Guest post by Prasanta Chakravarty

I want to tell you about a song.  A song and a singer that few will call political. I want to talk about a song called Daya Karo (Have Mercy) sung by Mousumi Bhowmik, which appears originally in her album Ami Ghor Bahir Kori/ In and Out of My Room (2001).

Though she would routinely perform in certain public events and campus fests in Kolkata, Bhowmik has always been a peripheral figure in the popular imagination on Bangla singers who appear in the last couple of decades. She does not qualify as a mainstream modern popular singer. It is an equally barbed proposition to accommodate her within a new group of singers who would tilt the popular musical scenario in Kolkata and its suburbs by some straight talking, angst ridden compositions and solo performances throughout the nineties. Some of these singers have of late plunged into active politics and one of them has even become a Member of Parliament.

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