuddin sang at that time.”Abbasuddin’s influence also travelled into cinema through his mentorship of Sachin Dev Burman, whom he taught his trademark voice breaking technique. Burman later used in his own singing, though he never sang Bhawaiya himself, recognising Abbasuddin as the undisputed authority. The clearest example of this influence is the folk tune ‘Allah megh de‘, first recorded by Abbasuddin in 1940s Kolkata to popularise Jari gaan and later adapted by Burman for the 1965 film Guide as ‘Megh de paani de’, carrying Abbasuddin’s legacy into popular Hindi cinema.“Many songs grow monotonous and their popularity wanes after listening to them for a long time,” said Ishwar Chandra Roy, a Bhawaiya and Bhatiali artist from North Bengal. “But Abbasuddin’s songs, such as ‘O garial bhai’ or ‘Kajal bhomora’, are still equally popular — or have even more listeners, after nearly 80 years. This is the success of an artist’s creation.”Before Abbasuddin, Bhawaiya and similar genres were often dismissed as low class music of cart drivers, farm labourers and poor peasants. By bringing these songs into urban drawing rooms and onto radio, he helped shift them from cheap entertainment to recognised art. At the same time, by popularising the North Bengal dialect on commercial records, he challenged the notion that only Kolkata Bengali could be refined.Sukbilas Barma, a folk artist and researcher from North Bengal, underlined this role. “Even in these turbulent times, if someone starts singing Bhawaiya or Bhatiali along a roadside in North Bengal, Assam, Tripura, or Bangladesh, people still stop whatever they are doing and become captivated by the web of that melody,” he said.“This tune is intertwined with the everyday life of the marginalised: the song of a boatman’s exhaustion or joy, or the pain of a friend’s house being across the border after Partition,” Barma added. “Extensive research shows that no one had made Bhawaiya so popular before him.”Alongside this folk transformation, Abbasuddin and Kazi Nazrul Islam reshaped the religious soundscape of Bengal. In the early 1930s, Abbasuddin pointed out to Nazrul that Hindu festivals such as Durga Puja and Holi had a vast Bengali musical repertoire, while there were almost no Bengali songs for key Muslim occasions such as Eid ul Fitr, Eid ul Azha or Muharram.With Nazrul writing lyrics steeped in both Islamic theology and Bengali poetics, and Abbasuddin giving them voice, the pair proposed to HMV a new line of Islamic devotional songs in Bengali. The company initially refused. They persisted.The turning point came with the Eid song ‘O mon, ramjaner oi rojar sheshey elo khushir Eid’. Its recording and release had an electrifying impact across Bengal. The song, and many that followed, such as ‘Allahte jar purna iman‘ and ‘Islamer oi sauda laye‘, were embraced not only by Muslims but also by many Hindus, drawn by Nazrul’s poetry and Abbasuddin’s passionate delivery.Cultural historians say the duo helped lift the taboo of music in quite a few Muslim homes. Framed in a religious cultural idiom, their songs allowed even strict households that normally banned music to accept and enjoy it, creating a confident Muslim musical identity in the Bengali language. At the same time, Abbasuddin continued to sing folk and modern songs that appealed to both Hindus and Muslims, reinforcing a shared cultural space.Next year will mark Abbasudin’s 125th birth anniversary. Even as his ancestral home in Balarampur lies neglected, his name is being invoked in new struggles over rights and resources.Translated from the Bengali original by Aparna Bhattacharya.