The Making of Sunil's Music

I. The Composing Process

“The insane relish of work is gone, the allegretto agitato of strings have died down — but deep within me there is a still pool which sends back the image of a light that is burning somewhere.”

— Sunil Bhattacharya, in a letter to a friend

Behind Closed Doors

Every morning, at around eight-thirty or nine, Sunil would climb the stairs to his composing room and lock the door. He spent roughly two hours there before coming down. No one witnessed these sessions; the privacy was absolute and inviolable.

“We never actually saw him composing, because the doors were always locked. Every day, around eight-thirty or nine in the morning, he would go upstairs and spend roughly two hours composing.”

— Steve

One door, however, was kept unlocked — a precaution that arose from a near-crisis during the 1966 New Year compositions, when the force passing through Sunil was so overwhelming he nearly fainted. The Mother’s response, in correspondence, was characteristic:

“Perhaps I put too much into it.”

— The Mother, in a letter to Sunil

After that, Sunil’s sister-in-law Chobi insisted the connecting door to the adjacent room was never to be bolted again.

The Notebooks

Sunil kept composing notebooks, written in a personal notation system that mixed Bengali script with mathematical symbols. These were not standard music notation; they were a private language he developed to hold his musical ideas between the morning sessions and the recording room.

“It turns out the balance between improvised and composed is something Sunil Da threaded so deftly that it is genuinely hard to say which it was. He spent a great deal of time playing and trying out parts. Inspiration was clearly the guiding force — he received, and then he transmitted. But when you look at his notebooks — and in Sunil Da’s Studio at the Ashram there are boxes upon boxes of notation — you find a very deliberate system he developed himself, using Bengali script, with carefully written melodies, chords, and structural sketches.”

— Mrityunjay Sathyanarayanan

The notebooks travelled with Sunil into the mixing phase. If they were not at hand, he became unsettled. They were not a memory aid to be discarded once the music was committed to tape; they were a continuous working document.

“Steve told me that Sunil Da would sit with those notebooks during the mixing phase — and if he did not have them to hand, he was unsettled. So the notation was taken seriously; it was not merely a memory aid to be discarded. And yet he was also known to change things on the fly, as any Indian classical musician might.”

— Mrityunjay Sathyanarayanan

The Spark: Received or Composed?

Whether Sunil’s music was improvised or pre-composed is not a question with a tidy answer. Both things were true at once. Steve’s account of working alongside Kanakda — the slide guitarist who collaborated with Sunil from the early years until the very end — captures this duality precisely:

“His collaborator Kanakda — who played slide guitar and other forms of guitar, and remained with him until the very end — gives a vivid picture of how they worked together. From what I am told, Kanakda would come into the room, Sunil Da would be at the organ, and without a word exchanged, they would simply begin playing. For music connected to something as weighty as the New Year invocations or Savitri, you might expect some kind of spiritual discussion beforehand — but no. They just played, as musicians do. It was both: inspired and received, but also carefully considered.”

— Mrityunjay Sathyanarayanan

How the New Music Began

The decisive turn in Sunil’s creative life came not from a planned programme but from a chance encounter with the Mother in 1954. He had been composing dance music for Ashram programmes — a task that felt, to him, artistically restricting. Then:

“One day in 1954 he ran into the Mother in the playground, and she asked how the music was going. He said fine, and she replied, ‘Come at four o’clock and show me.’ He assembled his musicians, went to her room, and they played. When it was over, the Mother said nothing immediately. Then one of the girls who used to play the reed organ asked her, ‘Why don’t you play something for Sunil?’ And she did. That is when he had the experience he described — the flood of chords, the opening.”

— Steve

Composing with Savitri

The Savitri settings — which occupied the last decades of Sunil’s life — were composed to text rather than to sound. Chobi would type out lines from the Mother’s recorded recitation of Savitri and paste them directly into Sunil’s composing notebooks. He wrote his music in the space below the words.

“The words were always physically in front of him while he composed. He did not compose to the sound of the Mother’s recorded voice, but to the words themselves.”

— Steve

For the Sanskrit shlokas, Sunil worked from Nolini Kanta Gupta’s Bengali translations, which were laid alongside the original Sanskrit. “Some of the material he used,” Steve notes, “was also traditional Bengali — pieces like Jadav that he would have known from childhood.”