Videos from Kushtia, 1997

Video Montage from footage shot in Kushtia in December 1997. It features Phokir Nizamuddin Shah, the keeper of Lalon Shah's mausoleum, who passed away earlier in 2008.

Music Video based on footage shot in Kushtia in 1997. In this sequence you see Balai Shah with Suman Mukherjee and Ibadat Shah. Videography is by Sudipto Chatterjee.

11 Years Apart

Balai Shah, a Phokir novitiate, guided Sudipto and Suman during their first visit to Kushtia in December 1997. Sudipto re-located him in Summer 2008 and

worked with him in and around Kushtia again. Balai went to Calcutta, recorded his own album of Lalon songs and appeared on stage in Man of the Heart in September.

Two  Samples of Field Work in Kushtia, 2008

The blind Phokir Bader Shah was one of the oldest in Kushtia, at 107, when he died in Februrary 2009. In this audio recording made in July 2008, he sang his favourite Lalon song: "manush bhajle sonaar manush hobi".

"Faith in Life": In this video, Jiban Biswas, a 6 year-old child with multiple disabilities, sings two Lalon songs. Jhaudia, August 2008.

Documents 

Here are some documents that are important in exploring Lalon Phokir's syncretic faith, problematic biography, and music.

Text (final page) of the Moraqeba chant, which is part of the syncretic Marfati worship ritual. The last line ascribes it to Lalon Shah Phokir. Signed by the scribe, Bholai Shah, a leading disciple of Lalon.

Legal deed with Queen Victoria's seal proving Lalon's ownership of the land in Chheuriya (Kushtia) on which his mausoleum stands today.

The 2 documents below are pages of an obituary published soon after Lalon's death in 1890, in the local biweekly Hitakari edited by Mir Mosharraf Hussein & Raicharan Das.

The set below is a manuscript trying to prove Lalon to be Muslim by birth. This has been proven to be a case of ill-motivated academic fraud.

The forgery has been wrongfully ascribed to Lalon's disciple Duddu Shah, a renowned song-maker himself.

Below: 4 pages from Lalon's song books, taken and held in Shantiniketan (now in India) by Rabindranath Tagore. They were transcribed in an unorthodox style by Bholai and Maniruddin Shah, Lalon's direct disciples at Chheuriya.

Collected by Shaktinath Jha.