B'desh director Mokammel releases music album of upcoming film

On the morning of May 20, 1971, a six-month-old baby girl lay bubbling with life among a pile of human bodies left by marauding Pakistani soldiers, having her dead mother's breast milk at a sleepy village bazaar on a river bank in Bangladesh's Khulna district.
Forty two years down the timeline, the baby grown into the wife of a farm labourer relived the history at a plush auditorium in Dhaka on July 7 when she released the CD of songs of Bangladesh's critically acclaimed director Tanvir Mokammel's latest film "Jibondhuli" (The Drummer), which depicts how the country's liberation war affected the lives of poor people.

A few hours after one of the worst carnages by Pakistani troops during the liberation war at Chuknagar market place on Bhadra river, Ershad Ali, a local farmer, went to the bazaar to look for survivors and found the six-month baby and came to know she was a Hindu from the vermillion on the forehead of her mother's lifeless body.
"Ali handed the child to a childless Hindu couple and thus began the journey of the unnamed baby who grew up with the name Rajkumari Dasi," Mokammel told PTI in an interview.
For Mokammel, bringing Rajkumari to Dhaka to release the CD of six songs of "Jibondhuli" was much more than a novel way of promoting his film. It was, he says, keeping in sync with the subject of the film - how the life of a poor Hindu drummer who earns a living by beating drums during major festivals like Durga Puja is shattered by Pakistani army which kills his family members.

"In my film, I wanted the focus to be on the poorest people and how their lives were devastated by Pakistani army during the liberation war" says Mokammel.
He says "there are many recorded stories about heroic feats by our freedom fighters but there are also equally victims who remain unsung because they belong to the poorest of the poor strata of society and my film is a tribute to them".