Home » Press & News » News » Tangra Blues, the first ‘Bengali rap’ film
Rapping (also rhyming, spitting, emceeing) is a musical form of vocal delivery that incorporates ‘rhyme, rhythmic speech, and street vernacular’, performed or chanted in a variety of ways, usually over a backing beat or musical accompaniment. The recent Bollywood film Gully Boy directed by Zoya Akhtar is a living example of a rapper who rises from the slums of Dharavi to become a star rapper with his performance and his compositions that underline the world he belongs to.
Tangra Blues Parambrato Supriyo Sen and Ranjan Palit working still
Rapping, however, is not commonly known among the Bengali middle class nourished on a heavy diet of Tagore and Nazrul on the one hand, expanding to include Jeebonmukhi Gaan popularised as a fine form of performing art based on music and lyrics by Kabir Suman followed by Anjan Dutt, who, inspired by Suman, evolved onnodharar gaan, all in Bengali, alongside Nachiketa who also writes, composes and sings his own songs focussing on topically relevant socio-topical issues.
In the case of the film under discussion, rap arises from the heap of rubbish and debris and waste that is dumped every day in the slum otherwise called Tangra, in Kolkata. Supriyo Sen, who has won several national awards for his documentary films, was led to direct the first Bengali film on rap and rappers while making a documentary assigned to him by Films Division on Sanjay Mandal and Group, a real-life rap group that rose from the debris of one of the worst waste dumps of Kolkata.
“I actually planned to work on two documentaries on Sanjoy Mandal’s rap and group and met him along with his boys way back in 2015. It has been a seven-year journey of moving with these people, living with them, trying to understand them and their lyrics and beats,” says Sen. Creative producer-actor Parambrato Chatterjee, who has written the script along with Sen, met him halfway “when he met one of my rap boys who was acting in another film. Together, along with a like-minded friend Aritra Sen, we decided to form our banner, Roadshow Films. When we screened some clips from my Films Division documentary to SVF, they liked it so much that they came in with the funding and their banner,” he adds.
Parambrato portrays the protagonist on whose group and life the screenplay is based. “This is not a biopic,” warns Sen. “But is inspired by how rap brings about a healthy and optimistic metamorphosis not only in Mandal, who rose from the gang-filled world of crime and criminals to leave his past behind and redeem himself through his group, bringing about a change in the lives of these urchins too.”
Sen opens the film with a thrilling chase that leads to the cold-blooded shooting of a labour leader who protests the throwing out of workers when the Chinese-owned leather tanneries shut shop, opening out the lands vacated by the closed factories to land sharks and promoters and real estate brokers. The scene shifts to a city-bred, sophisticated Joyee (Madhumita Sarkar) a young musician on her way back from Brazil where she worked with slum children with music and shifts from Mumbai to Kolkata to live in one of the flats in the skyscrapers that have come up, looking out through the window of her car. She gets off the cab to walk into a lovely rap performance, interrupted by a sudden bombing.
“The original inhabitants of Tangra were tribals who had, sometime along the way, converted to Christianity. Cyril Murmu, the labour leader who is shot in cold blood, was an Adivasi-turned Christian and his son is called Chalu, shortened from the original Charleton Murmu, the main rapper of Mandal’s group. The other boys in the group are also Dalits but they are not aware of their caste roots. We chose Samiul Islam to portray the schoolboy raised in the slums because of his very expressive face and large eyes,” says Sen.
These boys go to school, collect rubbish and waste from the flats of people who live in the skyscrapers, and practice their rap in an empty workshop which a warring local gang is determined to make them vacate. They are supervised by criminal-turned-rapper Sanjeeb Mandal (Parambrato) who is their strict mentor preventing them from joining the two rival gangs, tempting them with new clothes, beer and other material means.
Investor Relations