“It hit me like brandy on an empty stomach. And I could hear the conviction in him. He meant it,” Kabir Suman says about listening to Bob Dylan for the first time in ‘Bare Voice’, filmmaker Jaideep Varma’s documentary about his life and work. “That was it. I could have stayed in France, but I had to come back. Because this was something I had to work on. So I got back to India and put myself to work.”

Few Bengali songwriters since Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam have transformed the language of Bengali song as profoundly as Kabir Suman. Before him, modern Bengali music, or ‘adhunik bangla gaan’, largely consisted of romantic ballads, film music, Rabindra sangeet, and the lingering influence of golden-age composers such as Salil Chowdhury and Hemanta Mukhopadhyay. After him, Bengali music acquired a new language: urban, conversational, political, and profoundly personal. In many ways, Kabir Suman did for Bengali music what Bob Dylan had done for American folk music three decades earlier. Yet to think of Kabir Suman as only a musician is to misunderstand the times and forces that shaped him. His music emerged from political ruptures, regime changes, naxalism, the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, uprisings in South America, and communal violence in India.

Born as Suman Chattopadhyay in 1949 to musicians Sudhindranath and Uma Chattopadhyay at Cuttack, Odisha, Kabir Suman came of age during one of the most turbulent periods in India’s modern history. The Bengal of his youth was still haunted by the aftershocks of Partition and the later waves of refugees during the Bangladesh Liberation War. Kolkata in the 1960s and 70s was a city of naxalism and urban youth protests, police crackdowns, and labour strikes. Suman absorbed all of this like a sponge and released his pent-up anger, anxieties, and frustration into his music. In the mid-1970s, he moved to France to teach Indian classical music.

In Europe, Kabir Suman came across the works of singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Wolf Biermann, whose influence would become impossible to ignore in his later work. Living in Europe and the USA during the height of the Cold War, first in France in the 1970s, then in America in the early 1980s, and finally in West Germany from 1986 to 1989, exposed him to the realities of ideological conflict on a global scale. During this time, questions of socialism, capitalism, state power, propaganda, and resistance complicated his Indian classical musical foundation with a newfound, internationalist intellectualism.

In America, Kabir Suman worked as a journalist and produced two volumes of political reportage, later published as ‘Discovering the Other America: Radical Voices from the 1980s’, a collection of interviews with Socialist thinkers and cultural figures such as Maya Angelou, Noam Chomsky, Pete Seeger, and Barbara Ehrenreich; and ‘Mukto Nicaragua’ (Free Nicaragua, 1987), a book of narrative non-fiction about the revolutionary movement in the Central American nation.

Back in India, Kabir Suman’s 1992 album ‘Tomake Chai’ captured the moment of India’s transition into economic liberalisation, consumerism, globalisation, and the ossification of Bengal’s 60s and 70s revolutionary politics into bureaucratic machinery. Equipped with only a guitar and his bare voice, Kabir Suman’s conversational songs spoke to a generation caught between ideological exhaustion, disillusionment, and the promise of new possibilities. Both intensely personal and unmistakably political, his music was a breath of fresh air in Bengal’s cultural continuum.

As the decades progressed, Kabir Suman’s songs became increasingly political. Unlike many protest musicians, he rarely wrote in slogans. His songs often drew inspiration from and included ordinary people like rickshaw-wallas, hawkers, and named victims of political violence. He approached songs the way a reporter approaches a story: by paying attention to how people speak, what they fear, what they desire, and how political decisions manifest in ordinary lives. The result was a body of work that often feels like field reportage set to music. He became directly involved in politics in the late 2000s during the Singur and Nandigram anti-land-acquisition movements and was eventually elected to the Indian Parliament from Jadavpur as a member of the Mamata Banerjee-led All India Trinamool Congress in 2009. Yet even within formal politics, he remained difficult to categorise. He frequently criticised allies and opponents alike and became the centre of several controversies.

Over the years, Kabir Suman’s detractors have criticised his numerous relationships, complicated marital history, use of foul language when confronting ideological opponents, and support for the censorship of Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin’s controversial book ‘Dwikhondito’, but none of this negates his oversized impact on Bengali music and culture in the last five decades. From his fiery protest songs in the 1970s to the early 2000s, to his mellower, more romantic songs in recent years (his National Film Award-winning soundtrack for 2014’s Jaatishwar is a personal favourite of mine, despite my mixed feelings about the film itself), Kabir Suman has been a chronicler of Bengali society through several transformative decades. His songs document the transition from the ideological politics of the Cold War era to the uncertainties of liberalisation, from the dominance of the Left Front to the rise and fall of the Trinamool Congress, and from the analogue All India Radio-era of popular music in India to the digital age. His songs are almost like dispatches from a changing nation.

Jaideep Varma’s ‘Bare Voice’ is a necessary, if sentimental, biography of Kabir Suman, largely in his own voice, with insights from musicians, journalists, playwrights, and friends whose lives were touched and transformed by his music. The film also includes several unreleased songs and never-before-seen archival footage from Kabir Suman’s formative years as a musician. And although at times Varma smooths over the rough edges of Kabir Suman the man to shed light on Kabir Suman the musician, it’s a necessary portrait of an individual who remains, at once, an artist, a musician, a poet, and a reporter — a troubadour in the truest sense of the word — of our time.

Jaideep Varma’s ‘Bare Voice’, a documentary about the life and music of Kabir Suman, is tentatively set for release on July 4, 2026.

Here’s more from Homegrown:

Rebels Of The Sand: How Tinariwen Channelled Tuareg Struggle Into Their Global Sound

The Rebel Poets of 1960s Bengal

The Poetry Of Lal Ded: Mysticism, Resistance, & The Female Voice In 14th-Century Kashmir