Kolkata: Kabir Suman accuses percussionist Subhadrakalyan Rana of plagiarizing his 'Ahir Bairagi'

KOLKATA: Kabir Suman levelled plagiarism charges against a 20-something musician on Sunday from his hospital bed. Suman alleged Subhadrakalyan Rana had copied ‘Ahir Bairagi’, a raga that he had composed some years ago. But Rana pleaded innocence, claiming his raga was called ‘Dhaivati’, which was not a copy of Suman’s creation.
According to Suman, after he had posted on Facebook about this raga, Rana had contacted him and expressed his desire to play it.“He learnt it and played in ‘tabla taranga’. Thereafter, he started to market this as his own creation. He also got a few others to attack the Bangla Khayal genre on Facebook. Now, I am recovering at SSKM Hospital because of the efforts of the Bengal government’s health workers,” he wrote. Suman promised to get back to pursuing Bangla kheyal as soon as he recovered and hoped Rana would pursue music and not engage in peddling falsehood and jealousy. The veteran musician also posted a screenshot of his earlier interaction with Rana, when the latter had sought his permission to play this raag.
But Rana told TOI on Monday that he had never claimed ‘Ahir-Bairagi’ to be his creation. He alleged that Suman had been “unilaterally defaming” him and “causing public harassment” by claiming he had “stolen” his raga. Rana, who started taking lessons from Pt Shankar Ghosh, shared his recitals, called ‘tabla tarang’, being played on10 to16 ‘dayan’ drums, on social media. “In December 2020, I posted on Facebook my rendition of ‘Ahir-Bairagi’ with due respect and credit to him. I mentioned this recital was done with Kabir Suman’s consent. I removed that post following his public attack against me when I requested him to sing a song during a Facebook live,” he said.
In February, Rana claimed to have posted his “experiment” as Raag Dhaivati. “I started formulating it in 2016. It is not a copy of Ahir-Bairagi. A major difference was I applied Dha or Dhaivat to the ascending and descending scales of Bairagi, while his Ahir-Bairagi has ‘Dha’ in avarohi only. I have no information that Kabir Suman holds a patent to add ‘Dha’ in any form to the scale of Bairagi,” Rana said.