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Salil Chowdhury

Salil Chowdhury
সলিল চৌধুরী
Image of Salil Chowdhury
Salil Chowdhury (1923–1995)
Background information
Birth name Salil Chowdhury
Also known as Sholil-da
Born (1923-11-19)19 November 1923
Harinavi, 24 Parganas, Bengal Presidency, British India
Died 5 September 1995(1995-09-05) (aged 71)
Calcutta, West Bengal, India
Occupation(s) Music director, composer, poet, lyricist & story-writer

His musical ability was widely recognised and acknowledged in the Indian film industry. He was an accomplished composer and arranger who was proficient in several musical instruments, including flute, the piano, and the esraj. He was also widely acclaimed and admired for his inspirational and original poetry in Bengali.

Salil Chowdhury was born on 19 November 1925in a village called Harinavi in West Bengal. Salil's childhood was spent in the tea gardens region of Assam. From an early age he listened to the Western Classical collection of his father. His father was reputed to stage plays with coolies and other low-paid workers of the tea-gardens. He studied in Harinavi D.V.A.S High School and there after graduated from Bangabasi College, affiliated to the University of Calcutta in Kolkata, and during this period his political ideas were formulated along with a considerable maturity in his musical ideas.

In 1944, a young Salil came to Calcutta for his graduate studies. He joined the IPTA (Indian Peoples Theater Association) the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India. He started writing songs and setting tunes for them. The IPTA theatrical outfit travelled through the villages and the cities bringing these songs to the common man. Songs like Bicharpati, Runner and Abak prithibi became extremely popular with the general population at the time.

Songs like Gaayer bodhu, which he composed at the age of 20, brought about a new wave of Bengali music. Almost every notable singer at the time from West Bengal had sung at least one of his songs. A few examples are Debabrata Biswas, Hemanta Mukherjee, Shyamal Mitra, Sandhya Mukherjee, Manabendra Mukherjee, Subir Sen and Pratima Banerjee.

His first Bengali film "Paribortan" ("Transformation") was released in 1949.The singer of his debut song was Debabrata Biswas. "Mahabharati" released in 1994 was the last of his 41 Bengali films.


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