The great debut: Arnob's Chaina Bhabish

It was 2005 when we first met the prodigy that is Shayan Chowdhury Arnab

Every time I hear the phrase you better sit down for this one, I am taken with how some events have such an effect on our nerves that if we weren’t sitting down, the news may cause our knees to stop functioning leading to bodily harm. This is usually uttered when bad news of great import are being uttered , but when I think back to first hearing Arnob’s first musical works outside of Bangla (with the phenomenal in their own right bandmates Anusheh, Buno, Kaartik and late Shantanu; in fact, they deserve their own fawning over in one of these great debut pieces), I feel like the enormity of the newness of the sounds that were washing over us had a very similar impact. In the best way imaginable.

Bangladeshi pop music had had a very long life and we have had great acts build and pave the way from the early days to bands exploring many of the western popular genres. For a good decade and more Rock music has been taken from stolen airwaves and rubbed in the dirt of the streets of Dhaka, Chittagong, Khulna and many other towns and cities to produce great musical successes by the likes of Souls, Feedback, LRB, Feelings/Nogor Baul, Warfaze and so on. Then there was what was called the ‘underground’ scene which took on the alternative influences from the west. Starting with Black, and then lots of other bands that followed, another exploration was in full force. However, if we were looking for great pop acts, none had thus far given it a face or form that would live up to the names mentioned above. Who would take Pop and rub it in our dirt, feed it some jhalmuri and tea and make it our own for us? Some of you are thinking Habib, Hridoy Khan, but the name on top of my list is Arnob. The others may in fact have more popularity or sales nationwide, but not the sophistication and artistry that Arnob would present to us in his debut Chaina Bhabish.

Image of the artwork that was on the cover of Chaina Bhabish, with a close up of Arnob’s face coloured blue with sashes of yellow with red borders going across his cheeks and other areas.

At that time, just before the album would be released, I had the opportunity through a friend of mine to hear snippets of two tracks - one of which was ‘Bebak bibagi’ (বেবাক বিবাগী). This was 17 years ago and I must have been sitting down or at least leaning against a table or furniture on which the tape player sat for I was, pardon the cliche, blown away. My reaction wasn’t to say much except to blurt out wow like a little child or inarticulate TV presenter. Mostly the reaction took the form of a baffled face and lots of nodding that was helping me digest and appreciate what I was hearing.

The sitting down starts from when you place the CD (Compact Disc, yes) in its tray and track #1 ‘Amar hariye jawa’ (আমার হারিয়ে যাওয়া) ensues. As the song talks about losing oneself, that same is bound to happen to the listener. If you had put on the CD while looking for your wallet or peeling a carrot or whatever, let’s just say that you would not be able to continue. There’s an eerie quality to this song over its heavy melancholy and bare-boned instrumentation. I don’t know how much or how little care may have gone into constructing that song, or maybe it was just second nature for our Arnob. The song starts with a haunting vocal line on a bed of a simple synth chord before the line amar hariya jawa is sung. As we are taken deeper in, we hear the voices and soudscapes layering, echoing hauntingly. At some point there is a santoor like instrument (or maybe it was a santoor, a japanese koto? or a chinese guzheng? Feel free to enlighten us in the comments if anyone knows for sure) breaking things up, playing a little far eastern-like melody. These continue and when the singer declares i feel lonely (আমার একলা… একলা কেবল লাগে), the words are separated again by a few bars where a single note on a piano is played a few times but spread out filling the void but finally connecting the words and emphasisng the loneliness the song is talking about. It’s beautiful, magical, it’s voodoo, leaving you enraptured with sadness.

This kind of minimalism is of course evident all throughout this album and the choice of instruments, which included piano and esraj, and the use of keyboards and electronic elements not heard in Bangla music till then. Ultimately it is not the elements, but the creative approach Arnob has taken to construct the songs is what demands appreciation. Bebak bibagi is a prime example of this. At the time of release, the song ‘Se je boshe achhey’ was probably the biggest hit of the album - due to to it being featured in a natok on TV directed by Afsana Mimi and featureing the band Black’s members cast as a band within it. The song is featured in a scene where they show the band rehearsing and those who heard it was instantly enamored by the power of Arnob’s mastery.

(The album is available on Ektaar Music’s official channel on Youtube, Spotify and Apple Music)

That’s not to say that was the catchiest song of the album, that would be a hard decision to make. The soundscape created from track to track throughout the album has such superb variations in the emotions, tempos, craft that it’s not hard to imagine every track being a favourite track for someone out there. Even the extremely fast-paced last track ‘Chhowachhowi’ with its wordplay (chowachowi is after all a game, the game of tag or you’re it) with ‘chha’ is admirable for its self-referential creativity.

Years later, in 2022, and to great fanfare, Bangladesh finally got its own version of Coke Studio which we’ve been watching for years from Pakistan and then from India. When it was announced that Arnob is the one who’d be producing, there was a sense that the best man for the job had been chosen. In between the debut and now, Arnob has produced multiple solo albums and even compilations where multiple other talents were revealed gifting us with great music and picking up badges along the way. Coke Studio Bangla also featured ‘Chilte Roude’ from his debut album. Arnob reveals that he found this as a poem in a love letter that he was put in charge of delivering. He may not be trusted with sensitive letters but he used his undeniable talent to convert that poem into a beautiful, bittersweet song expressing the emotions of lovers unable to meet.

In closing, I would end by classing it as a masterpiece - each song is unique in its own way, with minimalist quailty to them with use of instruments that was just so apart from what we were used to. Arnob doesn’t write much lyrics, but it is clear his talents lay elsewhere and the end result was something that would be deemed a classic and will not tarnish anytime soon or at all.