For as long as he can remember, Pro Ghosh (short for Prosenjit), his Mother’s Day would begin and end with music. Banani Ghosh, the famous Rabindrasangeet singer who passed away recently, was a singer popular in India and abroad. Pro, who does sound engineering and recording as a passionate hobby, recalls that as a child he thought everyone’s parents would sing like his mother. “I studied and played with the likes of Pramit Sen or Srabani Sen and their parents (Sagar Sen and Sumitra Sen) were great singers. Then there would be those legends like Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, Pahari Sanyal or Aparna Sen who would float into our Pratapaditya Road residence and I would be chuffed by my neighbours to let them have a peekaboo. It’s then I realised who my mother was and why she was so popular,” says Pro, who has lived in Poughkeepsie, New York, and later moved to Kansas City. He was recently in Calcutta.
Banani Ghosh, who has several LP and EP records, CDs and cassettes, was a big name in the Tagore circuit of the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and then somewhat in the ’90s (her last CD release was in 2014; an exclusive collection of tappas from Tagore). Her husband’s postings took her to Switzerland and then to the US. Clearly, she had to make sacrifices for her absence from the country but first, her husband and then her son made sure her music never took a beating even when she was abroad.
Pro recalls, “My father was always managing her concerts, her flights and her music schools. The routine was every weekend my mother would fly to her various schools (Antara) and teach for three days. Today it could be Ann Arbor, next weekend it could be Toronto, then Buffalo; he had her tickets and schedule everything in advance. Tuesdays were reserved for me solely.” She taught over 600 students from ages six to 60 across North America.
As a young boy in Calcutta, Pro recalls sitting in the audience at Rabindra Sadan or Jorasanko Thakurbari listening to his mother connect with the audience. According to him, she was a different personality when it came to singing. Much later, when he would record his mother through his company Rhyme Records, he found her extremely smart and professional who didn’t bother so much about technology and would record at least six-seven songs a day. “I would hire the best of studios in the US with multiple microphones so that we produced the best of sounds but to her, it didn’t matter. She would concentrate only on her singing and was never satisfied with the end product.” Banani has almost 30 albums to her credit in a span of four decades — singles, duets and, of course, significant solo inputs in many popular dance dramas like Shyama and Bhanusingher Padabali.
Pro also recalls his mother’s love for her guru, the late Kanika Bandyopadhyay, and how she would travel twice a year to spend time with the legend. “Apart from that, she was a foodie and loved cooking any fish dish, especially the paturi and she would love to entertain her friends with her culinary skills.”
Pro is now keen to keep her memories alive through her recordings, her pictures and possibly, her memoirs. As mother and son, they were extremely close and while Pro feels the vacuum of not having her physically around, he is happy she is in an extremely peaceful space. In her last few years of illness, the music never stopped playing in the living room.