The social construction of Bengali childhood, like its counterparts in other cultures, owes a lot to fairy tales. But folk music, too, plays a formative role in the way that children, particularly girls, arrive at a sense of self. Baul, Bhatiali, Bhawaiya, Gombhira, Kabigaan, Ghatu, Jhumur, Baramasi, Jatra, Sari and other folk forms paint a musical tapestry of Bengal within which children learn to find and place themselves.

For me, "Sohag Chand Bodoni", a marriage song that has passed into the endless annals of Bengali folk culture, represents what it means to be a Bengali. The version that I grew up with was rendered (incomparably, I would say) by Nirmalendu Chowdhury, who was born in the Sunamganj district of Sylhet in 1922. He was a household name in West Bengal till he passed away in 1981.

I first heard his song in the 1960s when I was ten or eleven. I danced, with the whole weight of Bengali existence lifting my infantile spirit to the eternal skies. Since the song is about a girl, I missed a sister who would have been a playful Sohag Chand Bodoni about to be wedded to a shy and handsome young man (chosen by patriarchal me, of course).

What I cherish to this day is the earthy kindness of Nirmalendu Chowdhury's voice. In this song, as in every other masterpiece of his, Chowdhury draws the majestic cadences of a simple folk song from the unfailing generosity of everyday Bengali soil. That is the soil on which Sohag Chand dances during the "Gaye Holud" celebrations preceding her marriage. She is likely to have been a child-bride, a rightly aberrant phenomenon today which unfortunately was normal in an earlier time. (I would never have allowed my sister to get married so young. Nor would have my leftist father.)

Nevertheless, the celebration of an approaching conjugal life animates the song, which invokes the legacy of the divine Radha-Krishna companionship to bless the couple-to-be. Sohag Chand is not supposed to lift her feet during this initiatory dance into marriage which is performed ritually in the presence of women elders from the groom-to-be's family. To dance with one's feet planted firmly in the ground is quite a feat but, metaphorically, that is what the rest of life, too, is about. Bengalis live with their heads in the stars and their feet on the ground (or submerged in floodwater). They still make their way home during the monsoon months of Ashar and Srabon.

Nirmalendu Chowdhury has sung his way to the hereafter. What he leaves behind is the Bengali penchant for song. His association with the Indian People's Theatre Association and particularly with Hemanga Biswas, another son of the soil of Sylhet, grounded his progressive aesthetics in the lives, loves and losses of the Bengali people.

I pay him my respects as a Bengali every time I hear Sohag Chand Bodoni. Recently, I came across a video that portrays little children dancing to the song. Although the singer in that video is someone else, Nirmalendu Chowdhury lives on. Who knows? He might have been reborn a girl. Her name? Sohag Chand Bodoni.

Look at the blessings in the photograph. Look closely at the second girl from the left. If her smile does not signify happiness in a Bengali marriage, then there is nothing to celebrate in any marriage.

Boroloker biti lo

Now, let me turn to another quintessentially Bengali song about feminine childhood, "Boroloker biti lo". The song has passed into Bengali folklore although its vintage is not ancient.

Ratan Kahar, a Birbhum-based singer in the Bhadu folk tradition, wrote the lyrics, set them to music and recorded the song in 1972. It became so popular that many artistes rendered it in their own styles, mostly without acknowledging Kahar's authorship. That appropriation led to a full-blown controversy in 2020, when a rapper released a steamy Hindi video that featured lines from the song repeatedly (and incongruously) without acknowledgement, let alone permission. Bengalis erupted in fury on social media. The elderly Kahar, who lives in penury in his Birbhum village, remained above the copyright fray, but the rapper displayed generosity of spirit by giving him ₹5 lakh. Kahar received the Indian government's Padma Shri award this year, a belated but nevertheless valuable tribute to a man who is fondly called the Pagla Sursadhak (Mad Musician) in Birbhum.

What is interesting about the song is its subtext. The song is written from the perspective of a prostitute who is singing to her daughter - whom she bore to a rich man who left her - while combing her hair. The image of a mother combing her daughter's hair draws on the customary association of long hair with fertility; the genda phool - marigolds - mentioned in the song reinforce that biological link through their customary association with purity.

Kahar's masterpiece offers subversive insights into these associations. The prostitute (who is paid to pleasure males but not give them children) symbolically inscribes her fertility on her daughter's future with the added benediction of the marigolds that will represent her daughter's chastity in marriage. No prostitute wants her child to follow her trade. The teenaged daughter does not know about her mother's past: All that she is doing is growing up, leaving behind her childhood for womanhood. But her mother will remain hers. Even as a mother herself one day, she will remain her mother's child.

The Bengali girl-child who sways to this song does not know all this. For her, this is a song of innocence. But she will grow up to understand it as a song of experience, too. Adulthood will add the rough glow of pain to the soft beauty of childhood.

A still is from a recent video which recreates Kahar's making of the song.

Oki Garial Bhai

While it is normal for adults to sing folk songs that initiate children into the real world, it is always good to hear children sing of that world themselves.

"Oki Garial Bhai" is a Bhawaiya folk song from Rangpur whose contemporary popularity is associated with the legendary Abbasuddin Ahmed. The song reveals an extremely advanced degree of ecological consciousness. The rural singer identifies herself with the garial crocodile - Garial Bhai, or Brother Crocodile, no less - and asks how much longer the animal will survive human encroachment and environmental destruction. The lyrics have been rendered into music by great singers, but a video produced by BD Child Talent Media reminded me of the agency of the young in reshaping the legacies of the ages into gifts for the future. I do not know the name of the girl who sang the song, but that does not matter.

Like you and me, she is an eternal part of Bengal's childhood.