Pankaj Mullick

Tagore had known Mullick since 1925, when word of the young singer's voice brought him to Jorasanko to perform one of the poet's own songs. In 1937, scoring the film Mukti, Mullick set another Tagore poem, "Shesh Kheya," to a tune of his own and finally worked up the nerve to play it for its author. "Tagore was so overwhelmed on hearing the song that he embraced Mullick," the family foundation's own account records, and told him: "All those lyrics of mine that I will not get the opportunity to set tune to during my lifetime, I leave to you to embellish them with your music."

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1932

Tobu Mone RekhoRabindranath Tagore

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1937

Diner Sheshe Ghumer DeshePankaj Mullick

listen forTagore's only commercial recording, cut for the Hindusthan label in 1932, is barely sung at all — his voice hovers just above speech, unhurried and private. That restraint carries straight into Mullick's "Diner Sheshe Ghumer Deshe," the tune Tagore blessed for Mukti (released, most sources agree, in 1937, though one account says 1935): no phrase pushes past a murmur, the melody easing downward like the sleep the title names — the hushed delivery the poet modeled, that his pupil never abandoned.

Rabindranath trusted his grand-nephew Dinendranath Tagore, keeper of the music-school library at Santiniketan's Visva-Bharati university, above anyone else to sing his songs correctly: "Dinu is the steersman in the boat of my songs, and the storehouse of my songs," the poet said of him. It was Dinendranath, not Rabindranath, who actually taught the teenage Mullick the technique of Rabindra Sangeet in Calcutta, years before Mullick ever met the poet himself — training that let him later carry those songs, properly rendered, onto commercial records and into film.

listen: upstream & heresource: Pankaj Mullick Music & Art Foundation — About (Dinendranath Tagore as teacher) ↗share

1926

Megher Pore Megh JomechheDinendranath Tagore

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1939

Piya Milan Ko JanaPankaj Mullick

listen forNone of Dinendranath's own 1920s Gramophone Company sides — the ones Tagore had him cut as models of how the songs should sound — survive on any modern platform, but contemporaries described exactly the quality Mullick carries into "Piya Milan Ko Jana": singer Sahana Devi recalled that "what Rabindrasangeet meant, if one learned from Dinuda, would never forget — Rabindranath's songs would find freedom in Dinuda's voice." That same floating, unornamented restraint, never swelling toward operatic display, is what carries the melody here.