At a Hason Raja tribute, the songs did the talking

Rain held up the start of Songs of Bengal: Pran Bondher Shone at Aloki Convention Centre on 12 June, and the delay turned out to suit the material — a poet preoccupied with nature's indifference would probably have found it fitting rather than unfortunate.

The evening, organised by MW Magazine Bangladesh with MAYA, structured itself as something closer to a staged biography than a straightforward concert. 

Shayan Chowdhury Arnob curated and musically directed, and the choice to break up the performances with narrative passages on Hason Raja's life — privilege and indulgence giving way to a spiritual rupture that produced the songs he's remembered for — gave the night a shape most tribute concerts don't bother with. The music wasn't simply performed; it was being explained, gently, as the record of a man changing his mind about what mattered.

That biography is worth dwelling on, because it's an odd one for a folk icon. Hason Raja was born in 1854 to a zamindar family in Sylhet's Lakshmansree, and inherited the family estate at fifteen after his father's death — not the usual origin story for someone whose songs are now sung by farmers and folk revivalists alike. 

He ran that estate for over fifty years, by most accounts unapologetically, indulging in the wealth and excess available to a landlord of his standing before a Sufi encounter in his middle age turned him toward asceticism and mysticism. 

What followed was several hundred songs in the Sylheti dialect — plain, unornamented language carrying genuinely difficult ideas about the soul's impermanence and its relationship to the divine, compiled in Hason Udas in 1914. 

The songs found an unlikely admirer in Rabindranath Tagore, who quoted Hason Raja's lines in lectures on religion and philosophy, effectively introducing a Sylheti zamindar's mystic verse to an international audience the poet himself never sought out. 

The work nearly didn't survive its own century — much of it was preserved only through individual effort, including a Sylhet radio producer's chance encounter with Hason Raja's grandson in the 1970s that rescued songs which might otherwise have been lost to decaying archive tape. 

That the songs are now common cultural property, taught and covered and remixed without much thought to their fragility, is itself a small miracle of transmission.

It's also, increasingly, Coke Studio Bangla's terrain. Arnob — who curated Friday's concert — built that platform from its first season in 2021, working through a long list of folk candidates before settling on the songs that would define it; Hason Raja's "Dilaram" closed the show's second season outright. 

The platform has functioned as a kind of farm system for exactly the voices that filled Aloki Convention Centre on Friday. Kaniz Khandaker Mitu, who performed "Pirit Koirase Dewana" and "Sona Bondhe Amare Dewana Banailo," is a postgraduate folk-music specialist who was discovered almost by accident — a recording sent to a university senior, forwarded on, and within days she was singing for the platform's producers. 

Hamida Parveen carries a longer-standing reputation in the same folk circuit, and her solo turn on "Dilaram" was the night's clearest display of vocal control: the kind of performance that quiets a room not because it asks to, but because nobody wants to miss a phrase of it. 

Arnob's own performances — "Baula Ke Banailo Re" among them — carried the particular ease of someone who has spent years arranging this material before standing up to sing it himself; less a display of feeling than a familiarity with where the feeling lives in the melody.

What held the evening together wasn't any single performance but the way Hason Raja's central contradiction kept resurfacing under different arrangements: a man who walked away from land and status to write about having nothing, doing so in songs precise enough that they're still being studied, rearranged, and performed competitively for audiences more than a century after his death. 

Renunciation, sung well enough, is its own kind of achievement — and the fact that this concert needed Arnob's narrative interludes to explain that arc says something about how far the songs have drifted from the life that produced them. Most of the room knew the music. Fewer, probably, knew the zamindar underneath it.

The night closed with every performer on stage for "Hasoner Nao Re," the group arrangement working as a small structural echo of the song's own subject — a boat that nobody sails alone. The guest list (Abul Hayat, Chanchal Chowdhury, Afzal Hossain, Nazifa Tushi among others) and remarks from Square Toiletries CEO Malik Mohammed Sayeed were the part of the evening that belonged to the institution; the closing song was the part that belonged to the room.