Great artists don't pretend: Pierre-Alain Baud

At about the turn of the twentieth century in France, a wealthy couple in Paris was at a fix to manage milk for their baby. To feed it, they travelled for twelve hours to a small hilly village of Abondance, situated more than 600 kilometres from Paris and found a poor, healthy woman. The male of the couple was a doctor. He convinced the poor lady to breastfeed their kid back to Paris. But they imposed a condition, too: her baby would not be able to tag along with her to the capital of France. The lady could not help accepting the proposal. Returning home after a few months, she found her baby to be dead. Quite this way, another baby died. Monsieur Pierre-Alain Baud was born into the family of the last baby girl of the wretched lady. A radical left possessing such a family tale to share, Pierre-Alain asserted that he 'will always be on the side of the petit.' 

Dr. Baud had accompanied Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Pakistani maestro of Qawali, on his numerous tours across Europe, Tunisia, Brazil and the USA for more than ten years. He had published a biography of Nusrat in French titled Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: Le Messager du Qawwali. After being translated into English (Nusrat: The Voice of Faith) and Urdu, it found a Bengali translation in September 2022. 

This interviewer met him at the book-signing event of this translation Shahenshah-e-Qawali Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan by Kazi Abdullah Al Muktadir. Apart from some salespersons, no employee of Pathak Shamabesh came out and exchanged greetings with this author. Later, on a convenient (yet clammy) evening, this interviewer sat with Dr Baud and chatted about Nusrat, music, Bangladesh and politics.

Baud is now the Arts Director at a research and cultural development nonprofit, Arts Nomades. He has also worked at the University of Dhaka and Sindh. Versed in Spanish too, Pierre-Alain has done his PhD from Mexico on 'dance and its power'. 

A rigid translation

Muktadir's Bengali translation detracted at least from the English translation of the book. He has rendered French and occasionally retained English texts instead of translating the book into Bengali. Baud could not supervise the Bengali text as much as he could with other versions. 

Eventually, some nuggets extant in the 170+ page English version published by Harper Collins India are absent from the 130-page Bengali one. Such an ersatz translation work—nowadays quite usual from translators affiliated with Alliance Française de Dhaka—might put future projects at risk. 

An introverted Nusrat

Dr. Baud never imagined that he would someday chronicle a biography of the Emperor of Qawali. So he never interviewed him, though he had sometimes been invited to Nusrat's home in Pakistan. Neither Nusrat nor he was a man of speech. 

Awaiting Nod from the Western Front

Pierre-Alain Baud reminisced two tours in Paris and Holland where all the audience but him and his friends were 'desis; we were the only girls.' He claimed Nusrat hadn't been 'acknowledged' by the diaspora then. He was acknowledged by the world only after he was introduced to the Western audience by a French tourist guide, Bruno Ferragut, via Théâtre de la Ville (Municipal Theatre of Paris). 

But why should it always be that artists should get an Oscar or a Nobel Prize to be considered by their fellow citizens while having toured across India and Pakistan? The author averred it is the 'neocolonial' mindset extant among desis. He quoted Nusrat from his book:

Nusrat was not taken in by this 'late recognition' from Pakistani high society. His response to Adam Nayyar, asking him one day about this rising popularity with a certain elite of the country, was: 'You know this perfect cloth they make in Faisalabad. People won't buy it unless you stamp 'Made in Japan' down the side. I'm like that cloth for the "gentry' (p. 122). 

'Great artists don't pretend'

When the young Baud first attended Nusrat's concert, he didn't know what Sufism was. Off the stage, he was humble and quite ordinary. But when he began singing, a kind of 'divine sparkle kindled my spirit'. It happened to Baud later with South African legend Miriam Makeba, Luzmila Carpio from Bolivia, and Bangladeshi Lalon singer Farida Parveen, with whom he has worked. 

Some Bangladeshi balls unbeknownst to him have transported him too. 'Great artists don't pretend at all. They are always very humble and straightforward. For instance, Farida apa lives quite a quotidian life at Tejkunipari, helping the poor in winter as I have seen.'

Songs for the elite class

Are some genres of songs, like ghazals and Hindustani classical ones, to be nurtured, practised and cloistered among only an elite cliqué, where the connoisseurs know where to clap and where not? 'I would really appreciate that such assertion be challenged by more informed people and music history researchers.'

'Didn't want to be a saviour incarnate.'

After finishing baccalauréat, the national school-leaving qualification in France, at 18, Baud moved to Africa for volunteer jobs. He landed in South Asia in India 1978 for the NGO Service Civil International. 

Three years later, in 1981, during a political tumult throughout the nation, he came to Bangladesh for the first time. He and his colleagues worked for flood relief in 1988. They worked with Bangladesh Mahila Shomity, Bangladesh Garment Workers Federation, and Bangladesh Krishok Shromik Federation (where he got the chance to meet the peasant leader Abdus Sattar: 'an impressive fellow'). 

Returning to France, he wrote Bangladesh: des jours et des dimanches (Bangladesh: Weekdays and Sundays), which later became a derogatory title: Le Bangladesh Existe Encore… (Bangladesh Still Exists…).

But as years passed, he saw NGOs only highlight the negative aspects of the people they are helping. Moreover, cash began to flow in. Local NGO BRAC's Aarong used to buy clothes at 1000 from rural women and sell those at around 5000 in their retail stores, and it was one of many other instances that made the Frenchman gutted about the whole structure. 'I didn't want to be a saviour incarnate to Bangladeshi people. I have seen both the beauty and the harshness of the country. So I left it.'