The unlikely qawwals

Inside an HMV recording studio in 1930s Calcutta, two young brothers from Narail stood before a microphone that local Bengali singers had only recently begun to trust. The elder, twenty-three and quietly convinced that music was his true life's work rather than a fleeting sideline, took the lead. The younger stepped a half-pace behind, assuming the understated position typical of junior siblings. 

Kamal Dasgupta and his brother Subal were about to record qawwali, in Urdu, on Bengali soil. Very few musicians before them had ever attempted such a daring feat.

Kamal’s training read like an exhaustive catalogue of classical pedagogy. He studied khayal, thumri, and dadra under Dilip Kumar Roy, blind master Krishnachandra Dey, and Ustad Zamiruddin Khan. Later, he earned a doctorate from Benares Hindu University analyzing the melodic structure of Meera’s devotional bhajans—proof that his musical talent rested on intellect rather than mere instinct. 

Recognizing his gifts, HMV appointed him music director at twenty-three. In his first year, he recorded fifty-three tracks in a single month—a pace that looks like an accounting error in the surviving studio ledgers.

Yet the most intriguing turn involved qawwali, a genre that did not drift into the Bengali canon on its own steam. It was pushed there by the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. Nazrul maintained that Islamic devotional traditions belonged in the Bengali musical landscape as legitimately as in Urdu or Farsi. 

Realizing this vision required adventurous performers willing to project Urdu phrasing into a gramophone market that had never asked for it. By most accounts, Kamal became the first Bengali to record Urdu qawwali on wax—a bold step between cultural translation and provocation.

Qawwali was never an indigenous Bengali creation, tracing its origins to Amir Khusrau in thirteenth-century Delhi. Built for the mehfil-e-sama—the Sufi gathering where devotion was communicated through sound rather than abstract theology—it traveled alongside the Chishti order in Persian, Urdu, and Hindi. 

Bengal possessed its own centuries-old Islamic folk tradition, but it operated chiefly in rural areas, unwritten and informal. Urban Bengali elites largely overlooked it, viewing rural singing as rudimentary compared to refined classical forms of khayal and thumri that dominated metropolitan salons. 

Nazrul’s project—assisted by Kamal, Subal, K. Mallik, Girin Chakraborty, Piyaru Kawal, and Abbas Uddin Ahmed—aimed to bridge this divide, giving Islamic song formal gramophone legitimacy.

Subal joined his brother in this effort, forming a duo named Chand-Suruj, or Moon and Sun. The moniker carried none of the solemnity expected from such a loaded enterprise. Together, they recorded hamd and naat alongside the Nazrul geeti repertoire that was cementing Kamal’s reputation. 

The context makes their collaboration remarkable: two Hindu brothers, raised on classical traditions, singing Urdu qawwali over Bengali airwaves at a moment when communal divisions across South Asia were hardening into political borders. While Nazrul composed melodies for four-fifths of his Islamic songs, he entrusted the remaining fraction to a tight-knit circle. Kamal sat at the top, with Subal close behind.

Beyond qawwali, Kamal possessed an extraordinary capacity for musical output, authoring between seven and eight thousand compositions over his career. His vast body of work spanned khayal, kirtan, qawwali, ghazal, Nazrul geeti, regional folk melodies, and film scores across Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, and Tamil. 

Curiously, his catalogue includes "Kadam Kadam Badhaye Ja"—the military march that remains a staple of Indian ceremonial parades—composed alongside devotional qawwali arranged with his brother in quiet evenings. He was even commissioned to create a composition for the Golden Jubilee of the Nizam of Hyderabad. By his peak, he had transcended genre, acting less like a composer and more like an elemental force in Bengali music.

Subal’s role in historical accounts remains understated, a common fate for younger brothers in musical lineages. Yet his artistic contributions were far from trivial. He composed the enduring melodies for Jaganmoy Mitra’s acclaimed tracks, including "Saatti Bochor Aage," "Saatti Bochor Pore," and "Chithi"—songs that brought delicate personal sorrow into Bengali homes through the 1940s and 1950s. 

He also set Nazrul’s poetry to music and worked on Hindi films. Though he rarely escaped his brother’s shadow, any examination of his original scores reveals a composer operating at an impeccably high level.

Kamal’s narrative presents an unexpected final turn that defies easy categorization as a simple story of interfaith harmony. In 1955, at age forty-three, he married Firoza Begum, a twenty-five-year-old young singer who would become the definitive vocal interpreter of Nazrul geeti. 

Two years later, he quietly converted to Islam, taking the name Kamaluddin Ahmed. When he passed away in 1974, he was buried under that name in Dhaka’s Azimpur graveyard—far removed, geographically and spiritually, from the Narail household where his father Taraprasanna first placed a tanpura into his own hands.

Chand-Suruj was ultimately far more than two ambitious brothers experimenting inside a studio. It marked a rare historical moment when devotional art refused to remain neatly confined within prescribed cultural boundaries. Nazrul provided the poetry, but the Dasgupta brothers supplied the classical technique required to anchor an Urdu vocal tradition in new soil. 

The ensemble left no permanent institutional legacy, surviving today primarily as a fascinating footnote in the vast history of Bengali recorded sound.

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Mahmud Newaz Joy is a Dhaka-based freelance feature writer and political analyst