How Mahisasura-Mardini, AIR’s iconic Mahalaya show, effected a rare failure for superstar Uttam Kumar

The dawn was that of holy Mahalaya, which heralds the approach of the five-day Durga Pujas (beginning roughly a week from Mahalaya), which Bengal celebrates with a gusto that is hard to imagine for an otherwise laid-back state. The dawn also belonged to Birendra Krishna Bhadra's sacred chants, his Mahishasura-Mardini, and no one could ever be imagined to replace him.

Mahalaya is, after all, at the cusp that marks the end of Pitri Paksh — the holy fortnight for reverence of ancestors, and the beginning of Devi Paksh — the period reserved for the worship of the great goddess, coinciding with the celebration of Navratri in many parts of the country. Millions of pious Bengali Hindus head for the ghats of the Ganga, or whichever river is available nearby on Mahalaya, to perform ‘tarpan’, the sacred Hindu ritual of offering water to their deceased ancestors (pitrs) and to other divinities and sages.

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For decades, the dawn of Mahalaya has been synonymous for Bengalis with the sonorous recitation of the sacred hymns of Mahishasura-Mardini. The programme relates goddess Durga's several battles over evil forces and has been aired on All India Radio, Kolkata, for close to a century now. The verses have been chanted by Birendra Krishna Bhadra in so inimitable a manner that it is said to stir the souls of even hardened atheists.

Which is why the star-studded radio programme which replaced Bhadra’s Mahisasur-Mardini on Mahalaya 1976 provoked such an unimaginable cultural backlash in Bengal and elsewhere. Calls started flooding Akashvani's Kolkata and other stations as early as 4 am and protests continued even on the river ghats, as people prayed in waist-deep water.

This Mahalaya, October 10, marks 50 years of that unmitigated disaster.

The anger at the sheer temerity of Akashvani continued unabated for a long time, even after Akashvani reverted to Bhadra's Mahishasura-Mardini the next year.

Bengal's public displayed a visible self-contradiction, however, when it expressed its anger and rejection, in no uncertain terms, of the radio programme led by Uttam Kumar, but refused to blame the beloved star. This almost-schizophrenic outrage may appear quite inscrutable — as many things are, about a highly emotional people. But the event is just too copybook a case for social psychologists not to cite it.

The making of a tradition

A flashback to the events of that Mahalaya must start with the sweltering afternoon of August 26, 1927, when Bengal's then Governor, Sir Stanley Jackson, opened Kolkata's first radio station to encourage a private venture. But the valiant effort failed and on All Fools' Day (April 1) of 1930, the government took over this radio station as well as the one started in Delhi. Thus was launched the Indian State Broadcasting Service, later renamed the 'All India Radio', on June 8, 1936.

In the initial years, Bengalis did not find the expensive imported radio sets cost-effective, as there were hardly any attractive programmes for them. So, the programme director of the radio station organised some brainstorming sessions with several top cultural personalities of Kolkata. They explored ideas to attract local audiences to the new medium and, obviously, to increase the revenues of the radio station.

It was in one of these meetings that a unanimous decision was reached — Birendra Krishna Bhadra and his ensemble would curate a fusion of hymns in Sanskrit from the Devi Mahatmya (which describes the Goddess Durga), to be interspersed with Bhadra's narration in Bengali, and a chorus would come in at appropriate intervals. The background music would be rendered by an orchestra playing several Indian instruments. This called for some special skills, as most musicians were 'up-country' Urdu-speaking Muslims, who had no idea of what the holy hymns to Durga meant.

There are many disputes on the exact date of the first broadcast of this assembled programme. It is, therefore, safer to go by the blog of Akashvani that quotes from archival copies of the radio station's own journal, Betar Jagat Patrika. It says that the first programme Bhadra, the iconic Pankaj Mallick and so many greats, titled Basanteswari, was broadcast on October 21, 1936. This was the day of Maha Shashthi (coinciding with the sixth day of Navratri) that year and it was instantly the grandest hit of Kolkata's radio station.

But since Maha Shashthi marks the first day of the Durga Puja celebrations, and holidays in the state, many travel-loving Bengalis missed the unique experience as they were on trains heading out of Kolkata for vacation. The next programme was, therefore, brought forward by six days to coincide with Mahalaya. It was renamed Mahishasura-Mardini and was broadcast live every year. This meant that well over a hundred singers, musicians and recordists had to rush in the middle of the night to reach the radio station.

From 1962, however, live broadcasts were stopped and the recorded version was aired on Mahalaya at 4 am, year after year. People not only never tired of listening to the same performance every year, but, instead, felt increasingly thrilled to be a part of the glorious everlasting cultural tradition of Bengal.

A careful examination of the last claim will reveal that while the tradition may well last forever, its origin was much too recent, in 1936, to position it to some hazy romantic past. This is exactly what Eric Hobsbawm has described as the 'invention of tradition'.

When star power was defeated by popular sentiments

Now for that Uttam Kumar programme which broke the show’s glorious continuity in 1976. This is where we started. But Uttam Kumar did not actually replace Birendra Krishna Bhadra. Instead, the radio station created a completely new programme in 1976, called Debīṃ Durgatihāriṇīm. It was conceived by a top Sanskrit scholar and had new lyrics. Its music direction was by Hemant Kumar — Bengal's own Hemanta Kumar Mukherjee.

But this attempt by Akashvani to replace an old cultural format with a new one — that had Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Manna Dey and Bengal's topmost singers — proved to be an unmitigated disaster. Incidentally, Uttam Kumar is said to have been initially quite reluctant to do the narration and was reportedly persuaded by Hemanta Mukherjee and others. An AIR-related account says that he was paid only 150 rupees for the recording.

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Bengalis were outraged at All India Radio for insulting their 'everlasting tradition'. It was as if they were collectively expressing, unconsciously or otherwise, their protest against the prevailing Emergency (1975-1977) itself, for the sheer arrogance of tinkering around with a sacred institution. The radio station had totally misjudged when it planned to rub off some of Uttam Kumar's incomparable popularity onto the programme. There was unusual and rare unison among one of India's most argumentative people that Mahalaya was reserved for Bhadra's Mahishasura-Mardini and for nothing else.

As Uttam Kumar is said to have put it in wise hindsight: "We cannot renovate our family's worshipping space into a swank drawing room".