Abdul Alim sang a country into being

Abdul Alim’s voice seems to arrive from somewhere farther away than the recording studio. There is river water in it, certainly, but also mud, boats, fields, separation, faith and the indescribable Bengali talent for converting misfortune into melody. 

Put on “Naiya Re Nayer Badam Tuila” or “Sarbanasha Padma Nodi” today and the recordings sound old. The emotions do not.

That distinction explains why Alim, who died 52 years ago on September 5, 1974, remains such an imposing figure in Bengali folk music. Bangladesh has produced singers with better technological adaptation and larger stages. And probably with vastly more efficient publicity machines. It has not quite produced another Abdul Alim.

He was born in 1931 in Talibpur village in Murshidabad, in what is now West Bengal. As a boy he became fascinated by gramophone records. By 14, he had recorded two songs.

He later met figures including Abbasuddin Ahmed and Kazi Nazrul Islam and studied under several musicians before settling in Dhaka after Partition. There he joined Dhaka Radio and trained further, including under Ustad Mohammed Hossain Khosru. 

Bengali folk music had already been carried toward urban audiences by musicians such as Abbasuddin and Sachin Dev Burman. Alim took that inheritance and made it mass culture. 

He sang bhatiali, murshidi, marfati and other folk traditions without making them sound like exhibits rescued from an ethnographic museum. The countryside entered the radio set without having to dress itself up as the city. 

This was Alim’s great trick. His music was rooted without becoming provincial.

Bhatiali, particularly, suited him. It is the music of river country: boatmen, distance, currents, journeys whose destinations are often less important than the longing generated along the way. In Alim’s voice, the river could be geography and metaphor simultaneously. 

Love became navigation. God could lurk somewhere beyond the opposite bank. Human life was frequently a boat with questionable steering.

Songs such as “Duare Aishache Palki,” “Holudia Pakhi Shonar Boron,” “Premer Mora Jole Dobe Na” and “Porer Jaiga Porer Jomi” became part of the Bengali musical vocabulary. His control of modulation allowed him to move between tenderness and lament without the vocal theatrics that later generations sometimes mistake for feeling. 

Alim himself looked almost comically unsuited to celebrity mythology. Photographs generally show a serious man without much interest in manufacturing mystique. Accounts describe simple clothes and simple habits. Fame apparently failed to persuade him that he ought to behave like a famous person. 

The public, however, had other ideas.

One story, repeated by people close to him, concerns a burglary at his Kamalapur home. A thief made off with the family’s belongings, only for the goods to reappear a few days later accompanied by a note. The burglar, the story goes, had discovered whose house he had robbed. Stealing was one thing; stealing from Abdul Alim was apparently a violation of professional ethics. 

Villagers travelled to his home simply to see him. His children remembered shopkeepers lighting up when he appeared in markets and strangers calling out the opening words of his songs when they spotted him in public. 

His institutional success was considerable too. At the All Pakistan Music Conference in Lahore, he won five gold medals. He recorded for Mukh O Mukhosh, the first Bengali feature film made in East Pakistan, and became a fixture of cinema playback. 

By the end of his short life, he had made more than 300 gramophone records and sung for more than 100 films. He received a National Award posthumously for Sujon Sokhi; the Ekushey Padak followed in 1977 and the Independence Award in 1997. 

Yet the economics of being Abdul Alim were less impressive than the honours suggest.

He supported a large family and accumulated little wealth. His son Jahir Alim later recalled that his father encouraged the children to concentrate on education rather than follow him into music, apparently because he understood perfectly well how precarious the livelihood of a full-time singer could be. After Alim died at only 43, the family struggled financially. 

There is something grimly familiar about what happened next. Bangladesh became very good at calling Abdul Alim a national treasure and rather less good at treating his recordings like one.

His family spent decades collecting surviving recordings and master prints. Jahir argued that the songs were not family property in any meaningful cultural sense but national assets requiring systematic preservation. Yet concerns about disappearing recordings and inadequate archiving persisted for decades. Even a 2024 assessment lamented that a musician of Alim’s stature was being commemorated increasingly quietly. 

That neglect matters because Alim preserved something more elusive than songs. He captured a society before development rearranged its soundscape—the Bengal of ferrymen and river crossings, village courtyards and spiritual wanderers, when water was not scenery but infrastructure, livelihood and destiny.

Near the end of his life, already seriously ill in hospital, Alim did something that now reads almost too neatly as metaphor. Jahir remembered seeing his father, normally unable to rise without assistance, suddenly sit upright one morning and begin singing. His voice, his son recalled, sounded steady.

Asked why, Alim gave the simplest explanation imaginable… he felt like singing and could not help himself. 

Perhaps that is why the songs have lasted. Abdul Alim did not sing folk music as heritage requires preservation. He sang it because, in the world he inhabited, it was still alive.

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Yusuf Banna is a full time poet and a part-time journalist