Deben Bhattacharya

Debendranath Bhattacharya

Paris, France

Deben Bhattacharya was a Bengali field recordist and prolific media producer who for five decades ran a successful transnational folklore collection and publishing business. When Bhattacharya died in 2001, he had produced over 120 records, 20 films and countless radio programmes that drew on over 400 hours of sound recordings made in countries across the world.

Bhattacharya travelled to Britain in 1949 on the SS Stratheden, arriving on 5 November. On 17 November 1949, within two weeks of docking, he made his first broadcast on the BBC Eastern Service, deputizing for Professor D. Ganguly, who was unable to attend the transmission. A few months later, in March 1950, he was offered a temporary contract as producer for the Eastern Service’s Bengali programme. The BBC Eastern Service provided Bhattacharya with regular, bit-part work from the late 1940s to the early 1960s and gave him an important platform to launch a career within the post-war creative industries.

Bhattacharya was an enormously inventive and resilient individual; he had an impressive ability to generate ideas and make projects happen. In his early years in Britain, Bhattacharya pitched several ideas to the BBC but met with little success. On 11 January 1952, however, he posted a letter that landed favourably with the producers of the Third Programme: an outline for three programmes on Indian classical, folk and contemporary music. These talks, which were illustrated with recordings from the BBC’s Commercial Record Library, were broadcast between 10 July 1952 and 5 March 1953, and represent Bhattacharya's first significant BBC radio commission. Listener responses to the programmes were positive, and his second Third Programme commission, three talks on ragas and raginis, were broadcast between 31 October and 13 November 1953.

In 1954 Bhattacharya acquired a GB732 reel-to-reel tape machine for £83 10s (worth approximately £2,582 in 2024), bought with a patchwork of funds, including an advance from the London-based Argo Record Company. Argo released Bhattacharya’s first UK LP record, Music from India – Songs from Bombay in 1956; his friendship – and working relationship – with Argo director Harley Usill was lifelong. Throughout the 1950s and until the late 1970s, Bhattacharya frequently produced talks for the Third Programme, including the seven-part Overland Route to India, broadcast between 11 February and 5 March 1957, which documented Bhattacharya’s gruelling journey from Paris to Calcutta

The BBC never commissioned Bhattacharya in advance, however: his field recording ventures were self-funded. Bhattacharya offset some of the business risk in folklore collection by selling his recordings to multiple departments within the BBC. Alongside the Third Programme, the BBC Sound Archives were a significant ‘customer’; the Sound Archives relied heavily on the endeavours of private collectors to expand their international folk music archives. He was a prolific and important collector, firmly part of the post-war folk revival zeitgeist, although rarely positioned within these histories. Furthermore, Bhattacharya’s expertise was well recognized within the BBC, and in 1961 he made his first foray into television, acting as an advisor to David Attenborough on the series Adventure ('Crusaders’ Path', 9 November 1961; 'Kathakali', 30 November 1962). His field recordings were used to illustrate these programmes.

Bhattacharya’s work in the UK extended beyond the BBC. In 1963 his translations of the Love Songs of Vidyāpati were published by Allen & Unwin. Introduced by his friend William G. Archer, who was Keeper of the Indian Section at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1950s, the book was the first in a series of three published in the prestigious UNESCO Collection of ​Representative Works:​ Indian Series.

Bhattacharya published material across a breathtaking array of mediums. The Gypsies (1966) was published with London-based publisher Record Books, a hybrid picture book and 7-inch record which featured his photography, writing and field recordings. With Argo, Bhattacharya produced the Living Tradition series (1967–74), curated collections of music Bhattacharya had recorded in southern and eastern Europe, Scandinavia, the Middle East and South Asia, enriched by his detailed sleeve notes and photography. Argo also produced Bhattacharya’s first film, Raga (1969), narrated by violinist Yehudi Menuhin, fresh from his Grammy Award-winning album with Ravi Shankar, West Meets East (1967).

Bhattacharya lived in Britain for less than a decade, but his experiences were formative and he established partnerships and friendships that continued throughout his life. His impact on the cultural landscape is under-researched, but he clearly had a pioneering influence on the distribution, interpretation and curation of transnational folk music and dance, within Britain and far beyond.