Bickram Ghosh’s journey from concerts to composing

Tabla exponent Bickram Ghosh recently won the Best Composer award for the film Abhijatrik at the Montreal Independent Film Festival

“For me, it is fun to compose a film song in the morning and perform a classical concert in the evening,” says Bickram Ghosh. Not many people know about the many creative pursuits of this tabla exponent, who recently won the best composer award at the Montreal Independent Film Festival for the Bengali film Abhijatrik. Meanwhile, Ishq, his indie album in collaboration with singer Hariharan, has evoked good response on social media. Bickram says he discovered that he could compose when he was working on ‘Rhythmscape’ with his band of the same name. The album was not just about rhythm, it had melody too. It was followed by many popular albums and set the tone for the film composition offers that began to come to him from people who had heard his albums. He started with Shatabdir Galpo followed by Iti Shrikanto. In fact, impressed by ‘Rhythmscape’, Rajkumar Hirani had wanted him to score the music for Munnabhai MBBS back in the 2000s, but that didn’t work out as he was touring with Pt. Ravi Shankar then as his tabla accompanist. In a long interview, the musician speaks about why he chose to take his experiments with sound beyond the classical realm. Edited excerpts.